Sometimes you just need 🍟 + 🍪

Amy • Biz owner, was a teen mom to a now 18 year old 🩷. Baby #2 was a 5 week NICU warrior born @ 34 weeks in August 2020 💙. Baby #3 born at 33+2 in June 2023, currently in NICU 🩷

LONG APPRECIATION POST!

To start, my relationship with my boyfriend Scott is solid. We are each other’s best friend, we always have each other’s back and we don’t question each other’s love or loyalty. It’s a beautiful relationship, really. We take unbelievably good care of each other no matter what. He’s always so attentive, so thoughtful, always thinking a step ahead and doing whatever he can to make my day to day life easier. I wouldn’t dare believe there’s a better man out there anywhere.

His mother was recently diagnosed with stage III lung cancer. She was prescribed radiation 5x/week and chemo 1x/week for 6 weeks as a first attack on the tumor. She’s terrified, but Scott is taking her to all of her appointments and is absorbing all of her fear and anxiety so she doesn’t have to worry. No matter what he keeps a smile on his face and tells her everything is going to be fine. She lives almost an hour from us, and her appointments are at 8am every day. He gets up at 5 every morning, takes care of our 3 dogs so I don’t have to get up (they get up with the first person in the morning, the little bastards), then drives the hour to pick her up and get her to her appointment. Then he drives back down an hour to help me with my business (I’m short a FT person until the end of this month and he’s been working for me all summer) then he goes BACK to his mom’s to take her out to run errands, do grocery shopping, etc. (Her doctors have recommended that she not drive because her oxygen randomly drops so low that she gets dizzy and has almost gotten into accidents) then he makes the trip BACK home for the rest of the night. So he is up at 5 and not back home until after 7, sometimes 8 every day. Every single day. He’s beyond exhausted and emotionally drained from worrying about his mom’s health, but he never complains and he never lets it affect the rest of his responsibilities. He’s a machine and he’s so inspiring. Totally selfless.

We are used to being together most of the day, it’s been that way since he moved in a year ago. I am obviously fully supportive of him taking as much time as he needs to help his mom, I wouldn’t want to be with a man who would put his mother second to me. But it’s been crappy and hard for both of us to not have as much time together as we’re used to. He absorbs all of his mom’s fear and anxiety so she can focus on getting better, and I try to absorb all of his when he gets home so he can focus on helping her. It’s what you do when you’re a team, and I want to be a soft place for him to land at the end of a stressful day. Being short a full time person has been stressful on me, I’m the business owner so I absorb 100% of the responsibility for keeping things smooth no matter what. So between that and the emotional aspect of supporting him, I am equally exhausted. He knows that and he feels so guilty for putting any kind of stress on me, but I told him I wouldn’t have it any other way. He does for me, I do for him. It’s the only way.

Last week he told me that after we brought my daughter to her dad’s house for the weekend, he wanted to take me out on a date. He told me I could have anything I want in the whole world… I’m a simple gal so I just wanted cheese fries and the caramel skillet cookie from the Outback Steakhouse. That’s all.

So we made the date. I was so excited because we haven’t had a date night in a while between work and his mom’s treatments. We both had unbelievably exhausting weeks last week, I had to deal with a catastrophe at work and he had to deal with all the driving and the stress of trying to work in between his mom’s appointments. It was the longest week ever. Finally it’s Saturday night, I got all dressed up and did my face up and all that, we get to the plaza where the Outback is... and there’s some kind of festival going on. No parking anywhere. We tried to park further away and walk but it was a no go. I just put my head down and started to cry. It’s been weeks of exhaustion, not seeing each other all that much, and a bunch of little setbacks here and there and I just lost it. He made a couple of other local suggestions but nothing sounded good because to be honest I was acting like a baby. A total brat. He asked where the next closest Outback was, but it was over a half hour away and I didn’t think he would want to drive that far when it was already 8. So I said “let’s just go home and order pizza and have a date night in. This isn’t gonna work”. If I had been him sitting next to someone acting like me, I would’ve driven my ass home and left me there. He checked his phone, started the car and we started to drive. I wasn’t paying attention to where we were going because I was too busy yelling at myself in my head for being such a brat. We got off the highway and I realized I had no idea where I was. Then we pulled into a plaza… with an Outback Steakhouse in it. This man looked it up on GPS and drove my stupid ass all the way to the next Outback because “my baby wants cheese fries and a caramel cookie, that’s what she’s getting”. I had a complete breakdown in the car. Tears, snot, sobbing, the whole 9. It had nothing to do with the cheese fries or the cookie. It was him. He was trying to take me on my date and he wasn’t going to stop until he made me happy. I didn’t deserve it for the way I acted, and he did it anyway. We got one of those tiny booths with just enough room for one person on each side, but he sat next to me with his arm around me and his butt hanging half off the seat for the whole meal. We had a perfect date, despite my eyeliner being smudged from crying, and he told me how much he loves and appreciates everything I’ve done for him while his mom is going through treatment. He told me he wouldn’t be able to do it without me and that knowing he had me to come home to made all the stress of the days 100% worth it. We ate, went home, changed into our PJs and threw on a crappy movie, then fell asleep snuggled up as close together as we could get.

I couldn’t ask for a better man. He doesn’t exist