It all came to a head one July morning, with my husband sitting under the mayday tree in our backyard. No matter how much I coaxed, cajoled or threatened, he wouldn’t come back into the house. Wouldn’t talk to me. Wouldn’t look at me.
As the sun got higher in the sky, I started to envision either having to physically drag my six-foot-two husband back into the house or call him an ambulance for heatstroke. Determined to get him to hydrate at least, I filled a glass with water and picked my way across the dry grass.
“Giovanni? Sweetie?” Even though he was facing me, I called out well before I got close. “It’s hot out here. Do you want some water?”
“I’m not drinking that.” He still wasn’t looking at me but at least he was talking. That was good, right?
“OK, do you want something else?”
“No. It’s poison.”
Even in the summer heat, his words turned me cold. Maybe I hadn’t heard right. “What’s that, sweetie?”
“The water is poisoned. You’re trying to poison me.”
Bipolar disorder with psychotic features. That’s the diagnosis we finally got after months of white-knuckling our way through Giovanni driving at reckless speeds, racking up credit card bills and firmly believing he was on a mission from God — and not in the fun Blues Brothers way.
February marked 27 years that Giovanni and I have been married. We have the same challenges as any other married couple: financial stress, clashing parenting styles, his complete disregard for the basic rules of how to load a dishwasher. But where your relationship might run on, say, mutual respect or open communication, mine runs on drugs. Four times a day, my husband goes to the cupboard, pours an assortment of pills into his hand then tosses them down his throat. Those pills are the difference between the man I found under the mayday tree — vacant and suspicious, trapped in a nightmare of delusions — and the husband who came into the kitchen to make me a cup of tea as I wrote this. To say I love the people who created those drugs severely undersells my feelings.