Ripple Effect

There are things people warn you about when you become a parent.

You’ll be tired.
Your house will never really be clean again.
You’ll worry more than you ever thought possible.
Your marriage will change.
Your friendships will start to look different—more grown up, ya know?!

What nobody really tells you is that sometimes one child can change the shape of nearly every relationship in your life.

Not because of who they are, but because of what life asks of you once they arrive.

Since Eli was born, I’ve watched relationships I once thought were permanent shift in ways I never saw coming.

Friendships ended.
Sibling relationships that were once close became so distant that they sometimes feel almost nonexistent.
My marriage has gone through seasons that the younger version of me—the one standing at the altar eighteen years ago—could never have imagined.

Some people stepped closer, while others quietly stepped away.

And if I’m being fair, I’ve quietly stepped away too. I’ve learned that sometimes stepping away is the best way to protect your own peace and self-esteem—and that of your little bitty.

It’s not really about someone being right or wrong. In most circumstances, I’m not even sure there was a right or wrong.  It’s more about what happens to relationships when life becomes something none of you were prepared for.

We all like to say we know exactly how we would manage certain situations. We play the “what if” game and fantasize about how we’d act… if we were cheated on… if we couldn’t have kids… if we had a child with special needs.

But the reality is, we can’t know any of that until we’re actually living it.

Before Eli, I had a very different amount of myself available to other people.

I could be spontaneous.
I could say yes without mentally running through seventeen different scenarios first.
I could show up to something without thinking about medication schedules, sensory overload, escape plans, food, behavior, safety, transitions, or whether the entire thing might fall apart twenty minutes after we arrived.

I had more emotional bandwidth.
More patience.
More flexibility.
And definitely WAY fewer boundaries.

Then Eli came along.

And I want to be very clear about something.

Eli did not break my relationships. He did not cause relationships to end or grow distant, or create difficult seasons in my marriage.

But becoming his mom changed me.

It changed what I had available to give.
It changed what I needed from the people closest to me.
It changed what I could—and would be willing to—tolerate.
It changed what mattered to me.
It changed the way our family operated.

And all of that is okay.

Without being asked, every relationship around us had to figure out how—or whether—to adjust to that new reality.

Some did this so beautifully.
Some tried, even when they didn’t completely understand.
Some relationships bent and stretched and somehow became stronger.
Others didn’t survive the stretching.

I think friendship was one of the first places I noticed it.  There’s an ease to friendship when your lives operate in roughly the same universe.

You laugh about your kids.
You complain about your husbands.
You make plans.
You cancel because somebody has a stomach bug.
You meet for dinner the next week.

I don’t want to minimize the struggles of everyday parenting. I do have two kids, and only one of them has special needs, so I get it.

But when your parenting experiences begin moving farther and farther away from everyone else’s in such a significant way, sometimes the conversations change.

Their child is struggling with homework.
Yours is struggling to function in a classroom.

Their child doesn’t want to go to the birthday party.
Yours desperately wants friends but may not understand why other kids stop inviting him.

They’re worried about whether their kid made the team.
You’re worried about whether yours will ever live independently.

None of those worries are insignificant.
They’re just different.

And sometimes different is a hard gap to bridge.
There were times I didn’t know how to explain what our life looked like without sounding dramatic, so eventually it felt easier not to explain it at all.

I minimized things.
I left parts out.
Shamefully, I often stuck to stories about Aiden.
I said, “We’re fine,” when we really weren’t.
I made myself smaller—and, in turn, made Eli smaller too—so the friend, sibling, parent, or coworker in front of me never had to feel like our life took up too much space.

I wanted them to know I was still listening, still interested, still available.

I didn’t want every conversation to become about autism or therapy or school or whatever crisis we happened to be managing that week.

But somewhere along the way, I got very good at editing our life down into something easier for other people to hold.

Sometimes I just wanted someone to understand why I couldn’t come.

Why I had to leave early.
Why something that looked incredibly minor from the outside felt enormous inside our house.
Why I didn’t have the energy to be the friend I had once been.
And sometimes people did understand.
But sometimes they didn’t.

Family relationships changed too.

That’s hard.

Maybe because friendships, even the closest ones, always carry some small understanding that life could eventually pull you in different directions.

