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The feeling of being a new mum was, for me, very scary.
I know they always say that babies don't come with manuals but what do I do?
How do I do this? I don't know what I'm doing.
Just going to get a cup of tea, going to the toilet even, having a shower...
Straight away I was struggling with the basics....
...and I thought that I wasn't a natural mother.
It was then that I found that my son had Asperger's...
...and I became pregnant again.
I now had two sons with autism and they both had very different needs.
I was in really bad place. I don't think I really knew how bad it was at the time.
I started trying to cope with it in different ways.
So I started to drink more and that lead me to self-harming.
A lot of people use words like "I know" or "I understand" or "It must be awful" or something sort of flippant phrase...
...but every time you're thinking, "You've got no idea. How could you understand...
...how it feels to see your babies, like this, struggling?"
It was then that I was introduced to Scope and I was told that I could speak to someone who would understand...
...what it was like to be on a journey similar to mine.
Shortly afterwards, a mother came round and she explained that she had two disabled children.
It surprised me how quickly she was able to help me.
I had years of baggage that I'd been carrying around...
...and I started to realise that I didn't have to be perfect...
...and that these feelings that I was having: they were okay.
It wasn't just me. It wasn't just something we were experiencing.
I wish that every family could have access to Scope's Face 2 Face befriending service...
...because it's the only place that deals with the emotional aspect of the journey.
It's a service that focuses on the whole family functioning...
...and looking at the main carer at the centre of it.
In my world, it's helped make our dysfunctional family function.