Tart Reviews: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All The Way Home

By Agent Tarter

Posted on January 1st, 2017

Written by Catherynne M. Valente, illustrated by Ana Juan, age 10 and up

If you’re a fantasy fan and haven’t discovered Valente’s Fairyland series yet, I suggest you get reading! The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All The Way Home is the finale of this remarkable series of five books. The story began when Valente crowdfunded the publication of the first book, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It was published online before being picked up by a publisher, and made history by becoming the first book to win a Nebula award before traditional publication.

The Fairyland series follows September, a 12-year-old girl from Nebraska during the second World War, after she accepts the Green Wind’s offer of an adventure into Fairyland. The feel of the books strikes me as very similar to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, capturing the same sense of sometimes terrifying wonder and strangeness. The denizens of Fairyland are far more True Fae than sanitized fairy tale, and while the books are recommended for age 10 and up, there are plenty of references for adults to enjoy.

In this final volume, September has been crowned the Queen of Fairyland, but to keep her crown, she must compete in the Royal Race, a Cantankerous Derby to find the Heart of Fairyland. Of course, first you must identify what the Heart of Fairyland is. In the process, September will rediscover old friends and old enemies, and face the terrifying possibility that Saturday, her marid maybe-more-than-a-friend, is going to lose all memory of her. She also wrestles with two sides of herself: the Engineer who is determined to win this race, and the girl who misses her family and wants to go home.

Valente’s writing is, as always, full of vivid descriptions, and as a result it’s probably best for stronger readers in the middle-grade group. One of my favourite touches from the series is the very obvious narrator who plays with the conventions of story. A passage I particularly loved in this book is when the Marquess, September’s rival, nearly arrives too late for the Derby, and the narrator explains: “I must admit: The Marquess actually overslept on the morning of the Cantankerous Derby….But I woke her….You might think it wicked of me – why not let that awful lady sleep through to the end of time? But, darlings, I have many more stories than September’s to look after, and I cannot neglect even one of them.”

Similarly, I have always enjoyed how Valente tackles typical tween and teen feelings of isolation and struggles to fit in, despite her rather fantastical setting. In a lovely moment early in the book – one which will probably speak to many adult readers – Hawthorn, a changeling who grew up in the human world and found his way back to Fairyland, challenges September by saying that he can’t trust a human: “You don’t know what it’s like to always, always feel that you don’t belong, to your family, to your city, or your school, knowing there’s something different about you, something off, that you’re not like theothers, that you’re an alien all alone.” The narrator’s response is one of the more poignant moments from the series: “Oh, but Hawthorn, my best and dearest boy….No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.”

As an end to the series, this volume is quite satisfying, tying up many lose ends and bringing back many intriguing characters from earlier books, even as it incorporates new ones into a very busy story. However, the cast of thousands starts to tell at the end. The pacing seems slightly off, as things feel increasingly rushed closer to the end. This may have been a deliberate attempt to capture the urgency of the Derby, but instead, it leaves the book feeling slightly unfinished, as if a deadline were approaching and Valente didn’t have the opportunity to flesh out final chapters as much as she did the earlier ones.

Without getting into spoilers, the tension of September’s choice between continued life in Fairyland and missing her family has an unexpected end – and not one every reader will enjoy. Personally, I found the result a little disappointing and a little too pat, with the characters getting much of what they want with little sacrifice.

However, the last two chapters in particular are a beautiful testament to the power of story. “This is my last magic trick, the curious wizardry of narrators….Endings are rubbish. No such thing. Never has been, never will be. There is only the place where you choose to stop talking. Everything else goes on forever….Sometimes I will be young, and sometimes I will be old, and sometimes you will be young, and sometimes you will be old. But for as long as forever, I will keep a room for you.”

Whether you like September’s particular ending or not, fans of the Fairyland series will find this a satisfying ending, suitably exciting and tense – and, of course, magical and fantastic. If you’re new to the Fairyland series, make sure you start at the beginning, but dive in! It’s a journey you won’t regret making.

