Allowing It To Fall Away: Relationships and Medical Parenting, A Guest Post by Becky Ketarkus

In our experience, adopting a child with medical needs has both enlarged and shrunk the number of relationships in our lives.  It's widened our overall network, but decreased the circle of friends we actually do life with.  In her guest post, Becky Ketarkus, shares about this experience of having relationships fall away after adopting kids with medical needs.  

Becky is a mom of ten who has earned her credentials as a medical momma.  Read through her blog, The Full Plate, and the term supermom will come to mind.  She's a busy momma, an adoption advocate, small business owner, and pediatric advanced practice nurse.  She does all this while also juggling specialist appointments, surgeries, therapies, school and meds.    That she has shared some of her precious time to encourage other moms tells much about her heart. 

Fist pump to you, Becky.  Yes, yes, yes.  You nailed it.

 



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Mom Confession:  Prior to having children, my relationships with friends, and even family, looked completely different. 

 

That’s a no-brainer, right?  I think everyone who has a child or children will tell you that their relationships changed drastically once they became a parent.  You tend to flock to people who are in the same place as you in life.  Birds of a feather and all. 

 

I am also an extrovert.  So, I tend to ‘know’ about a million people.  In fact, people who know people who know me, are pretty sure I ‘know’ everyone.  I love chatting, connecting and relating to other people.  You don’t have to be a mom, I’ll still chat you up.  As my husband will attest, I can strike up a conversation with anyone.  So can he.  We’re people people. 

 

We never let the fact that we have an above average (let’s be honest, WAY above average) number of children truly isolate us.  We always have a network of people we can complain, celebrate, commune and grieve with.  For us, parenting has never been the isolating circumstance that it is for some.  As we added children to our family, our circle grew.  People rejoiced with us.  It was truly beautiful. 

 

Mom Confession:  That all came to a grinding halt when we adopted our eighth child.  And, I allowed it.  In fact, I welcomed it.

 

If you’ve read about us over at The Full Plate, you know that my husband and I are the very lucky parents of a child with severe Congenital Heart Disease.  We adopted her knowing she had a heart defect, but the severity of it surprised us a little.  When our daughter, Tess, came home, she was declared inoperable.  We were told she would die, likely before she reached her teen years. 

 

Life stopped. 

 
The social me, the chatty me, the me who cared about some things she shouldn’t have before, died a little too.  My soul focus became on finding an answer for our girl that we loved so much, an answer that didn’t involve losing her.  I stopped volunteering at school.  I stopped going out with friends.  I even stopped shopping.  Yes, for those of you who know me, I.stopped.shopping.  Losing all the things that had comprised me before, no matter how shallow they seemed, cost me many relationships.  For the first few months after Tess’s diagnosis, I let it all fall away.  Everyone who wasn’t vital to me fell away. 

 

It will sound so cliché, but the people who mattered, the ones who really knew me, stayed.  Even though I put on a brave face, the people who truly knew me knew that I was falling apart.  They didn’t ask how I was.  They didn’t ask about Tess.  They just brought meals, hugged me, and continued to tell me about all the great sales.  I grieved the loss of the others for about five minutes. 

 

The relationships that involved complaints about my behavior change, the ones that involved criticisms like ‘Becky doesn’t care about her children’s school anymore!’ or ‘Becky is so anti-social lately, she never goes out for drinks’ or ‘Becky doesn’t call ME anymore to ask about ME!’ are the relationships that needed to fall away.  They were also a litmus test upon which all future relationships shall be based. 

If I don’t think the person will ever call to ask me about me, or show up when I need them, then I allow them to fall away.  Sadly, this falling away involved some family members as well.  This too, was surprisingly freeing. 

 

I’ll still chat with everyone.  I still seem like the same extrovert I was before.  But, when it comes to real relationships, our network has shrunk significantly. When it came right down to it though, that doesn’t sadden me at all.  In fact, it prepared us to add two more children with special needs.  It helped us to understand what really matters. 

This. 

 

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This is post ten in the blog series, "Medical Momma Toolkit: Tips, Tricks and Encouragement". 
You can read all the posts here.