My wife has MS, I'm forty-four, and I think about leaving roughly twice a week.

Diagnosed in 2016. It's the progressive kind. In 2016 she walked. In 2020 she used a cane on bad days. She's been in a wheelchair since early 2023.

I want to lay out the day, because people hear "caregiver" and picture something noble and vague.

Six fifteen: I get her up. That's a transfer — two of them, bed to chair, chair to toilet. Then dressing, which takes about twenty-five minutes because her hands don't do buttons. Breakfast, meds — eleven pills, three times a day, and I'm the one who knows the schedule.

I work from home, which is the only reason this is possible, and I am on calls between all of it. Lunch. A transfer. Afternoon: the stretches a physiotherapist showed me in 2021 that I do badly. Dinner, meds, bed, which is the hardest transfer because we're both tired.

Twice a night I'm up.

Nine years.

Everyone says I'm a good husband. My mother-in-law says it, with tears, every single time she visits, which is four times a year for two hours.

And twice a week, usually in the shower, usually around six in the evening, I have a very clear and detailed thought about getting in the car.

It isn't a fantasy about another woman. There's nobody. It's a fantasy about a one-bedroom apartment with nothing in it, where the only thing I have to do in the evening is nothing.

I love her. I need to say that in a way that gets believed, because everything else I'm writing argues against it. I love her and she is funny and sharp and she is still completely herself inside a body that is leaving her, and she knows what this costs me and she has apologized for it, which is the worst thing that happens in this house.

She said, in 2023: "You didn't sign up for this." And I said "yes I did," and that's the vow and it's true, and also when I was thirty-five and said it I had no idea what the words meant.

Here's the actual confession. It's not the leaving thoughts. It's that last year I caught myself doing math about her prognosis — not with fear. With planning.

I didn't tell anyone that. I'm telling strangers.

I'm not asking whether I'm a bad person; I've worn that question out. I want to hear from people nine or ten years into caring for a spouse: does the twice-a-week thing level off, or does it get louder? And did anyone get real help — not a pamphlet, actual regular respite — and how did you arrange it without your spouse feeling like a burden?

Because every time I raise it she says she's fine, and then I drop it, and nothing changes.