You know those nights when you are up and you are left to wait? Wait for a number to go up. Wait for a number to go down. Waiting. I remember those nights and the time I had to think. Sometimes I would feel my own heartbeat. I never knew certain clocks made certain noises until I was up during these nights. I did not know that dogs DO GET UP during the night. I would hear sounds but mostly I would think.
I was up recently and perhaps it was a sound I had not heard in a while but a memory popped into my head. It was a thought I used to have much more often than I do now. It was the thought of ‘wanting’ someone or something to blame for my children having diabetes.
Before I tell you about those thoughts, I want to share about ‘resolve’. That is where I am now. I have written before about ‘life’…..we all have it. It’s nicer to some over others; but we all have a dose of life. My resolve and where I am now; is that we deal with what life throws at us. Hardship, disease, financial woes, and even death—-we have had a lot of it and we have moved forward…..life. Things could have always been different……even better. But it IS surely ours. Ours to deal with as we see fit. Just as you do.
So, in a way, we have come out of the other side. Scratched a bit, but survived. We did not lose the house years ago; we worked hard, the kids survived and grew; we continued.
Here we are. I am sure life is not done with us yet; good and/or bad and we will choose to move forward, yet again. That is where we are now. And we will move forward. Taking what we get and trying to stay positive. Others have it worse. Others have it better. “IT” is a very relative term. Onward.
Now back to the blame. A thought I had for the longest time is that I wanted to place blame. I wanted to rage against some entity seen or unseen. A bad bloodline on either side of the family, God, environmental triggers, inoculations, clusters, power lines, a bad something-or-other, a missed something-or-other, AN ENTITY needed to get my wrath. I have been up and down the list where to place the blame.
If you are fairly new at this new-normal called diabetes; let me share two thoughts with you and try to save you some grief…..well maybe. You can spend a lot of energy and emotion looking toward blame; or you can look past it. If I found out the EXACT cause of Kaitlyn or Rob’s diabetes, at this point, what would it matter–and it would not have mattered if I found it a long time ago either? I stopped looking years ago because it was getting too much of my energy.
I decided to turn that energy into something productive. Slowly at first. But forward for sure. Because I realized that I could not change it, it came down to two distinct thoughts. One was to better our knowledge of diabetes so they could stay healthy; and I could do what I needed to stay in pursuit of a cure. Those aspects worked for me. And two, I realized that no matter what I felt as a parent, it could not be compared to my child who lives with it every day. I get it…..the pain of a parent is as large as mountain but for me, (Note: for me), the more I thought about WHAT THEY GO THROUGH on a daily basis; it just drove me (and still does) to keep moving forward.
After a while, I found that there were more important things to do than look for who or what to blame. It just made more sense to work on the things I might have a shot at changing in the near future and work toward those goals; and not on something I cannot change. I will leave the changing to the researchers…….I surely would like to have THAT sooner rather than later; if it is all the same to anyone else. I can only do my part and pray nightly that they are doing theirs.
I am a diabetes dad.
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