Isn’t it amazing how many people pop out of the shadows when you first announce a pregnancy? The joy and excitement both from them and yourself is overwhelming.
They follow you through your first ultrasound, finding out the gender, even up until your due date to catch those first shots of your newborn!
After all, with social media these days it is easy to share with family and friends and follow along with anything! Unfortunately you also lose a few friends and family along the way. Maybe not intentionally, but those friends you had since high school who may not be ready for kids yet and are still enjoying their care free evenings and weekends. They don’t do it to be mean or intentional.
You all just suddenly have different priorities and responsibilities and grow apart. With the new mom label going, let’s say we add one more and make you a new mom to a newborn with a diagnosis or disability.
With the wave of whatever wand the universe has, you are now friends to even less than you imagined.
Maybe they are scared to say the wrong thing, or ask the wrong questions. Maybe their children grew on to learn to crawl, walk, or even talk and your child has not. It could be a number of reasons, but somewhere along the way they could not relate to what you were going through, felt guilt, felt nervous and slowly lost contact.
Nobody realizes how hard it is to make friends once you’re out of high school and onto having families, getting married, and doing “grown-up” things.
But it is there.
I guarantee it hits most of us stay at home moms the hardest. It hits us stay at home mothers to newborns with a diagnosis or disability like a brick wall. And although I now have a new plethora of people I call friends, it took many days of loneliness and reaching out to get here. I just had to realize I was reaching out in the wrong places.
Where I felt singled out and like the only rare species of lonely moms on the planet, there were more. More moms like me, who were willing to share their friendship and even build friendships amongst our children (disability or not). So although most days I still label myself as the lonely stay at home mom, I realize I am not the only one and have built a great group of friends off of that.
Cheesy, I know. (;