About the Author: 
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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Two Will Have To Do

By Agent Tarter

Posted on Monday, July 18, 2016


From the moment A. and I first talked about having kids, our ongoing debate became a joke. A. came from a small-ish family and liked the idea of having three kids; I always countered with “Let’s have two and then we’ll see.” He (with backing from the many parents of large families in our area) argued that parents are all good until you have more kids than hands; I responded with the point that since it was MY hands that would be staying at home, more than two WAS outnumbering hands! But I did, in fact, have an open mind; I was looking forward to being a parent, and I knew that, once I got into the swing of things, I might be open to three…or maybe even more.

We had a little trouble having O. – unexplained infertility can be a bitch – but he came along. It was a while later than we had expected, but not too much later, and we didn’t require any significant intervention. And, while I had one very early miscarriage before G. – early enough that I would have thought it was just a truly awful period if it weren’t for an early-response pregnancy test – having child #2 wasn’t too hard.

Equally importantly, I did enjoy being a mom…for the most part. I mean, nobody loves poop and feeling trapped at home, but I liked having babies (although I find they get more fun the older they get!) We had our struggles – money was a bit tight, stresses were a bit high – but initially, it didn’t seem like a third child would be necessarily out of the question.

I did debate whether I would want another biological child, or whether we should explore the idea of foster care with intent to adopt. It’s an issue that’s important to me, and there are so many kids who are looking for permanent homes. So A. and I definitely talked about doing the required home course, which would make us fully aware of the whole process, and considering adopting a child. Our thought was to wait until O. and G. were in school, and then consider adopting a child younger than our biological kids, so we were already familiar with the age and stage.

Then A. started seriously struggling with mental illness, which I’m talking about in my own series on this blog. And much of his stress was triggered by issues relating to the kids. I started to realize that, if I decided to carry or adopt a third child, responsibility for that child would really be entirely with me. In all honesty, I also feared that A. wouldn’t be there to help parent any longer. But even if he was, I began to understand that he would probably never be able to share a full half the burden of parenting and decision making.

And then my next door neighbor had an oops pregnancy. They had always been adamant: they had two, that was what they wanted. J. had his vasectomy appointment booked. Two weeks before, I realized she was late. All things told, they handled it pretty well – after the requisite freakout, of course!

But I had my own freakout, too. Suddenly, I realized that I was terrified of my own possible accidental pregnancy. A. was struggling with mental illness and G. had just been diagnosed on the autism spectrum – how could I possibly handle another child?

And then I really started to think about my “maybe” third child. Going from four to five has plenty of complications in any situation – bigger cars, more food, more clothes and school supplies and activities. But in my life, the emotional complexity was the bigger problem. I had a certain amount of time and energy and compassion to give and it was all spoken for.

I told A. that, whether we fostered and adopted a child in the future or not, I was sure I didn’t want any more biological kids, so we took <ahem> permanent measures. There’s still question about whether we would be permitted to adopt through the foster care system given A.’s diagnosis; most governmental organizations are not so forgiving of mental health issues, sadly. But even if we are, I don’t know that it’s something that I can take on, now or in future.

Most of the time I’m happy with our family of four. We have a boy and a girl, what Canadian Maritimers call “the millionaire’s family” because you have one of everything. Both of them are fun, delightful kids. And while they were cute as babies, it’s hard to imagine going back to a world of diapers and nighttime feedings.

But I am a bit wistful about feeling like I didn’t really get to make the call. I didn’t decide I was happy with two; I decided I couldn’t handle having three. That changes the tone of the decision by quite a bit…and not in a way that makes me happy.

I love my two kids to pieces, but two will have to do.



About the Author:
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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Married to Mental Illness: What Is Going On?

By Agent Tarter
Posted on Monday, July 4th, 2016

Before you can start helping someone with a mental illness, you have to know exactly what is wrong. Little did I know before my partner and I entered this process, that’s far harder than you might think.

