How come I can’t stay home
March 14, 2009 by Jeff Stimpson
Filed under Health
Sometimes I’ve envied Jill her time at home, away from an office, much as I haven’t liked the job (see “insurance policy”) I had to take 11 years ago. To me she had much of the free time in the marriage, and I conveniently forgot what my mother used to tell me before Alex was born (“When you have a baby you’ll probably want to go to work!” – was that an insult? – just as I conveniently forgot much of what it must have been like for Jill at home alone while I was in some hotel on a business trip.
(In the past six months I have, of course, learned to be out-and-out thankful for having any job.)
Once the boys were old enough, I wanted Jill to return to work for, in equal parts, her own career advancement after Alex’s birth and hospitalization (a job in itself for Jill), and for the spirit of teamwork I’ve come to need in a marriage. I often felt I was carrying the whole load of a special-needs family, though I knew I wasn’t. Sometimes in this kind of parenting, there’s a wide gap between what you feel and what you know.
Jill is moving back into the workworld – amazing enough in this economy – but it was a source of friction. Sometimes less, sometimes more. (“You don’t know the numbers of resumes and letters I’ve sent out,” she’d say.)
Jill and I haven’t come close to adding to the supposedly higher divorce rate among couples parenting a child with autism or other special needs. After the National Autism Association launched a study on the subject a few years ago, in fact, the previous author of this column found no evidence to support the bandied 80-to-85% divorce figure for couples parenting autism. And as Lisa Jo Rudy points out on her about.com Autism page, that a recent study reports that the divorce rate for couples parenting children who have ADHD (which Rudy terms similar to autism) is much lower than the incidence of stress in such families.
Stress we have. Online spots like ACT offer primers on relieving family stress, as does Terri Mauro’s excellent About.com channel on raising special-needs children.
