Autism: How is your marriage holding up?

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I joined a support group for mothers of young children with developmental disabilities. I'd never been the support group type, but figured I needed all the help I could get.
The meeting, led by a kind and Kleenex toting family therapist, was held in the gymnasium of a grammar school in a nearby community. The therapist invited each of us (there were about 10) to go around the circle and tell our names, our child's age and "the nature of their disability."
The first two women sobbed through their introductions, and the third, who like me had a son with autism, blurted out that her husband had just left her the week before.
"Let's have a show of hands," she said angrily, "how many of us are still married?"
I was only one of two in the group who raised her hand.
"Citing autism as the reason for a marriage failing can be seen as yet another reason for saying why autism is so awful," says writer Kristina Chew. She is a professor at Saint Peter's College and the mother of a child with autism. "Life with autism has made Jim and Charlie and I, and Jim and I, a tighter unit."
"When we laugh at ourselves even at difficult moments" says Susan Senator, author of the forthcoming Autism Mom's Survival Guide "we feel like ourselves and not like slaves to the demands of disability. Having private jokes, even about the kids, is a way that we ease the consuming struggle of family life with disability."