But family?

You grow up believing those people are stitched into your life permanently.
You know each other’s everything.
You speak the same strange family language.
You remember the same Christmas mornings and vacations and arguments and parents before they were grandparents.

There are relationships I once assumed would always be part of my everyday life that now barely exist. And there is grief in that.  Not dramatic, movie-scene grief.  The quiet kind.

The kind that shows up when something happens and you realize they aren’t the person you call anymore.

The kind where you remember how close you once were and can’t quite pinpoint when all that space appeared between you.

Then there’s marriage.  Nobody enters a marriage knowing exactly what life is eventually going to ask of it.

We certainly didn’t.
We were young.
We loved each other.
We had plans.

And like most young couples, we probably assumed the hardest parts of marriage would look like disagreements about money or whose family we were spending Christmas with.

We had no idea what chronic stress could do.

Or exhaustion.
Or fear.
Or what happens when two people who love the same child deeply sometimes carry the weight of that life very differently.

There have been seasons when we’ve been completely in sync, and seasons when it has felt harder to find each other underneath everything else that needed our attention.

That doesn’t mean the love disappeared.

It means sometimes marriage has had to compete with appointments, worry, advocacy, parenting decisions, exhaustion, and the million invisible things required to keep our family moving.

There are ebbs and flows in our marriage that simply weren’t there before we became special-needs parents.

And I think that’s one of the harder truths to admit.

You can love someone deeply and still struggle beside them.
You can be on the same team and still occasionally feel like you’re playing entirely different games.
You can choose each other over and over and still miss the ease of who you were before life became this complicated.

I love my son EXACTLY as he is.

I feel like sometimes there is this unspoken rule in special-needs parenting that if you acknowledge what has been hard, someone might interpret it as wishing your child were different.

Those two things are not the same.

I can adore Eli and still acknowledge that our life has been complicated.
I can be grateful for the person he has made me and still miss parts of who I used to be.
I can love the family we have and still grieve relationships that changed along the way.

Both things can be true at the same time.

Maybe that’s the part I’m finally beginning to understand.

There is more than one kind of grief.

Sometimes grief isn’t losing a person.

Sometimes it’s losing the version of a relationship you thought you would always have.
A friendship you expected to grow old with.
A sibling you imagined raising your children beside.
A marriage you assumed would always feel as easy as it did before life became complicated.

Even a version of yourself who had more time, more energy, and fewer things to worry about. And none of that means the life that replaced those things is bad.

It just means it’s different**.**

There have also been people who surprised me—in both good and bad ways.
People who learned.
People who asked questions instead of making assumptions.
People who never needed a long explanation when I said, “We have to go.”
People who made space for Eli instead of expecting him to make himself easier for everyone else.
People who understood that sometimes loving our family meant meeting us exactly where we were.

Those relationships mean more to me now than I probably know how to say.

Because one thing this life has taught me is that hard seasons have a way of revealing things.

They reveal which relationships can stretch.
Which ones require you to shrink yourself to keep them.
Which people love the version of you they fell in love with—and which ones understand when your priorities need to change.

And they reveal things about you too.

I’m not the same person I was before Eli was born, there is no way I could be!

I am more protective.
More tired.
More compassionate.
Less willing to put up with certain things.
Much better at saying no.
No longer pretending something doesn’t hurt.
And maybe more aware than ever that relationships are fluid things.

They need attention.
Grace.
Honesty.
And sometimes an enormous amount of forgiveness.

I’m still figuring out what to do with the relationships that change.

Some I’ve mourned.
Some I still hope will find their way back.
Some I’ve accepted probably won’t.
Others I’ve made the decision to walk away from on my own.
And some are still changing.

Thirteen and a half years later, I’m still learning that loving the life you have doesn’t mean you never grieve the things it changed.

Maybe there isn’t a tidy lesson here.

Maybe you can be profoundly grateful for the people who stayed while still missing the ones who didn’t.

Maybe you can love your child fiercely and still acknowledge the ripple effects his needs created throughout your family.

And maybe talking about those things isn’t betrayal or bitterness.

Maybe it’s simply telling the truth.

Because the diagnosis may belong to one person.

But the ripples move through all of us.

Susan