Riva Greenberg wrote an interesting piece earlier this summer (and which appeared last week at A Sweet Life) on a disappointing experience she had using a continuous glucose monitor, and it reminded me of our own brief and unhappy history with one of these hi-tech devices.

About eight months after Lia was diagnosed with T1 and only six weeks after going on the Animas Ping, our CDE suggested we give a “blind” CGMS a go. Franca and I agreed, after all, what in the world did we know about diabetes management. We were still wrestling with its very presence, and on top of that (disqualifier), we thought it’d be good information to have in helping us configure the settings and maximize the power of the pump. Unfortunately, it appears, heightened emotion and naivete are two sure signs that other than the experience of trying something new, very little good will come of the extra effort. Now we know.

For starters, the device was just too big. Lia hated it and its presence, in her mind, was inescapable. She could not forget it was there and so she scratched and scratched at the area, clawing her nails over and around the little contraption until she had managed to unplug, as it were, the business end of the monitor, rendering lost the last day or two of information, a fact anyone had failed to realize until the nurse at the endocrinologist’s office saw the missing days in the data, or rather failed to see the data. In our mind, even one second spent in discomfort or otherwise hampered by diabetes is one second too much. Strike One.

Though our endo’s office had assisted us in initially programming the pump’s settings — one carb ratio, one insulin sensitivity factor, three basal rates for a 24 hr. period — it became pretty much up to us to figure out how to fine tune them. Ignoring (for now) the gross dereliction of duty I now believe that was, setting up a pump is no simple small task, no matter how long you’ve had diabetes. Six weeks later we were still chasing numbers all over the place, correcting blood sugars day and night. The fact of the matter was, it was just too soon for us to be test driving the newest technology. Going to a pump from shots is not the same as say, switching from a stick to an automatic. We were still trying to figure out the complexities we already had. Were we ready to try a CGM? No way. Strike two.

And finally was the data itself. As this was a blind CGMS, the readings were not provided to us in real time. It wasn’t until two weeks later at our endo’s office we were finally able to see them. Without going back and comparing our logbook to the data the CGM spat out, there was no way to know if the thing was even calibrated correctly. For sixty bucks, I honestly expected more than that. End of story. Strike three.

Like Riva, Franca and I would really love to have a CGM in our corner. It’s something that should be in every parent’s corner. Taking care our children is hard enough without using all available resources. Unfortunately, we’re not looking to sign one up anytime soon, and it wouldn’t matter if we were, Lia’s experience turned her off the idea anyway. In her mind the rules just aren’t that complicated. Three strikes, you’re out is plenty enough.

When I first read about the Diabetes Blog Week, I thought it just wasn’t the thing for me. In theory it sounded great. An opportunity to engage other writers for a week on a similar topic, sharing in different perspectives, stories, and experiences. But I worried about the time and creative commitment, about the topics and whether or not I had anything worthy to contribute. But mostly I worried — and this will sound strange — of opening myself fully to this community.

I know, I write a blog. I put myself out there every time I post something. You can’t get much more open than that. But as I’ve written before, like many of you, I don’t write it for others… well maybe I do some occasionally now, but it didn’t start that way. It began as a way for me to personally come to terms with my daughter’s diagnosis. The fears, the raw emotion, the anxieties that greeted us every day, those were my audience. My goal then and still today is to root those devils out, expose them in their deepest, darkest hiding places and in making them public learn to live in plain sight of them.

For me, to achieve that must take, in part, a better understanding of myself through the words that I write. But I am reminded, often in my writing, that I am not the one with diabetes, Lia is, and to be honest gaining an understanding of what that must be like for her takes so much more and is so much bigger than just sitting down to a keyboard or a computer screen. It takes walking in her shoes, something I and everyone else is incapable of doing; so there are times when I finish with what I have to say and I realize I have no better understanding for what I think about it than when I began. They’re just words on the page, my blabbering on about this or that, knowing full well that buried amongst the squiggles and straight lines is the deeply unsatisfying truth that this is not nor has it ever been my burden to carry.

