While I was Figuring out Autism

I have talked a lot over the years about autism.

I have talked about Dylan and his struggles. I have talked about the toll autism can take on a marriage. I have talked about siblings and how much they carry. The exhaustion, the worry, the behaviors, the appointments, the decisions and the constant question of what the future will look like.

But there is another part of autism I don’t think I have ever really talked about.

The isolation.

And lately, I have been thinking a lot about friendship.

If you are raising a child with significant needs, you probably understand when I say there are years when you aren’t really living the same life as everyone around you.

You are surviving it.

For so many years, I was barely keeping my head above water. I was trying to keep Dylan safe. Make sure Anderson had the childhood she deserved. Keep my marriage together. Work. Build a career. And somehow figure out autism when there was no roadmap telling me what to do next.

Friendship wasn’t something I didn’t value.

There just wasn’t much left of me to give to it.

Right now social media is flooded with homecoming pictures. I see groups of moms who have clearly been doing life together for years. Their kids grew up together. They sat at games together, went to dinner while their kids hung out, took pictures before dances and probably sat around someone’s kitchen afterward talking about life.

That wasn’t my life.

There weren’t many nights of dropping the kids somewhere and going out with girlfriends. There weren’t groups of families getting together while all the kids played.

Because Dylan couldn’t just go along.

And if I’m going to continue telling our story honestly, I have to admit something else.

I didn’t leave the kids with Kevin very often either.

Not because he wasn’t a good dad. He absolutely was. But I was more equipped to handle Dylan. I knew the routines, the triggers, the signs that something was coming. Sometimes it was simply easier to stay home than to explain everything, worry the entire time, or deal with what might happen if I wasn’t there.

So I stayed.

And somewhere along the way, my 30s became my 40s.

I spent about 17 years figuring it out.

Figuring out autism. Figuring out how to survive. Figuring out how to keep my family together. Figuring out how to give two children with incredibly different needs what they each deserved.

There wasn’t a lot of time left to figure out me.

And there certainly wasn’t much time to build deep adult female friendships.

I realized this again recently while standing in a room filled with almost 300 women.

I had just helped cohost the Women Rising Summit—an event built around women connecting, supporting each other and showing up for one another. It was an incredible day, and I am so proud of what we created.

But as I looked around the room, I noticed the groups of women who had clearly been friends for years.

They had history.

They raised their kids together. They’ve been through birthdays, graduations, marriages, vacations, hard seasons and probably a whole lot of completely ordinary nights together.

And for just a minute, I realized I don’t really have that.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I have friends. I have wonderful people in my life, and I am incredibly grateful for them.

This isn’t about feeling sorry for myself.

It’s about recognizing something I don’t think we talk about enough.

Special-needs parenting doesn’t only change the life of the child.

It changes the entire family.

It changes marriages. It changes siblings. It changes careers. It changes what you can say yes to. It changes where you can go, how long you can stay and sometimes whether you can go at all.

And yes, sometimes it changes friendships.

Sometimes people stop asking because you’ve said no too many times. Sometimes you stop asking because explaining why you can’t come becomes exhausting.

And sometimes you wake up years later and realize everyone else was building a history together while you were building a life that could safely hold your child.

I don’t regret that.

If I had to go back, I would choose Dylan and Anderson every single time. I would stay home again. Learn every trigger again. Fight every fight again.

But two things can be true at once.

You can know you made the right choices and still acknowledge what those choices cost you.

Maybe that’s the part I want another autism mom to hear.

If you look around sometimes and wonder where your village went—or why everyone else seems to have one and you don’t—maybe you were just busy surviving a life that required more of you than most people ever saw.

I wish I could wrap this up by saying that now I’m going to go out and build all those friendships I didn’t have time to build then.

But that wouldn’t be completely honest either.

Because I’m tired.

At this point in my life, the thought of starting over and trying to build deep friendships from the ground up can feel exhausting. Trying to figure out where you fit. Wondering if you’re included because someone really wants you there or because you did the inviting. Wondering which relationships are real and which exist because of what you do, who you know or what you can offer.

I don’t want to chase friendship.

I don’t want to force it.

And I don’t want to spend this chapter of my life trying to rewrite the chapters that came before it.

Maybe there isn’t a perfect ending to this one.

Maybe I’m just finally able to look back at those years with enough distance to understand what they cost—not with regret and certainly not with resentment toward Dylan, but with honesty.

I was doing the best I could with a life that demanded almost everything I had.

And maybe right now I don’t need to figure out what comes next.

Maybe it’s enough to finally understand what came before.