When Love Evolves: The Silent Truth About Parenting and Partnership

Those that are still holding on….

There’s a silent truth many of us don’t talk about the truth about what happens to relationships when you’re raising a child with a developmental disability.

Statistics show that nearly 87% of parents in this world separate or divorce under the weight of this life. It’s not because they don’t love their child. It’s not even because they don’t love each other. It’s because this journey is heavy. It’s relentless. It demands every ounce of your mind, your body, and your heart and sometimes, there’s just nothing left to give to each other.

The honest truth?

It’s hard.

It’s exhausting.

And sometimes… we can’t handle it all.

There are sleepless nights where fear sits on your chest.

Days filled with meltdowns, doctor visits, therapies, and self-injurious behaviors that break you open in ways no one prepared you for. You go from being partners in love to partners in survival trading dreams for daily routines, connection for crisis management.

And yet none of that means either parent is bad. It doesn’t mean someone failed. It just means life got loud. It means the pressure, the fatigue, and the constant worry became too much for a bond that was already stretched thin.

For me, I can say it openly now there were many factors. But one of the biggest was that we never rested. We didn’t take breaks. We didn’t know how to pause without guilt. We lived in fight-or-flight mode for years, just trying to keep up with the demands of seizures, therapies, medications, and emotional storms.

We loved our child fiercely and that love consumed us both in different ways.

We forgot that rest is not weakness. That partnership needs space to breathe. That love can’t grow when both hearts are running on empty.

Now, we’re not together and yet, somehow, we’re both better. We’ve learned that peace sometimes looks like separation, not failure. The kids go every other weekend with one of us, then the other. It works. We both get to rest, to reset, to simply be.

And in that rhythm, we’ve found a strange kind of healing.

A rhythm that lets us show up for our children from a place of fullness, not depletion.

A rhythm that honors that sometimes love transforms not because it died, but because it evolved into something that makes more sense for the season we’re in.

It took me years of healing years of learning to breathe again, to forgive myself first, and then to forgive him. Because forgiveness isn’t about erasing what happened it’s about releasing what’s still holding you down. I had to accept that we both did the best we could with the tools we had back then. And that’s okay.

See, we all have a choice. Healing, forgiveness, peace they’re not as far away as we think. Sometimes they come easier than we expect, if we simply allow them in.

So, to the parents still holding on

I see you.

And to those who’ve chosen to let go I see you too.

Because both take courage.

Both are acts of love.

And both can lead to peace, if we allow them to. 💜