I wish that it was. Everyday, I wish that it was.

Bad things happen to good people. We know that. It’s been that way forever. The hardest thing for a parent to accept is not that it happened but that we cannot take it away from our children. We can read of how others have learned to deal with diabetes, how young people have grown up and learned to live full, long lives; how they traveled, married, had children of their own. We can read books, watch documentaries, participate in other ways of communicating the same message: life with diabetes is hard, but not impossible.

We can do these things and are lives are better for it, but that shared experience only partially eases our worry, because there are other stories as well, some that aren’t being told because no one could stand up to the telling of them, and that’s all good and well. But it is in these moments of gloomy despair, when we feel most vulnerable to the frustration, confusion and uncertainty of fighting this disease, that we need a helping hand; it’s then that we realize, ultimately, that we just simply cannot do this alone.

With that in mind — and finally to theme of this blog day (sometimes discovering what you think takes a strangely circuitous route) — I’d like to share that my inspiration of late comes from someone who doesn’t even write a blog. To my knowledge this parent of a CWD doesn’t write at all. They do read plenty of d-blogs, however, (in fact that is how we first met) and most importantly, they are as involved in their own child’s health and well-being as are Franca and I. To our benefit, they have been with diabetes a good bit longer than we have and are willing to share their insight, knowledge and personal experience with what it has been like for them rooting out their own marauding demons.

It’s not just us, but Lia, too, who has benefited. She had the chance a couple of months ago to spend some time with their child. This little girl, we’ll call her R, is the same age, in the same grade, and has the same good-natured qualities as Lia. The two spent the day together and it seemed on the surface like any normal play date between kids. They ran around, they jumped on the trampoline, and other than testing together, seemed not to pay their diabetes any attention. But that evening after R went home, Franca and I went to bed forever grateful for having found someone else with whom Lia could relate to on this important level. Unbeknownst to us, however, Lia had been soaking up much more than a new friendship. The next morning when she came downstairs to where we were sitting, she announced to us her BG, how many carbs she was eating for breakfast and how much insulin she had bolused.

This was surprising in that it was the first time she had ever taken such charge of her diabetes and in all honestly it was a degree of intellectual involvement that Franca and I both knew was important for Lia to reach, but after only six months on the pump and just over a year of having diabetes, was something that neither of us were ready to ask of her  ourselves. We — I, especially — was still stuck in the theory that diabetes might be her burden, but it was mine to carry. Lia, it turns out, disagreed and she didn’t need one of us to ask this ownership of her, she only needed to spend time with a little friend, who showed that life with diabetes can not only be normal but also extraordinarily special and confidence-building, and that is a lesson, my friends, that I would not trade the world for.

It was a silly little game, but we all liked it, even when the supernatural was not tempted and the poems made little personal sense to the reader or anyone else, which was often. Lia, for instance, seemed to have the knack for always stopping on Robert Frost’s, Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know, (which may have made perfect sense looking back). She liked the poem so much, she had the page dog-eared and went ahead and read it anyway, whether she was commanded to stop or not. To her, life can be both mythical and in our power to control it, such was her dinner and a poem.

Often, people took more than one turn in the hopes of fate giving them a better verse, something lovelier or simply more direct. Disappointment, even in something as fickle as chance, is a difficult thing to accept. More than once, we had to just close the book, leave serendipity for another day, and get on with cleaning up the table. But, as I said, we all liked the game and out of it grew some appreciation in all of us for poetry, family, and tradition.

I don’t write poetry — well, I don’t write poetry well, that is. I don’t think so anyway. Other than one recent occasion (in case you missed it, here is the link to the very special, Six Until Me), I haven’t tried my hand at it in many, many years. But I love poetry and when I write prose I write with the same love and gratitude for the way words can be carved and shaped into an evocative, aesthetic rhythm. Poetry is to storytelling, what music is to sound.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been cracking Bartlett’s or any other poetry book after dinner lately. There is no good reason why. Energy. Focus. Desire. So much has been on our minds. What time has there been for daydreaming poets, for lyrics, or irony, when there are boluses and blood checks and other worries on which to attend?

