Find Your People

I’m heading out for a week-long work trip and, as always, I’m in knots. Four days and three nights away from my husband and my two beautifully neuro-spicy sons — who will come home and feel like their “safe place” shifted just a little.

I hate leaving them. I know they’ll be fine. They always are. I will be too.

But right now, I’m most unhappy to leave my husband. Yes, honey…I did not want to leave you.

Not because I don’t trust him to hold down the fort — he absolutely can. But because right now, we need each other.

Autism is kicking our butts. It’s exhausting us. It’s testing our marriage — not because we don’t love each other, but because neither of us has enough left to refill the other’s ever-emptying cup. We both need a tap-out that isn’t coming. We’re stressed. Discouraged. Stuck.

This is the part of special needs parenting people don’t see.

When your children are laser-focused on tone of voice, mood shifts, emotional undercurrents, micro-changes in energy — when they feel everything (almost telepathically) — a hard day for us becomes a doubly hard day for them.

Add menopause into the mix, and the woman who has always managed her men — big and little — can barely manage herself.

Their meltdowns melt us down.

Their dysregulation dysregulates us.

And burnout makes terrible de-escalators of everyone.

I always knew having children was a beautiful gamble. What I didn’t know was that it would require me to be a tireless advocate, therapist, researcher, caretaker, and safe haven — for life — all while working full-time, walking a parent through Alzheimer’s until his untimely passing, navigating life now without parents, maintaining friendships, showing up at school, and constantly studying how to help my sons live and love their neurodivergence.

And then the world whispers that they’re “too much.”

So we work even harder to prove they’re not.

I work every single day to show that my sons are brilliant — that they have so much to offer if people would just slow down long enough to see them. Hear them. Feel them.

Some days it feels unbearable.

And yet — what’s the alternative?

My husband carries this too. But he’s navigating it without the version of me who used to “hold it together.” He wants to pour into me because he sees how thin I’m stretched — and in doing so, he has less left for the boys. I see it in his eyes. I hear it in his voice. I feel it in his kisses. He’s burnt out.

So I grieve.

I grieve the life I imagined for him.

For Nico.

For Max.

For myself.

I know life can always be infinitely harder and for some it most definitely is, but right now I’m allowing myself to grieve. To need. To want more and also less.

But then I panic as I say that because even in grief, I am expected to rebound. To be resilient. To not become a “liability” in a world that doesn’t understand how heavy this is. In a society where the unspoken rule is that we live to work and not so much work so we can live.

This is why I need my husband.

Because I am not a liability to him.

He is walking in my shoes.

He knows this world.

He is my friend.

He is my partner.

He is my people.

We don’t have many people. That’s the quiet reality of special needs parenting.

But the ones we do have — they know us.

They see us.

They feel for us.

They love us.

You know who you are.

Thank you. We’re looking to you right now to fill our cups with anything you can share.

And for my fellow special needs parents, this is for you too. Find your people.

The ones who don’t flinch when it gets hard. The ones who aren’t scared of your truth. The ones who will sit in the messy middle with you and not try to fix it or pacify it away. Whether it’s your spouse, your sister, your best friend, your neighbor, or the one unexpected soul who shows up and stays — lean in. Say the hard thing out loud. Ask for the hug. Admit you’re tired. We were never meant to carry lives like this alone. And when the weight feels unbearable, it is your people who will remind you that you don’t have to hold it all by yourself.

To my person…I’ll be home soon, honey. You got this! Ride or die, baby.