Every Day of The Year That Broke My Marriage

All 365 days of it.

I made an album featuring a picture of every day of the first year of my son’s life.

It’s yearbook-style so that the focus is on the small changes in his face day by day. It was easy back then, all we had was a single digital camera which neatly organized the files by a uniform date format. I had it done by his second birthday.

My daughter is…uhhh…7. I’m finally working on her one-photo-a-day first-year album. To my defense, by then we had three smartphones and two digital cameras, all with wonky file formats, file names, and folder structures. It’s my week off work and dammit, I will finish this fucking album.

This is a tedious task as I let my computer search all my folders for every single date. It averages a minute and a half to spit out the results, then I have to visually scan to find the best picture. This means I’m viewing every picture, every memory, for an entire year.

Without a doubt, 2014 was the year that broke my Marriage Camel’s back.

While Joseph adores our daughter, he didn’t want her. He felt we had enough on our plate with a special needs son. There were so many issues, how could we juggle another kid in the mix?

My perspective was that we weren’t going to live forever and he needed a sibling to have his back when he’s older. It terrified me to imagine my autistic son as an adult, stuck on the streets with other adults who have mental illnesses but no one to help them.

Looking back, I acknowledge that I also wanted the experience of raising a neurotypical child without endless medical appointments and therapists.

I got pregnant shortly after Joseph found a new job. Having been unemployed for six months, his only job option was in Los Angeles. Depending on traffic (the bane of California life), that meant a 45 minute to 3-hour commute one way. Moving closer wasn’t an option since my job had the phenomenal healthcare benefits needed for my son’s treatments and anyone with a special needs child knows the effort in creating the network of treatment providers within a feasible driving distance isn’t something you can give up.

His response, when I begged him to reconsider his fickle, entertainment career was that he would sooner divorce me than to give up his line of work. In hindsight, I wish I had taken him up on that threat.

This year, he told me he would easily give up his career now that he’s experienced working from home and what it’s like to spend so much time with his kids. Thanks, dude, you’re about 8 years too late.

From these pictures, I’m reliving the worst year that barreled us down the path of divorce.

In the first year of our daughter’s life, Joseph came home at roughly 11 pm every night. Long after the kids were asleep. It was on me, during my maternity leave, to handle my son’s daily speech, behavioral, occupational, and physical therapies while taking care of a newborn. My nights weren’t any easier, since I was breastfeeding and that’s one task new fathers can’t help.

I remember the stress of putting our son in a special education preschool, which offered a bus service since it wasn’t all day. The preschool wasn’t the problem. It was finding a daycare, when I returned to work, that could accommodate waiting for the bus in the morning and promptly being outside when the bus arrived (or else they would keep him on and I’d have to leave work to get him).

Eventually, I found a multi-family in-home daycare that could accommodate my needs, but it was another massive burden placed on me that year.

As I’m finding pictures for this album, I watch a short video of my 3.5 year-old-son awkwardly coloring with incorrect hand grip. He’s quietly scribbling (he’s 7 and still can’t stay within the lines) until the marker touches his finger. My son jumps up, yelling and screaming with limited vocabulary as he runs to the bathroom that he has to wash his hands. His sensory processing disorder affected things touching his skin. It was another area of potential meltdowns that I navigated.

I go through more pictures in the album. Noticeably absent in these daily pictures is my husband since he wasn’t there when I returned from work and made dinner. He wasn’t there in any of the bathtub pictures or cute bedtime PJ shots.

Chugging along on this photo project, I get to the May 2014 pictures. Mother’s Day weekend. It was my first Mother’s Day with two kids. The first one after my daughter was born. The first one after six months of running a marathon with no sleep.

My husband insisted we spend that weekend driving up to visit his mother. Joseph guilted me by saying he had a bad feeling about her health and that she wouldn’t last much longer; he was positive she would die that month. Spoiler alert: she lived.

Driving for over 8 hours with a newborn that I was breastfeeding and a special needs son who wouldn’t eat anything available in restaurants was another gauntlet. When we arrived back home, exhausted, he was able to return to work and enjoy the luxury of going to the bathroom in peace or enjoying a lunch that was more than shoveling a piece of bread in your mouth.

Looking at those Mother’s Day pictures, my resentment is still sky-high.

I keep working on the photo album, re-living it day after day. There are only a handful of pictures with all four of us in them. I didn’t feel like a united family.

The next major event in these chronological pictures is the day he was a groomsman at my friend’s wedding. Much like Joseph, my friend’s then-fiancé had no real friends so he asked all of her friends’ husbands to be his wedding party.

I look banging hot in my dress (considering I had given birth a few months prior). But I know there was no night of hot sex after. Not just because of his low libido and porn addiction; by that point, shitty sex wasn’t worth giving up sleep.

When I returned to work, my pictures of the kids were during our nighttime routine. There’s a video of my son eating mashed potatoes. Or really, not eating them. He’s still in a harnessed high chair. His mouth is open and he’s screaming like his tongue is on fire.

Autistic kids need to learn everything, even how to spit out food. Every evening, at the direction of his occupational therapist, I tried introducing him to new foods so he wouldn’t subsist on goldfish crackers for every meal. That year, my son didn’t gain a single pound. He lost 30% of any potential growth. I felt alone in this struggle when all meal preparation and food buying was on me.

More resentment to add to that Marital Camel’s back.

There is debate whether having a special needs child increases the chance of divorce. Watching videos on weekends where my husband was present, it’s obvious we were immersed in my son’s world (very little attention paid to my daughter in comparison).

With his extremely limited speech, I’m reminded in videos of how every fun day would come to an abrupt end from a meltdown due to him simply dropping a toy (not breaking…just dropping and then picking back up) or a small fall.

The emotional exhaustion on both Joseph and my faces is visible. We didn’t know any other way to raise a child since he was our firstborn. We were alone, no family to help and all our friends were wonderful but had to take care of their own small. Every weekend was for playdates but they often highlighted the massive differences between our son and their children’s development.

I’m emotional watching these videos. My son is the poster child for successful therapy. You’d never know at first glance today that he has any issues. He’s worth all of the struggle, I don’t regret any of the combined effort to help him. But between him and a newborn, there was little my husband and I could give to each other.

I try to continue working on this photo album project, but studies are true when they say that parents of special needs kids develop PTSD. Trapped in a house thanks to COVID, I escape to my car to stop my hyperventilating. This was supposed to be a simple Shutterfly project, not a mental triathlon of emotionally crippling events.

Despite being an almost-single mother, my relationship with my kids was wonderful that year. My daughter was the sweetest and brightest joy needed at a time when things were dark and stressful. She gave me light. It was a joy to see my son get out of his comfort zone of the world centered around him to take on the role of the big brother.

Chugging through the photo album, I’m in the home stretch. October 2014. The month we get our holiday photos taken. There is no closeness between Joseph and me. In every shot, we’re far apart from each other. Despite my massive smile, my eyes in these family pictures show loneliness and exhaustion.

With great relief, I finally put the 365th digital photo in the album.

I’ve been glued to my desk for days, wrapping up this album and cursing Shutterfly’s lag time. My soon-to-be ex-husband has graciously watched the kids all week without complaint because he agrees this is an important project.

One of the nights this week while I hid behind dual monitors, Joseph came in and said, “hey…whatever happens between us…we’ll always have the kids.”

It’s his olive branch for a non-existent conflict. This marriage barreled down like a failed jet but has quietly ended like a rowboat finally reaching shore.