Since that fateful day in November of 2017, when my life was turned on it’s head and shaken. I have truly learned who my friends are. Some of those friendships came as no surprise to me, they were people who have been in my life for years. Other people have truly stepped up and showed me their true colors. Showed me that they are not friends that will vanish when things get hard.

Friends that will be there when I need someone to cry to on a random Tuesday because I just can’t stop crying. Friends who think dinner out on a Thursday night is the best idea. Friends that won’t let me stay home and wallow in my own pain. They use their broad shoulders to take on some of that pain with me.

Only a few of these friends have ever been through this awful loss of a child. But they have all suffered a loss of some kind. Whether it is a parent or a grandparent, a close friend or relative. Loss has touched all of their lives in some way.

Yet no one has ever said to me, ” I know what you are going through because I lost….”. They understand the loss of a child is a different loss type. It shares no components with a loss of any other kind. Your heart is broken, the mother child bond has been shattered, like a delicate China plate that someone tossed on a tile floor. No amount of Gorilla Glue will put it back together, like no amount of glue or stitches will repair my heart right now. But these friends of mine, the family that I chose, know that what I need is compassion, and love and fun, and the ability to fall apart when necessary. They give me all those things and more. They are the FRIENDS THAT GROW IN MY GARDEN OF LIFE. And I am eternally grateful for them, like wildflowers they weren’t planted. They just grow and bloom where they land, and the fact the they landed here makes me happy, and happy is what I need now.