{"id":16194,"date":"2011-05-10T10:57:18","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T14:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=16194"},"modified":"2015-12-27T15:42:49","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T20:42:49","slug":"rich-like-me-motherhood-diabetes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=16194","title":{"rendered":"Rich Like Me: Motherhood and Diabetes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Left to right: Lydia, age 15, Grace, age 11, and Eli, age 18<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I was the mother of very young children, I thought constantly about their health, safety, and survival. The responsibility of keeping alive a baby or toddler is almost overwhelming — just barely doable — as any parent (mother or father) knows. If you are a woman with Type 1 diabetes, as I am, that worry begins when the child is only an idea, an embryo, then a fetus.<\/p>\n

When each of my three children were about a year old, I looked at him or her with covert pride and acknowledged silently what seemed to be a huge accomplishment: “I got this little one into the world, healthy. I nourished this baby with my own body.” My physical connection to each child’s existence seemed immense and as though there were a direct correspondence between my actions and a baby’s growth. My husband and I even imagined it as a kind of ratio, and when I would sit in a rocking chair and hold a breastfeeding baby with one arm and use my other arm to feed myself graham crackers, peanut butter, and orange juice (my favorite glucose-boosting snack), Jimmy would inevitably say, “Input, output.” Food in, food out, with more than a little help from insulin.<\/p>\n

It’s funny how my almost proprietary relationship to my children’s bodies has slackened as they have grown and matured. The more they seem to be individual people — as students, as personalities, as community members, and as beings — the less I have reflected on my (and Jimmy’s) contribution to their well being. While they are not entirely self-maintaining (we do house and feed them), I see them often in situations of taking care of their own responsibilities, desires, and even mishaps.<\/p>\n

And, because parenting is such an in-the-moment frenzy, I forget sometimes the days of my three high-risk pregnancies, when I monitored and recorded every morsel of food that went into my mouth, every unit of insulin, every blood glucose reading, all the while remembering my doctor’s mantra that a well-treated diabetic woman could have as healthy a baby as a non-diabetic woman. I forget sometimes, too, the challenges of actively caring for my own health while caring for an infant.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t thinking these thoughts on Mother’s Day at all, even though the photograph of my three kids, Eli, now 18, Lydia, 15, and Grace, 11, was taken on that day. I was watching them enjoy each other’s company and feeling lucky that they were all such interesting people and that they seem to like each other.<\/p>\n

Only later, when I was transferring image files from my camera to my laptop did I really stop to stare at them all, frozen in a moment of random happiness, and reflect on my immense luck and also the enormous achievements in medical research, pharmacological development, and diabetes therapeutics.<\/p>\n

Really, would I be on this planet, healthy and alive and a mother to three almost-grown children, without insulin, without home glucose testing, without the Joslin diabetes and pregnancy program at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, without findings from the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial<\/a>, without health insurance?<\/p>\n

I’ve had diabetes for long enough now that, on the days when I pause to reflect on it, I often feel tired of it, bored, and even burned out. Furthermore, the imperfections of the many technologies I rely on can be exasperating. (What?! A glucose monitor may be as much as +\/- 20% off<\/a>?! Preposterous!) If there is a hierarchy of needs<\/a> for people with diabetes, I may have reached the apex: My life with diabetes is good enough that I have the luxury of worrying about its constant betterment.<\/p>\n

My life, in fact, is full of riches. I look at the photograph of my children, think of their good health and my longevity with diabetes, and I ask myself: Isn’t this everything?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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