This is going to be a hard post to write, but I NEED to process this. I've only half ass done so for the past 3 years and I think I need to just talk about it.
I am autistic. My husband is an ADHDer. I think that 15 years ago, when we started dating, it was a perfect match. Because I could be weird and feel safe. We could be untraditional and neither of us felt unhappy about it (we were engaged forever and married when I was 7 months pregnant and were were 8 years in the relationship). I'm pretty organized and was able to work with him to distribute the work and feel like we had it together. We had the occasional hiccup, but that's par for the course. People are not perfect, and a relationship ultimately is a space where two people entwine parts of themselves. I think there is a beauty in that imperfection. But one thing I didn't realize that people are as dynamic as they are imperfect. Life changes you, and accounting for 2 people changing makes successful, long term unions a miracle. A miracle that I admire, but failed to reproduce.
A lot of things hapenned to me after my late 20s. I lost my mother. That made me spiral in a depression so deep, that I estranged myself from family, old friends, and even stopped socializing in general. I felt a sense of shame of not helping her enough, and I felt I didn't deserve anyone. I developed a trauma with my phone. I'd ignore it, lose it, not pay the bill and letting the number lapse. I think I switched numbers 4 times because I just didn't want to look at the device where I found out that mom was sick, and that mom was gone. I was always quiet, but I became more somber. I started becoming more sensitive to emotions. I don't watch movies anymore. But I digress.
It's a classic stereotype that relationships can suffer after children, especially in a patrairchal society. Women take up invisible work, and the emotional labor. His mother moved to FL, and there was tension there, but we're fine now. But he lost his dad before our daughter became 1 and we experienced grief. When his mom moved with us for a while after, in time I felt overwhelemed and tired of masking. But I didn't know I was autistic, so he said I was selfish. Which it can seem that way without a framework to understand why one is the way one is. I couldn't say "I'm masking too much and burned out from my duties and having no privacy and too little quiet." But I'm digressing. People grow apart and respond to life in different ways. And my own relationship fell a victim to that.
It's hard to navigate the traits that once pulled two people together after it makes them drift apart. Years of micro injuries, lack of help, being secondary to hyperfixations and the general more coldness that sometimes we neurospicy folk display made thousands of minute cracks in my psyche, his psyche, and in the fabric of our marriage. He can be blunt, self-centered. I am an angry ball of Puerto Rican and I am very pragmatic. I stopped seeing the merits in out union, and slowly, I feel out of love. I don't think I've let myself grieve this. I've been so focused on the pieces and situations. The time I did "those things that were mean" or "the times he screwed me over by not caring about my wellbeing." There was a time when I considered getting help, save the mmariage. And here I hesitate. Becuase I want to convey that this situaiton transcends the usual "fair play" issues. That the emotional connection, which was unorthodox before, slipped into two people going on their own orbits. In a selfish way, I hoped he'd see this too, find peace or even another person to love that gets him like I can't, and be happy. I don't want my daughter to not have two parents for now so I spoke to him, laid out my feelings as a finality and am trying to work through how to live together so we can help each other until my daughter is older. I just... want to be alone at this point. I can't fathom the trauma of fighting these battles again. Cozy Cottage Fantasy™ is born of this deep need to have a sense of freedom to be myself, take care of myself more, and find the quiet space I need to heal, grieve, and move on.
To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.
– Jack Kornfield