My partner A. had always been anxious, something we both assigned to elements of his upbringing. Look up “insecure attachment” in a psychology textbook and you’ll have an idea of what it was like for him growing up. As he got older, he never knew what would result from his actions – whether he would be praised to high heaven or screamed at for being wrong – but chances were good that anything he did would be interpreted in the worst light possible.

During our Bachelor’s degree, the career that A. had planned on for nearly a decade fell through in spectacular fashion. Naturally, he became depressed. Between the anxiety and the depression, it was a very rocky couple of years, but we got through it. And that convinced us that both of those things were situational. Stick it out, we thought. Find a new career and be reassured through our relationship that he was worthy of love, and things would get better. And they did.

Sort of. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back now, things weren’t really better. They were contained. But obsessive thoughts – like the terror he had that he might cheat, even though the very idea made him sick, or the fear that gripped him if I was late – were still lurking, just manageable. Compulsions were hiding in slight exaggerations of normal behavior – like how he needed to click “save” on his essays three times, then also save them to two separate flash drives, before he could sleep.

But who doesn’t have some quirks? So we didn’t think anything of it.

Things got worse again when our oldest, O., was born. We assumed that having a child had triggered some worries and issues from A.’s own childhood. Watching his mother and father respond to O. in a way that we knew was unhealthy opened A.’s eyes to just how dysfunctional the dynamic in his family was. No wonder he was anxious about being a good parent and depressed to realize that the relationship with his parents would never be want he wanted it to be. Right?

And it got worse again when our youngest, G., came around. By the time she was six months old, I was desperately frustrated, taking on too much, asking A. over and over again to get more significant help.

We moved; A. started a new job. But the pace was faster, and his career is one that is emotionally very draining. He kept taking on more and more; I kept trying to convince him that he didn’t need to ruin his happiness and his health just to prove his value. But when he literally couldn’t sleep for two days because he was worried about getting a project done, or when he was sure that an idle comment from a client meant that everyone he worked with hated him, he just brushed it off as that old but comparatively meek demon of anxiety – something he had fought before and surely could fight again.

There was one particularly bad summer that finally convinced him to see a doctor. The obvious stress came from external factors – a two-month span that was grueling and brutal for many reasons – but it was really just the reasoning that convinced him to go. And then we started the wait… Anyone who’s needed to see a specialist knows about waiting (even in the socialist health care paradise of Canada.) He wasn’t a risk to himself or to others, so he had to wait…and wait…and wait.

Meanwhile, his family doctor prescribed something appropriate for anxiety. And then another something when the first thing had unpleasant side effects and didn’t really seem to help. Then another something for depression, which replaced the thing for anxiety but only after a painful period weaning off one drug, then on to the next. Oh, and something to take as needed for the anxiety. I could give names of the pile of medications we tried, but really, that’s incidental. The fact was that our family doctor was pretty upfront: he didn’t know for sure what was going on, so he was essentially trying a “spray and pray” approach, trying the medications that were most common for the symptoms that were most bothersome and hoping they would help.

When A. finally got to see a psychiatrist and a counselor, the diagnosis was clinical depression. Major clinical depression, actually. Persistent depressive episodes – have you heard of dysthymia? Well, perhaps you’re actually bipolar with a tendency towards depressive episodes; you do sometimes get explosions of rage, which can be part of mania…

It is very disconcerting to realize that even the professionals know so little about mental health. That’s not their fault; psychiatry is really a very new discipline, so it’s probably on a par with surgery over 200 years ago. But when someone you love needs help, you just want someone to be able to run a test and say, confidently, that THIS is the problem and THIS is how you fix it.

The hard thing for me was constantly feeling like something wasn’t adding up. I can’t count how many times I said, “That’s an obsessive thought; should that be happening?” Or “What did your counselor say about your trouble sleeping?” Or “Did you ask the psychiatrist if it’s normal for your thoughts to be racing this much?”

In the end, it took a month long period of overwhelming, terrifying obsessive thoughts – thoughts that drove A. to considering suicide simply as a way to make them stop – before we got the right diagnosis: obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD.