The truth is there is no excuse. This occasion means too much to us as a family. So in honor of returning this tradition to our table, I offer this, the very first poem I turned to this morning (honestly). It’s by Henry David Thoreau. The title is My life has been the poem I would have writ:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Now just to show how well this “diving rod” doesn’t work, the second one fate picked for me was To My Dear and Loving Husband, by Anne Bradstreet.

Good thing we aren’t relying on this to find water.

I think there is something strangely alluring to a child and an empty school building. It reminds me of when I was her age and visiting my father’s uncle who drove a school bus in some far out country school district in northern Ohio. I can still remember the thrill of him taking us for a Sunday afternoon joy ride in the enormously long (back then) yellow bus.

For the drive over we took what we call The Big White Truck, which for Lia is always a treat, but not because it is big, it isn’t, but because she gets to sit in the front seat. This puts us on even par, at least conversationally speaking. Just two dudes — a new favored term she has recently picked up — ridin’ in a truck, yappin ‘bout the day.

I was feeling nostalgic for other reasons as well. This year Lia will be in the fourth grade and as such will be moving to another building. This is good news for us as a family because that means that Franca and the girls will all be at the same campus, which brings us both great assurance from a diabetes care standpoint — this school has no nurses, mom and dad are the nurses — as well solves for us a number of logistical problems, primarily, for me anyway, avoidance of cutting my workday short to attend the dreaded carpool.

But a new campus also implies something lost: The early mornings of waiting with Lia in the car at the library, talking and listening to music until the school doors opened, then holding hands as we walked down the street and past the flag pole and up to the school’s front steps; later in the day, sunny afternoons waiting outside on the sidewalk to pick her up, sharing a wave as she found me in the crowd of other parents, listening as she told me about her day as we walked back to the car; the occasional side-trek to the park or the library, which, sadly in hindsight, never happened often enough. To make matters worse, in the fourth grade building there are fifth graders to serve as reminder that just around the bend are the sixth and seventh and eighth graders, who are just a short skip and a jump from the high school, of which I can’t possibly consider for fear of discovering that a blink is truly all that it takes and then you are there, years ahead of this one certain moment.

Lia is old enough to know this too but to a child time passing is different. It is something of which to look forward to, to dream upon and make wishes — who you might become, where you might live, what work you might do — and yet…

As we head to the school that day in The Big White Truck, her mood suggests also a special sadness. Whether she is old enough to appreciate it or not is another matter, but I sense this tinge of regret in her that all children eventually come to discover, that life does indeed hurry by.

I will miss our walks, she says, but her grin betrays her. She has said this for my benefit and I love her even more for it. It is one of those cherished moments you’d like to freeze in time, the beloved gift of a glimpse into someone’s true heart.

Our wistful moment is short lived, as most are, and we have moved on further down the road. Our discussion has moved on too and we are talking about barns and how it would be nice to have one on a farm, with cows and chickens and tractors. Lia turns to me and says, Daddy?

Yes, sweetheart.

When we grow up, she begins.

I look at her suddenly with puzzled amusement, and she stops. I regret my intrusion at once, the suggestion is just too farfetched, though also extremely appealing. But I am too late with remorse. Lia has already realized her verbal mistake. It shows on her face in embarrassment and I feel for her disenchantment. It is one of adulthood we all share eventually, there is no turning back.

And so she starts over with the proper beginning, and we continue down this path, where my daughter, and all of my children, in fact, keep proving to be miles ahead of me.

We returned to the lake over the Fourth of July weekend to share in a longer visit with our friends from Connecticut and though none of us noodled or grabbled or otherwise did anything risk-worthy of a video, we did come across two young men hand-fishing for catfish along the shoreline. My good friend, Mike, and I were standing on his dock fishing when they asked did we mind if they noodled past.

