Thank you for Being the Friend I Needed

Our husbands (then boyfriends) had known each other for quite a while before we met.

It was only a matter of time before we crossed paths.

We all ended up carpooling to a wedding together, and after that weekend the rest was history. Our then boyfriends became fiancés.

We both got married roughly two months apart, and later that year we both found out we were expecting. What a whirlwind.

I should have known the stars had aligned when I met you.

We spent the next nine months going to breakfast together, comparing notes from OB visit, and sharing ultrasound pictures.

We had a joint gender reveal party and eventually delivered our kiddos just 3 days apart.

You even stopped by my delivery room while waiting on your discharge paperwork, and as karma would have it we had the same room on the postpartum wing following our delivery/your discharge. 

The months went by, our babies were growing and we were healing. Healing from c-section incisions and recovering from the overall lack of sleep and stress that motherhood brings.

Children all develop at their own pace, but my sweet boy was starting to show signs of being on his own timeline.

You would always be the first to remind me not to compare kids because after all, you had two girls and they both hit milestones at different times.

It was like comparing apples to oranges, or so the old saying would go.

You never saw anything less than perfect when I mentioned my son. 

Shortly before our kids turned two, our pediatrician (funny, we both use the same one) recommended my husband and I get our sweet boy evaluated for autism.

It seemed to be a whirlwind from that point forward.

I distinctly remember calling you after talking with another autism mom and just balling. I didn’t know if I could handle this. 

You ratted me out to our pediatrician. You told her that I wasn’t handling everything as well as I had let on.

Dr. Blache called me that same day to check on me to check on us, all because of you.

I’m forever thankful for that.

You knew I was not ‘okay’ and wanted to check in.

You made sure I knew it was okay to be… ‘not okay’. Thank you.

Over the next several months you let me talk endlessly about the stress of appointments, complain about how long we had to wait to get from point A to point B, unload my worry, and run through all the far fetched ‘what if’ scenarios I could come up with.

Throughout all of this you never once felt like you needed to find a solution.

It wasn’t something that had to be fixed. You listened. You never judged. You cried with me.

You never questioned my decisions regarding what some might refer to as ‘common causes of autism’.

You never viewed this new ‘normal’ for my family as something that needed to be ‘fixed’. You just accepted us, like always. 

When life got hard or felt too heavy to handle you were always willing to listen, to offer a fresh perspective, to give suggestions or ideas that might help.

You could always find a way to relate my troubles with your own and that made me feel less alone.

It made me feel like our worlds weren’t as different as they often felt. 

Autism has a funny way of creating a dark rabbit hole that is easy to spiral down and lose your footing.

Sometimes you just need to sit in the dark and take it all in. Unashamed of the feelings it brings.

You allowed me to sit in the dark, and while I was there you joined me.

Even though I needed to sit there and feel everything that came with that, you wouldn’t let me stay there very long. 

Only long enough to feel the weight of what life could be like for our family in 5, 10, even 20 years from now, but not long enough for it to suffocate me.

You always reminded me of the beauty in this sometimes not so beautiful life.

Time has continued to move forward.

Our babies are growing and thriving.

Our tearful conversations have mostly been replaced with laughing about the shenanigans our kids put us through on a daily basis.

Thank you for being the friend I needed.  For knowing when to listen, when to offer kind, supportive, free from judgment and loving advice.

Thank you for loving my family like your own.

Thank you for being authentic.

Thank you for continuing to celebrate the smallest wins like the biggest victories with me.

Thank you for never trying to fix us.

Thank you for just loving us.

Thank you for being you.

Written by, Monique Scheetz

I’m a south Georgia mama, raising a sweet nonverbal son. He’s precious and my husband and I are just figuring it out as we go. His sister adores him, and so do we.

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