This might seem obvious as I’m telling it, but go online sometime and look at the symptom lists for mental health and it’s shocking how much they overlap. In retrospect, it’s easy, but at the time, how could we distinguish the obsessive thoughts A. had that he was going to fail from fears that would be generated by social anxiety? How do you identify seemingly helpful habits – reviewing one more time for a test, insisting on checking that the doors are locked one more time before bed – as compulsions until you’ve put all the pieces together? And until you know what’s going on, the strategies that work for one disorder can make one disorder significantly worse.

So why am I telling you this story? Because if you’re living with a partner who is struggling with mental illness, there are some things you can learn from my story:

Diagnosis is not simple. Expect it to take time. That’s painful when you just want a solution, but counseling or medicating for the wrong thing is at best unhelpful and at worst can make things deteriorate.

Diagnosis is also based on self-reporting. In hindsight, I wish that I had gone to A.’s counselor to talk to her about what I was noticing in him, because I think he minimized some things and failed to mention others.

Don’t settle for a diagnosis that doesn’t seem to be working. Whether there’s something niggling at you that doesn’t seem to fit, or the medication that usually helps doesn’t, pursue it at least for a while. Mental health is complicated, so in the end it may simply be the complexities of the human mind that result in things not quite adding up, but if you have reason to feel like the diagnosis is missing something significant, follow up.

If someone you know is struggling with mental illness, have patience when their diagnosis seems to take a long time – or when it changes. It’s not as simple as getting a blood test or filling out a questionnaire and being able to say what’s wrong. And trust me, you are nowhere near as frustrated with the challenge of getting a diagnosis as the person who is desperate for help.

For those who aren’t dealing with mental illness personally or within their family, it’s time to push for further research to improve our understanding. Mental health care now is the equivalent of the days when we had just decided to anesthetize patients before surgery: it’s better than when we began, but it’s not sophisticated, it’s not consistent, and it’s not successful as often as it needs to be.

And we can change that.

About the Author:
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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Full Bellies: Sometimes Support Means Saying You Can Stop

By Agent Tarter
Posted Monday, June 27th, 2016

I am one of the few, lucky women who had a pretty universally awesome breastfeeding experience. Sure, there were a few lumps and bumps thanks to my oversupply – boobs as hard as boulders when my first started sleeping through the night comes to mind – but overall, I liked the process and found it fairly easy. So when my local breastfeeding support group was looking for volunteers for a peer-to-peer support line for new moms who wanted to breastfeed, I was happy to raise my hand. The key qualifications: 6 months of breastfeeding experience, 8 hours of training, a willingness to fill out a few forms after every contact, and a positive attitude.

The training day was about what you would expect: we got a quick rundown on key information about breastfeeding, supply, potential problems, and probably most importantly, when to refer the mom in question to medical assistance, rather than continuing to help her by e-mail or phone. I went home with a binder of information I could reference and waited to be matched with a peer. Because I am a shameless keener, I also bought Dr. Jack Newman’s Guide to Breastfeeding (he’s Canadian! said my patriotic side) and read it cover to cover.

And that was valuable, although not in the way you would expect.

What came through to me by the time that I was done reading the book was that this was a great resource for women who knew for sure they would do ANYTHING it took to breastfeed for as long as possible, but it wasn’t so great for women who weren’t sure. It was great for women who were determined to overcome their mastitis or low milk supply or latch problems by any means necessary, and not so great for women who were exhausted and desperate and just didn’t know if they could keep this going. And if you were a mom who didn’t find this whole nursing thing such a transformative bonding experience? Well, let’s just say you would have gotten the impression that there was something distinctly wrong with you.

The thing is, breastfeeding is a wonderful experience…if the baby is getting fed and if the mom enjoys it. But breastmilk won’t magically make things better if Mom is sobbing the whole time because it hurts, or because she’s so tired and she just needs three straight hours without worrying about the baby or the pump. Sure, there’s validity to saying that no formula yet can duplicate the unique milk a woman makes for her baby, but that doesn’t make formula battery acid. And if a mother is on the fence about whether nursing is right for her, guilt and second-guessing are not going to help.

