Broken, Not Shattered

This morning, thanks to wonderful friends keeping her up late for us last night, Ellie slept in a little. She didn't come into our room until nearly 6:30, the latest since the time change. She climbed up into our bed (with assistance) and pulled up my satiny pajama shirt, exposing my big, round belly. I showed her where the baby's head (or butt) was pushing out right then, and she leaned over and gave my tummy/the baby a flerbert! I didn't know she knew how to do that. She she did it over and over, laughing and laughing.

Paul and I are going through a very rough patch. It's not OK. It's not going to be OK. But things are starting to look a bit brighter today, and we are both working really really hard. We're also seeing a therapist.

The problems stemmed from a lot of things, but I think that important among them was the fact that we've been underestimating how stressful it really is for us to raise a child with special needs. We tend to focus so much on her successes and abilities, and that's great for parents to do, but we also need to focus on ourselves, acknowledging when things are hard.

We also are strained by not having family nearby to help shoulder the burdens. We have so many dear friends who offer to help us out, to watch Ellie sometimes. We almost never take them up on that, and we need to do better. We need to go out together, alone. We need to send Ellie out and spend time at home together, alone.

What's broken needs a lot of fixing. Understanding some of the underlying stresses doesn't make things right. But having this sort of acute crisis is refocusing us, getting me out of my head-down-and-push-through mentality, getting Paul out of his 18-hour-workdays mentality, and forcing us to reprioritize. Right now, working on us comes before everything else.

Blogging openly about a marriage's struggles is just not done much, especially in a mama blog like this one, where Paul and I know so many of the people who read it. But I don't think that silence helps anything; I don't think that hiding the fact that we're struggling helps anything. Honesty and transparency are how we're trying to put the pieces back together. I'm not going to write here about every step of the process, but I think it's important to acknowledge openly that even people like us, people with a marriage we always thought was unshakably solid, can have real problems that require real work to fix.

Fortunately, Paul and I are both the sort of people who like homework.