Kristin Bennett

I have been so excited to watch my recent launch of MomsWithMS.com launch!! We have over 100 members and I have received such nice notes expressing how much they appreciate the community they have found on this site!!

I am looking forward to expanding the site quite a bit to include much more resources as well as links to relevant articles for us Moms who aren’t ‘just’ dealing with kids but also MS.

For me, I feel like I was lucky in a strange way to have been diagnosed so young…I was 18 years old when it all started, that’s when I was diagnosed with a stroke of all things, and after many many tests a heart surgery and more, at age 20 I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

The reason that I say I was lucky, is that I found out what I was dealing with, when I was in the midst of getting started with life. I didn’t have kids yet, in fact I was barely in college!! On October 1st 1999 when I went to the hospital for my ‘stroke’ I was in the middle of my very first semester at Parsons School of Design in NYC. I managed to stay in school, though all the medical treatments/tests/appointments I had to go to absolutely affected my GPA, I was determined to not take a year off though because for me it would have been so hard to come back, I knew I just had to tough it out and finish. Which I did, I graduated in May of 2004 along with my class with a degree in Communication Design.

I did eventually of course have kids, my first being born in NYC. That was an interesting situation which eventually led to my becoming a single mom. Technically I always was a single mom as I wasn’t ever married to my ex. The reason that I bring this up, is at first, when I was with him, I felt like I had to stay with him because he had ‘been there for me’ when I was going through all of this medical hell. The relationship had turned emotionally/psychologically and almost physically abusive at this point and I left him when my daughter was 6 months old. At the time I didn’t think twice about it, he’d threatened my life at that point and there was no way in hell I was going to let my daughter see this, she deserved better.

Soon after the prospect of being a ‘dating’ single mom was a bit daunting, though honestly I didn’t think much of it most of the time. I was ‘grateful’ that I was able to filter out the men I dated and the one I eventually married with the disclosure of my diagnosis. That is, I feel, the most beneficial part of being diagnosed when I was young. When I finally got married, I was lucky to know that my husband was fully aware of what he was dealing with, and true to his vows, he has always stayed strong in my times of need and doesn’t bat an eye when I need a little more (or less!) help.

One more quick note, especially to any single dating moms with ms out there…if anyone rejects you…they are doing you a FAVOR. I say this because they are sparing you the pain of getting seriously committed to them and then breaking your heart. They are letting you know that they aren’t ready for that kind of commitment which frees you to find someone who is. I also find that just about everyone I told had some kind of story of their own that they felt made them ‘flawed’ in some way, everyone has their own little secrets and MS isn’t that big a deal unless you make it one.

Back to the point of this post. I am absolutely loving the community that has developed out of MomsWithMS.com and am working hard on making it a much more common and valuable resource for all of us who either are, know, love, or care for Moms with MS. I’m looking into potentially turning it into a non-profit or partnering with a non-profit to make it more official now.