One of the moms I was matched with during my time as a volunteer had to go back to work when her baby was four months old. Nursing had always been hard, and it became harder afterwards. Now she wasn’t just fighting a still-painful latch and an erratic supply, she was also dealing with plugged ducts and engorgement and breasts that just plain wouldn’t empty for the pump. And despite the breastfeeding she had already done, despite her increasing desperation, she simply couldn’t bring herself to say the lactation f-word of formula. When I suggested it, there were literally tears.

I’m a tremendous advocate for the breastfeeding relationship, but my more militant peers are damaging that cause far more than they are helping. Yes, we should absolutely educate mothers who want to breastfeed about the advantages of that, and also about the potential problems with including feeds of formula some or all of the time if you’re hoping to continue nursing. And we should definitely combat the stupid myths out there – no, well-meaning but ill-informed great grandmas, your milk cannot “sour in the breast.” But by treating women who “fail” to nurse successfully as if they have done their babies a disservice by switching to a nutritious, safe form of feeding, all we’re likely to do is scare people off. Better to be a terrible formula-feeder getting a decent night’s sleep from day one than a defector, a failure.

I will always support the women I know who want to breastfeed, and I’m happy to tell them about my positive experience with it. But a key part of truly supporting them is telling them that, if they reach that point where nursing is consistently more miserable than rewarding – for any reason – it is okay to stop. There is an option for that now.

Oh, and for the record…the mom who cried when I suggested she try formula was a lot happier the week after. We stayed in touch after my time as peer support was done. If she has another baby, she says she might try nursing again, or not…but she knows that, either way, she’ll be a good mom.



About the Author:
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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Full Bellies: Too Much of a Good Thing

By Agent Tarter

Posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2016

If you breastfed your baby, think back to the information you got when you were getting started. You probably remember lots of information about building your supply. Build that milk supply! Make sure you nurse at night – that’s when the hormones that build supply get produced! You can drink special mother’s tea that will help give you more supply!

Yeah, you know what would have been useful? Talking about the opposite situation.

I did NOT have to worry about having enough. My milk came in before I left the hospital, 48 hours later, and man oh man, could you tell. Once, long ago, I remember a time when I was a C cup; I left the hospital with a pair of Es or Fs crammed into a DD nursing bra.

The guidelines all say kids should gain at least 4 ounces a week. My son O.’s record was a POUND. My family doctor laughed and said, “Well, some women make milk and some make cream!”

But it wasn’t just that my breasts ooze butter…it was also that there was SO DAMN MUCH of it. When O. nursed on one side, I could feel the other let down like someone had put a clamp on my boob. Only one brand of nursing pad could contain it, and even then I had to change them four times a day. If O. let go while I was letting down, jets of milk would spray all over his face, and on multiple occasions he actually choked when my letdown gave him more milk than he could drink. For a few weeks, I had to nurse him while leaning back in a recliner so that my milk sprays would have to go against gravity.

It is a bit of an understatement to say that O. regularly spit up. Actually, his poor little belly was so overfull that he regularly hit the far wall of the nursery. I learned to keep two or three burp cloths handy: one for him, one for me, and one to clean up whatever hit the floor.

When you have an oversupply, you frequently run into a problem called “foremilk / hindmilk imbalance.” In a nutshell, the first milk out of your boob is thin, and it gets thicker/creamier as kids empty the breast. If you have an oversupply, kids fill up on the foremilk and don’t get the hindmilk. This tends to make them cranky (since they don’t get the satisfying fat) and it also – fun fact – makes their poop foamy and green. No, really green. Green as the grass. Seriously. I have never seen anything like it and I hope I never will again.

