It was not a dozen roses or a diamond bracelet.  It wasn’t fantastic oral sex.  It wasn’t a fancy dinner or a tropical vacation.  It wasn’t a love letter. But it might as well have been all of those things, because buying a whiteboard for his office is the single most romantic thing my husband has suggested in our relationship in the past three years.

Let me explain.

As many of you already know, my son has Asperger’s. But he is not my husband’s only child.  He has another son, Michael, who is also autistic.  His autism is so severe that he will never developmentally progress much past being a toddler.  He is 22 years old. 

Michael and his mother live across the country from us.  She has devoted her entire life to the care of her son.  Hers has been a hard road, and I begrudge her nothing from the divorce settlement with my husband, or the (somewhat distant) relationship she maintains with him.  Unlike a lot of second wives, I harbor no resentment or ill will towards my predecessor.  To the contrary, I respect her deeply, and want only good things for her and her son. From the incomplete knowledge I have of their relationship (being that I wasn’t a party to it and it was over before I met him), she is a decent person whose life is like most peoples’ – a combination of good and bad, luck and misfortune, shining moments and stupid decisions.  The fact that she and my husband could not make their marriage work even after 16 years is a source of profound sadness to them both, even though, when one looks at the circumstances, it comes as no surprise to either of them.

It is a shocking and poorly documented statistic that more than 80% of marriages between parents of an autistic child end in divorce. The statistic has been cited in article after article, with no actual citations to any scientific study.  And the statistic has become so ingrained within the autism community that the National Autism Association has even started offering grants to couples with autistic children who want face to face local marriage counseling as a way to combat the divorce rate that is “creeping upward.” 

Yet as much as I want to disbelieve the statistic, call it outright hooey and file it alongside all the other myths about autism, there is a ring of truth to the notion that having an autistic child can put a terrific strain on a marriage.  Because the fact is, just about anything large, life-changing and stressful can put a strain on a marriage.  A spouse who suffers from depression or who experiences a life-altering disability will put strain on a marriage.  Families hitting financial rough patches will experience strain in their marriage.  When a child dies, that puts a strain on a marriage.  And marriages under stress fall apart a lot faster than marriages that are not under stress.  No big surprise there.  It has the unremarkable ring of the obvious.

Stress will force the parties to a marriage to demonstrate who they really are under pressure, how they operate when things aren’t going their way.  In many ways, it can be the true test of whether two people are really able to be partners in life.  Sure, it’s easy to love one another when you’re financially stable, the sex is still good and relatively frequent, and most of your problems are fairly garden-variety matters like juggling schedules and making sure you treat each other with respect.  Or maybe not….the national divorce rate still hovers around 50 percent, meaning that even under the most normal of circumstances, you can still screw it all up.

Yank the rug out from under a person and very often you will see a whole other personality emerge, one that maybe you’ve never seen before.  Many people never figure out what kind of person they are in a crisis until well after they have gotten married, and the emergence of this crisis persona can be disorienting to a partner, particularly since depending on the circumstances, they may be dealing with a newly-emerging crisis persona of their own.  A crisis during a marriage will reveal a lot about your partner, and about you, and the revelation, combined with the weight of whatever problem you are managing, sometimes causes a marriage to collapse.

The good news, however, is that sometimes the revelation helps.  Sometimes you discover that your partner has exactly the kind of response to a crisis that you need to help you through.  Sometimes you discover an ability to work together, and that you and your partner together have a strength you never knew before. Indeed, talk to couples who have been married for 50 years or more, and what you will find is that they know they have each other’s back unconditionally when it comes to external problems, no matter how much they may carp and bicker at each other about who doesn’t pick up after themselves.  And this is not a theoretical knowing.  It has been thoroughly tested.

The problem is that you never really know which kind of marriage you will have in a crisis until you are actually there.  And in the case of a problem with a child, the traditional way we still view child-rearing within marriage does not help matters. Even after decades of feminism, and an economy where the majority of families have both parents working outside the home, women are still held responsible in the home for most of the child-rearing duties.

The classic breakdown of a marriage between parents of an autistic child looks like this:  The primary caregiver of the child (most often the mother) is usually the one who notices the problems first.  She is the one who spends most of her day dealing with the trials and tribulations, the frustrations and the intermittent joys of a child on the spectrum. She may or may not have had the child diagnosed, but either way, she is working far harder at caring for this child than is the norm. She is suspicious there is something very wrong, and she is scared.  Getting a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily abate the fear.  It just adds more emotions as she becomes responsible for not only raising this child, but seeking countless necessary therapies.

The other parent, (usually the father) may also suspect something is wrong but because he has less overall interaction with the child might not take it as seriously.  Even if he does take it seriously, he is less conscious of the extent to which it requires additional parental energy and attention to deal with.  This is not necessarily an intentional thing.  It’s simply a side effect of the fact that you really have no idea what it is like to be a primary caregiver of an autistic child until you actually have to do it. 

Once you have a diagnosis, the therapy merry-go-round, the constant battles with the school and with teachers, the stress of trying to keep it all together falls largely on the primary caregiver.  And in her single-mindedness to care for her child, she may forget some things.  She may forget herself, doing the thing that many do and martyring herself on the altar of motherhood, laying aside her physical and emotional needs in the name of putting all her attention on her child.  She may forget to include the other parent in the care of her child.  Indeed a sort of standoff can often occur, where the primary caregiver is desperate to receive an offer of help from the other parent, and the other parent feels all but shut out of his child’s life because the primary caregiver never tells him what he can do to help.

