Hello,

I've thought through the start of my blog so many times. I always circle back around to the same thing. How in the world do I start this? I know that no one is giong to read this, and so therefore I shouldn't worry about having to fill anyone in on what's going on. I also know that no matter how I try to explain, I will be the only one that understands things from my perspective. I guess from that angle what makes me so nervous about this is that someone will read this and they will tell me that I am a complete and utter moron and I need to stop being such a whiny baby.

I have a wonderful life, really. I have a loving husband, and a gorgeous, laughing, healthy baby boy. I am relatively healthy, I am going to college full-time, I have a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food in my stomach. I have no right to be complaining about anything in my life, but I can find things. So how do I fix that? How do I start looking at the positive when even when I'm happy I can't see all of it?

The biggest concern I have now is my husband. I met him and we both fell instantly head over heels, I thought we were a match made in heaven. We got together the first date without really meaning too. What kills me about that is that he was still seeing his other girlfriend. He didn't tell her that it was over until after 5 the next night. I knew about her, I knew better, and I'm a horrible person because of it. My father cheated on my mother and my step mother and so I've always assumed that I've guy I've been with is going to cheat on me (for the record my last serious boyfriend before my husband did cheat on me), this includes my husband. This gets brought up because his mother (who I love to death) constantly tells me that I shouldn't worry because her son, my husband, is loyal to a fault and will/would never cheat on anyone, let alone me, his soul mate. But he did cheat. And I helped him.

Further, during our dating period we had a little falling out. My husband, when he gets upset, stops talking. And if he gets really mad, he gets polite and distant and speaks almost no words to you. The falling out was over something that I had done, once before, which I had no intention of ever repeating. However, that something, was something that my husband considered repugnant. He stopped talking to me for three days. This was before I got pregnant. I found out much later, after our son was born, that during that period he had contemplated (which he now says wasn't a serious contemplation but more like a fleeting contemplation) leaving me over the thing that I had done once in the past and never intended to repeat. That still bothers me and makes me wonder what would have happened to us if I hadn't gotten pregnant. I wonder that a lot, because I know how good of a man my husband is. The kind of good man that will marry somebody that they knocked up even if they don't necessarily really want to stay with that somebody for the rest of their lives. This becomes a problem because my husband doesn't believe in divorce. I don't want a divorce but I don't know if I still want to be married. I love my husband, but I'm not in love with him and I feel more like his roommate or his maid than his wife.

And then of course the issue comes up: how much of my problems are completely spawned by the mistake of brain chemistry that I was born with? If I wasn't bipolar would this even be coming up? Would I be able to get past it and go with the flow more? I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life, but I don't know if I can live with the way I've been feeling (even when I'm in a manic mode) for the rest of my life either. I can't stop thinking about how things would be different if I hadn't thought of my husband as father/husband material, if I had just considered him the way I considered all of my other boyfriends/sex partners, as someone that if I got pregnant by I would leave and not even tell them. I didn't consider anyone else "father" material, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't have considered my husband either. He's a good father but he's not a baby person. Every day that our son gets older, he likes him more. And I get that, my mother was the same way. But he's also like my mother in that he is sarcastic and he holds things in and pulls away and ignores people and explodes if you get him mad enough. I don't believe he would ever physically hurt us but I worry about his health, and I worry about the mental and emotional damage that I'm taking (which isn't near as bad as it could be, it's just compounded by my family/mental health history) and the possible damage he is going to cause to our son as he gets older. Children don't understand sarcasm, they don't understand parents/loved ones that pull away and won't talk to you, they don't understand why a parent is yelling and screaming in anger.

Well I'm sorry that this first post was so long. I've been wanting to say a lot of this for a while. And no one that I have to talk to understands, I don't even understand all of the time. My husband didn't understand the parts that I tried to talk to him about, which meant the other parts went unsaid. I wish I knew what to do. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.