The solution is to start feedings off of the same breast multiple times in a row. Sounds simple, right? It is…sort of. What the cheerful suggestions online or in guidebooks don’t really discuss is what to do with the other breast, the one that is slowly inflating and leaking and generally starting to scream at you that you should really get a baby on there. Eventually you find the oh-so-helpful advice that you should pump or express a bit from the opposite breast – but not too much, lest you prompt the buildup of even more supply. Also, you can run into some weird side effects…a friend who also had an oversupply ended up feeding off her left side so often that her baby decided he would only nurse from the left. The end result was that her right breast’s supply dried up, so she spend nine months with an engorged D cup on one side and a shrunken light B on the other. Ah, the majesty of childrearing.

Even with all of this, I was not prepared for the greatest of challenges: the first time O. slept through the night. It’s supposed to be a glorious day! You’re supposed to wake rested and refreshed with the birds chirping and a renewed love for your beautiful infant child, who is sleeping angelically.

Yeah, no. What happened to me was I woke up at 3:00 in the morning, both boobs as big as volleyballs and about as hard to the touch. My full milk ducts felt like cables under my skin, and the breast I’d accidentally rolled over onto was frantically squirting through my nursing pad and my pajamas. I didn’t have a pump, so I spent an hour awake milking myself into towels until everything (including me) calmed down enough to go to sleep. So glamorous.

Eventually, of course, things settled further. By the time O. was eating solids, my supply was generous but no longer so overwhelming (although my letdown was still dramatic, so my partner and I still joke that the first time O. tries a beer funnel in college he’s going to feel strangely reminded of Mom.) And for any other moms out there with oversupply, at least in my case, the rumours are true: with a second baby, it’s not as ridiculous. When I had G. things were much more under control, both literally and figuratively.

I don’t envy women who struggle with low supply, but I do wish that more people had talked about the possibility of having too much of a good thing. It came with its own set of challenges, and it was surprisingly difficult to find solutions to those problems because everything I looked for was busy talking about how to build supply up.

In the long run, though, I guess it’s good to know that if civilization collapses, I have a secure future as a wet nurse ahead of me.

About the Author:

Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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When Your Partner Has A Mental Illness…

By Agent Tarter

Posted Sunday, June 19th, 2016

When Your Partner Has A Mental Illness…

…you will spend time trying to convince your partner that something is wrong, really wrong.

Your partner will spend time trying to convince you otherwise. At other times, vice versa.

You will exert your willpower to make it through the bad spells and when they’re over, you’ll point to them as an example of why something has to be done. But by the time your partner is out of the bad spells, they are feeling better, and they will wave them away as just one of those things.

There will be another bad spell. It may come sooner, last longer, or be deeper. You will start taking little responsibilities off your partner’s shoulders to make it easier…small things, like cleaning the bathroom when that’s usually their job. Or not so small things, like paying the bills, because you’re not confident they will get done.

You will start to trust your partner a little less.

If you have children, you will try to protect them from what’s happening. Daddy or Mommy is having a tough day; let’s be extra quiet, okay? You will try to protect your partner from stress of the kids – don’t worry, honey, I’ll handle bedtime. You will try to protect your partner from the fallout when your kids only want you because they’re not used to Mommy or Daddy doing things for them any more: it’s just a phase, next month they’ll be all about you again.

It will become impossible to pretend things are okay, at least at home. Your partner will finally agree to see someone. You will get a diagnosis; it may be right, but it may be wrong.

Your partner will try therapy, medication, or both. You will wonder if they’re working. You will know they are working, but also know that the side effects are grueling – physically in the case of medication, emotionally in the case of therapy.

Your partner will come home with something their doctor or therapist said about your relationship – or you. You will be angry and hurt: why does your partner get to tell their side of the story and you don’t? Besides, for every complaint your partner has about you, you have more about them.

A kernel of you will realize there is validity to the criticism, but you will be so caught up in trying to get through each day that you won’t have time to examine it right now.

If you have children, you will start watching them like a hawk. Is he having that tantrum about his toy being out of place because he has a compulsion to line things up, or is it just one of those days? Is she swinging from happy to weeping in seconds because she’s overtired, or is this something more? You think to yourself that, at least, if your kids start showing signs of something more you’ll know what is going on and be able to help early. But in your heart, you can’t help but think that if your kids start showing signs of something more it will be your partner’s fault.