In the end, both can end up feeling beleaguered and alone in the marriage, and thus the disintegration begins, sliding to an inexorable conclusion.  If there were already problems in the marriage before they discovered something was wrong with the child, it can go downhill with frightening speed.

Of course, it doesn’t always happen this way.  Every marriage is as individual as the two people in it.  But the dynamic is shockingly typical.

When Little Man first was flagged as possibly having a developmental disorder, I’ll own it – I was freaked out. As calm, cool and collected as I know it sounds like I was, the fact of the matter is that I was scared.  And disappointed.  And angry.  And a host of other things besides, all at the same time.  The first day after we got the diagnosis was a snow day.  Little Man was off from school and I was home alone, in the house with him all day long, cooped up with the barrage of new emotions that were assaulting me from every angle at every unguarded moment.  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon , I called my husband and begged him to come home early.  I had lost it.

Having been through this before, Mike was a bit more sanguine about the whole thing. After all, he’d heard this news before, with his other son.  And therein lay the problem.  Autism does have a genetic component.  And when you are two for two in terms of producing offspring with a condition that normally occurs in less than one percent of the population, there is the natural tendency to believe that somehow it’s your fault.  Indeed, men are socially programmed to believe that they should assume responsibility for the welfare and well-being of their family, that that is what a good man does.  So the tendency to think in terms like “fault” and its more nasty cousin, “blame,” runs strong in men as a general matter. Mike being a more self-aware man than many in this world, understood that while he wasn’t panicking over Little Man’s diagnosis, he was feeling more than a little guilty, despite the fact that the guilt was wholly undeserved.

And despite the fact that Mike was already all too familiar with the typical dynamic regarding between parents of a kid with autism (it had played at least a small part in the breakdown of his first marriage), that did not mean that he was not susceptible to it.  And given my knowledge of the history of his first marriage, I was particularly wary of whether or not Mike was stepping up to the plate in terms of helping to take care of Little Man.

This is how fast a perfectly good marriage can find itself challenged by a diagnosis in the family.

I could feel us sliding down that road of isolation – I was shouldering most of the work in terms of getting the diagnosis, getting therapies set up, getting him to his appointments on time, dealing with the crap coming down from the school (which ultimately left me scrambling to find Little Man a new school at the 11^th hour).  Although I am fortunate to have some childcare assistance, at the end of the day, because I was the mother, everyone looked to me when Little Man was upset or needed something. 

I tried to voice my concerns to my husband, but sometimes even asking for help can be misunderstood as criticism, especially if the one being asked feels guilty in the first place.  Fortunately, both my husband and I are well-versed in the art of fighting fairly between us, and even when our discussions about the matter got heated, no one threw a punch below the belt.  Actually, I did.  Once.  I instantly regretted it and apologized immediately.

Things weren’t bad between us, but they weren’t easy either.  And then came a meeting with the school about Little Man’s diagnosis.  It was scheduled for a Thursday.  We’d been scheduling and rescheduling this meeting for over a month, and I was getting tired of the fact that I couldn’t seem to get a day when all parties could be together, and I knew time was running short. So I finally thought, screw it, Mike can go to the meeting without me.

On the one hand, it probably wasn’t fair of me. Mike simply wasn’t as up to speed on the timeline and the issues as I was.  If we wanted the best result for Little Man out of that meeting, I was the better person to go.  But I was supposed to be in Chicago on business and there was no way I was going to reschedule the meeting for the fourth time.  The issues that were to be discussed in the meeting needed to be discussed sooner rather than later, and simply could not be held off any more. To some extent, the decision to send Mike in my stead was a purely selfish act on my part.

On the other hand, the meeting woke my husband up to the fact of how checked out he had actually become with respect to the care of our child. Going to bat for your child when you are a primary caregiver with a full understanding of all the facts and issues is demanding enough.  But doing so when you aren’t takes you wholly out of your element.  I had briefed Mike for the meeting as best I could, discussing what our position was, what we wanted, and what we were prepared to do to get it. But he was simply not as conversant in all of Little Man’s issues as I was, not up to speed on everything like I was.  He struggled in that meeting, and the outcome was less than optimal.  And he did not like the feeling that produced in him.

That afternoon, after both of us had had some time to calm down after receiving the bad news that Little Man was not going to be asked to come back to the school next year, Mike said, “Honey, I think I need to buy a whiteboard to put up in the office.  I think we need to do more so that I can stay involved in what’s going on with him, and so we can keep track of everything.”

My husband is an emergency planner by trade, and the job suits him because he is someone who needs to establish order around him in order to feel secure. He is a listmaker, an “org chart” constructor, a scheduler.  The whiteboard was his acknowledgement that he needed to be more involved, and was a concrete tool that he knew would suit his style of information processing.  As a gesture, it sounds small, trivial even.  But knowing him as I do, I knew the gesture for what it was. It was his determination not to ever leave me so far out on a limb by myself ever again.  He was going to have my back, and he was going to gather the tools to make sure he could.

I was so moved by his expression of love that I cried. 

We went to Staples the following Sunday and it was installed that afternoon.  Along with it was a file box that sits on his desk and contains all the papers from all the different doctors, therapists, and programs who provide services to Little Man.  Every week, we track all of Little Man’s therapies, doctors, his school issues, and everything else on the board.  One glance, and everyone in our family is up to speed on where Little Man is on his journey.  It keeps Mike and I communicating, keeps us together on a journey that could all too easily send us sliding in different directions. It is a not cure-all nor is it a guarantee against future problems.

It is a mundane thing, to be sure. But it means all the world to me.