At the time I had no idea what they were even talking about and went on fishing, but watched after the two boys with interest as they went about probing beneath the surface with their hands and a stick searching for probable nests. The way they felt unseen before them reminded me of searching the nightstand for my glasses in the dark, minus of course the caution (read: fear) of being latched on to by something fierce and toothy. I found also a poetic semblance in their ambitious blind hunt to the treatment of Lia’s diabetes.

Such cause for waxing lyrically may have been due to my state of mind, which after the unceremonious case of forgetting the dog, was convinced that the rest of the summer would be going much in the way of her blood sugars: A plethora of mind-numbing highs, mixed with a few startling lows, some brief, unpredictable moments of rest and contentment. For both Franca and I it had begun to feel as if much of our days and nights would be spent on the periphery of living, bound down by the sole occupation of chasing phantoms. It was a sentiment we felt sure would be backed up with scientific proof during Lia’s next endocrinologist visit, which occurred the week following our lake trip.

Fortunately our fears, like the worry of those catfish hunters who sometimes poke something they wished they had not, were not realized. The two boys got their fish, a thirty-five pound channel cat, lurking beneath a boat ramp a few houses down from our friend’s. And despite the struggles we’ve had with adapting to pump therapy, Lia’s A1c came down to 7.8.

Our relief, of course, was immense, as was that of those two fishermen when the great water cat came clean of its guarded obscurity with no injury to either of them. And after the elation settled and those wonders we’d brought to the surface and spoke of and then turned loose and after the doorway in which we’d come to know them had gently closed and we were left standing alone untroubled by the effort of our accomplishment, at peace even perhaps, we thanked ourselves for the warriors in all of us who never stop searching, probing, and reaching into the next hole.

It is the experience of our hands that we learn from, which fingers to prick, which dark holes to avoid. We are being taught to take it one day at a time, one shoreline after another, celebrating the rewards of everyone’s hard work and  mulling over the things that went wrong. But such discovery has a hard-edged strangeness about it, an awareness that leaves us weary. Yes, with it comes empowerment, but there is always the troubling forethought of what might linger in the unknown. For tomorrow is another day and fear too can be motivating. Parents of children with chronic sickness know this maybe better than most. As Franca put it to me as we were driving away from the doctor’s office with our good news: Every time I leave there, I can’t help but feel like crying.

Worry is worry, however, and the distraction to everything else in the world is the same no matter if it’s set in the future or comes from the past or the present. That was our thinking last weekend anyway when Lia suffered a low of the sort that jerked us square back to the moment and reminded us that this beast still has teeth and can bite.

It was Saturday, close to noon, and for breakfast Lia had eaten cereal with milk. Milk, depending on the type, sometimes has the tendency to raise her blood sugar hours later, and in fact when we tested her blood before a mid-morning snack it was above three hundred. Lia suggested the culprit was probably the cow’s milk because the variety she’d had wasn’t the 2% Jersey milk we’d recently switched her to and which seemed to keep her glucose in check, but the heavier Holstein whole milk. But because people, especially parents, are capable of believing whatever it is they want to believe, even when the truth is staring them right there in the face, both Franca and I chalked up her high to unknown factors and gave her a bolus to correct it. An hour later Lia was watching television when she told her mother she was feeling shaky, her preferred way of announcing to us: something’s just not right here.

Franca had tested her blood thirty minutes earlier and the mid-morning bolus we’d given her seemed to be working as she was now at the high end of her target range. But with Lia feeling strange she tested it again and the bottom had dropped out of it and Lia was suddenly looking and acting in a way she hadn’t behaved before with any other low. Her eyelids drooped, her speech was sluggish, she had trouble focusing. So she gave her a glucose tab and waited for it to take effect but grew more concerned when Lia complained that her heart was racing and she gave her another. When after another few minutes had passed and there was little improvement in how she felt, Lia started to cry and everyone’s confidence was then shaken.

I think you should go get Daddy, Lia said.

Franca offered her a juice box then and went and called me from the bottom of the stairs.