Things will reach a crisis. You will feel like your partner is breaking. You will feel like you are breaking. You will wonder if you should take your partner to the hospital. You will wonder if that’s a bad idea. You will be terrified that they will be admitted for a psychiatric watch and terrified that they will not.

You cannot be with your partner 100% of the time. In your heart of hearts, you’re scared that, one of these days, you’ll get a solemn phone call or a knock at the door. “Mrs. X, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this…”

You will check your life insurance policy to find out if your family is protected if your partner commits suicide. You will feel like a terrible person. You will still feel relief if it turns out your policy covers it.

You will start to imagine how you will react if it happens. Will you cry? What songs will you pick for the memorial service? Will you stay in the house for a while, until the kids are done grieving? Perhaps it would be better to move closer to your parents. You will feel like a terrible person again.

You start finding it difficult to imagine a life ten years from now that still includes your partner. You don’t want to think you’d leave them – they’re sick, not abusive or neglectful – but in the back of your head it is a possibility. Even if you know you would never leave, you wonder if they will leave you, one way or another.

You will wonder if it would be better that way. Things are so hard right now, and you’re keeping so many plates in the air; remove the one or two (or five or ten) related to your partner’s mental illness, and your days would get easier. You will be too tired to feel terrible.

If your partner goes on leave from work, you will feel desperate and scared. Will they ever go back? Will being isolated at home all day make things worse?

You will wonder if you can manage now that you’re not getting eight hours a day where you can breathe, be alone, cry without anyone seeing. You will wonder if you can manage tighter finances.

You will ask yourself if, in the midst of all the appointments and pills and the leave from work, anyone cares about how you are coping. You’re not sick, after all, but you’re the one who picks up the slack and gets the kids on the bus to school and makes sure there’s food in the refrigerator and figures out how to make the family budget stretch between the counseling appointment and the reimbursement cheque coming in the mail. You’re the one who is the shoulder to cry on and the cheerleader who keeps the smile on saying, “We’ll get through this.” You’re the one has to expend every iota of energy you have to make that believable.

You’ll get numb to your partner’s pain and stress and anxiety, and instead of feeling sympathy you’ll feel exasperation – I’m so tired of having to hear about your bad day.

There will be ups and there will be downs. For me and my partner, the trend is upwards, marked by deep valleys. Others have it “easy” – if you can ever call it that – and the progress is steadily upwards. Others aren’t so fortunate, and things stay level, continue downward…or suddenly stop.

If you are lucky, things will get better. The medication will start helping. The behavioural techniques will make a difference. Your partner will return to work.

You’ll still be wary. You’ll drive your partner crazy with questions – are you sure you took your morning dose? What did the counselor say this time? You’ll pepper them with reminders: don’t forget your meeting tonight, and you have to meet the school bus at 2:30.

You’ll start rebuilding who you were, both personally and as a couple. It will be different, and you’ll struggle to decide if that’s good or bad.

And hopefully, you will realize this:

You are not alone. Others have ridden the whirlwind – not exactly like yours, but close enough to empathize. If we could just talk about it more, you would have known that when this all began. In fact, you might decide you want to talk about it more, in ways that are safe for you and your partner, which for some means acknowledging your own struggles with a therapist and for others means opening your soul to the Internet.

You have more strength than you thought you did just to get this far. Few people saw just how much you did, how much you had to carry on your shoulders. Those who do probably admire you more than they’ll say. You might even admire yourself when you really stop to think about it.

You are not a terrible person, no matter what you thought at the worst moments. Your partner is not, or was not, a terrible person either. You were fighting a disease that’s poorly understood and difficult to treat and terribly stigmatized, and you did the best you knew how to do.

In the rest of this series I’ll talk about my personal experiences with my family’s individual situation. But I suspect few of those blogs will capture the experience of being the partner of someone with mental illness the way this one will. For those of you living the same, I hope it gives you some comfort. For those of you who aren’t, I hope it gives you some perspective.

About the Author:

Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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