Tag: Marriage

Marriage can be hard, but sometimes it’s a lot harder than it has to be.

‘Specially when one of ya has something that rhyme’s with ‘ABCD’…

“What the hell did you do???”

I stared blankly back at My Beautiful Bride of almost 10 months, who had just come in the door after working the night-shift at the hospital.

“Why are you still awake???” she continued, clearly trying to make sense of the what she was seeing.

“Um, well…” I proffered her the suspicious-looking braided cable I had been holding in my hands.

“You were supposed to be sleeping–you have to drive almost 3 hours! And all you have to say for yourself is to hold up that?? I don’t even know what that is!”

It was becoming apparent that she was not pleased with the scene that had greeted her after spending a very draining 10 hours on her feet dealing with sick people.

“And what is this bloody mess? If I could, I would march right on over there and beat yo’ ass senseless!”” she said incredulously, waving her hand about the room.

I cast my eyes downward and said nothing.

“Is it…? No, it couldn’t be! Tell me that you didn’t just do what I think you did” she uttered in dismay as she slowly pieced together why I was sitting on the floor in our office, surrounded by a sea of body parts at 7 in the morning.

“I swear, it’s not what it looks like, Babe!”

I never thought that those words would be coming out of my mouth, yet here we were.

“Oh, really? Look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t been up all night engaged in wanton dismemberment. And don’t lie to me!”

Instead of looking her in the eye, I averted my gaze to what was around me. Truly surveying the carnage for the first time sobered me up a little bit for the first time all night.

“Ok, so I’ll admit that my impulses may have gotten a wee bit out of control,” I begrudgingly admitted, perhaps not being completely honest with myself.

“I thought…I thought I could trust you…but I leave you to your own devices for a few hours, and you go and do this…”

She trailed off as tears started to well up in her eyes.

“What kind of man have I married?” she sniffled to herself.

“Um, well…”

“A grown-ass man with ADHD.”

That–that–my friend, is this correct answer to the question ruefully posed by the Love of My Life–the Mother of My Children, the Woman I Call My Wife, yadda yadda ya–on what was supposed to be the beginning of our first romantic getaway since our Honeymoon.

But you probably could understand that she didn’t see things that way on that fateful October morning back in 2008–indubitably because it would be over 16 years before I would even consider that to be a likely explanation for the horror that had transpired overnight.

You might say that my unbridled desire to, um, ‘get around’ was being, uh, err, ‘frustrated’. And when she had left for work that night before we were due to head off to a cabin the mountains, I saw my chance to scratch that itch and so I took matters into my own hands, so to speak.

Honestly, I couldn’t exactly tell you what was going through my mind, as I don’t remember most of that night clearly, the whole thing being a haze clouded by my raging urges.

And it’s not that I want to avoid taking responsibility for my actions, but the truth is that my ADHD mind made it really hard to exercise good judgement, and in the end I just took things too far. Go ahead and look it up: the mental wirings of ADHDers like me are fundamentally different from that of the so-called ‘neuro-typical’ population, and we have been scientifically proven to be largely driven by the dopamine circuits in our brains.

If you don’t know what that means off the top of your head, dopamine in mammals is considered to be one of the primary chemicals responsible for that oh-so-satisfying feeling of reward.

To put even more in layman’s terms: it is also strongly associated with low impulse control and addictive behavior.

Yeah, that’s a big ol’ ‘Uh-oh…’ alright.

And, just like the night in question, so many times in our almost-an-adult¹In the sense that we have been married coming up on 18 years. marriage has my ADHD impacted our relationship negatively.

That really adds up in the long-haul, believe you me.

The good news is that at least it’s not a character flaw on my part. I swear, I’m not a bad person.

Nevertheless, it is important that I recognize the marital issues that I have brought to the table in this holy union of ours, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.

Therefore, this Valentine’s Day, I want share a very special message for that very special woman who has been legally and morally obliged to deal with all my nonsense this whole time:

*Turns to the right and solemnly looks into Camera 2*

“Babe, if you’re listening (though I doubt you are), I just wanted to say that your love and tolerance in the midst of all my neuro-divergent bullsh*t is wholly undeserved, and it is humbling to think that you still find me worthy to be called your hubby.

I am deeply sorry, my PunkinHead for all the stress and drama that I have unnecessarily caused you over the years, and I hope that with our newfound understanding of who I am on a biochemical level, and the insights, frameworks, and toolboxes that come with opening ourselves to the ADHD world, I can help relieve you of many of the immense burdens I have saddled you with.

In conclusion, my Love, my ‘Meatheart’, it is my hope–nay, my promise–that you will never ever come home again to discover that I have stayed up all night completely disassembling my moped just because I wanted to fix a turn signal that didn’t work and decided I needed to understand how the entire piece of machinery functioned while I was at it.

…

…though, for the record, 1) I really thought I could have had it reassembled before you got off work; and 2) I did successfully diagnose and repair it and put it all back together eventually. So…you know…it wasn’t entirely lost cause…”

Wait, what’s that, Dear Reader?

You thought that’s what I was talking about? Man, you really do have a twisted and dark mind don’t you?

And what kind of monster do you think I am anyways? Where the hell did you get that idea from?

Huh? What’s that you say? Look up…up…up. no up higher?

Oh, the title said what??

Um, yeah, that one’s kinda on me. It was supposed to say scooter–“the SCOOTER in the night time.”

Uh, hee-hee. *Gulp* My bad.

But seriously, you thought I had murdered and dismembered a prostitute, didn’t you?

Anyways…the point of the story is Happy Valentine’s Day!

…

Hmmm…now that I go back and re-read this, maybe it’s better that my love doesn’t read my little blog…

Content created on: 16 February 2025 (Sunday)