I came down and found Lia sitting in the chair, her eyes were closed, she looked to be sleeping. What’s wrong? I asked and sat down beside her.

Franca went through her symptoms as Lia looked languidly at me, then her eyes closed and her head lolled backwards. Honey, wake up. I patted her cheek. Can you hear me?

We were calm, but inside Franca and I were both on the verge of panic, each of us wondering was this what it was like when someone loses consciousness from hypoglycemia. Should we get the cake frosting? Was our next step the glucagon shot?

After a little more coaxing we got her to sit up and she drank some of the juice and we held her and waited for all those carbs she had eaten to do their thing. It seemed a long time in the way a long time can feel to the parent of a suffering child, but it wasn’t. Twenty minutes after her low was first reported Lia was feeling much better and back in her target range.

We spent the next few hours watching for the rebound high but it never came, proving perhaps that Franca had done well in treating the low so aggressively; and we kicked ourselves around the curb for not listening to Lia and going against our practice of not double dosing for the milk in the first place, a strange reaction when all you were trying to do was to make things right. But, like Elphaba learns, even good deeds can end in disaster.

The next day Lia’s numbers were perfect until the late afternoon when they shot back up over three hundred. We were visiting friends at their lake house, all of us: the kids, the dog, diabetes. The day prior was still fresh in our minds of course and Franca and I were both sporting that damned if you do, damned if you don’t attitude, so we dosed her for the high, because the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, and the devil right then was high blood sugar.

The bolus worked as it was supposed to, but the damage to our attention was already done. Still frazzled from the day before. Frustrated by the wildly swinging ups and downs. Exhausted from middle of the night blood tests. Sick of holding this damn beast at bay. Like the proverbial eggs in the frying pan, by the time we left that afternoon for the two hour drive home we felt as if our brains were fried.

We hadn’t been on the road long when Franca’s phone rang.

I wonder what we forgot, she said wearily and only half-jokingly as she took the phone from her purse and answered it.

We were all thinking what it could be, silently running through an inventory of what things we had brought when Franca said out loud: The dog.

Great, I thought, knowing the ridicule to follow. Fried and now scrambled.

I’ve written some about them before: Krista’s worry over becoming diabetic herself; John’s thespian talent. But those were stories of them reacting to Lia’s diabetes and not real depictions of the ways in which they and us all were being made to change because of diabetes. That I have tried in some part to do on my own. Besides, change requires some level of acceptance and because it is not their body that has come under attack and must now be reliant on something external to keep them from harm, how could either of them possibly react in any other way but disparagingly toward its relevance and necessity?

I can remember when Lia was first diagnosed with diabetes there was a period of time where none of us knew what exactly it meant to have diabetes. Later that day, driving John and Krista to the hospital, I was asked about it — or maybe I just took it upon myself to inform them — nonetheless, I shared with them a few of the words I’d held onto from the doctor’s office: high blood sugar, ketones, pancreas, hospital. When those had left me and I had only my own worry to keep me I said nothing at all.The children listened and they were quiet too afterwards, of such little use was my ignorance. I can only imagine what they were thinking. What message of foreboding had I conveyed?

Since then, of course, we know more, and they too. So not long ago we asked our oldest, our son, to put down in words what Lia’s diabetes meant to him in terms of change. It was, we thought, a fitting request. John had been in deep water himself for some while on an unrelated matter and both Franca and I were interested in how diabetes may have altered for the better his own personal mindset. In hindsight, neither of us were prepared for his answer.

We had hoped his awareness now of this chronic disease had illuminated in him the need for direction, for finding opportunity and taking action. He would see in his sister just how fragile life can be and so with fervor would launch his pursuit of whatever bright future awaits him. Much like the mantra I use with my students at a writing conference I teach at each summer: How do I know what I think till I see what I say? I borrow this phrase from the English writer, E.M. Forster, in order to challenge them with this theory that even our own thoughts are a mystery to us until we take time to write them down, only then can we know their effect. This is what we were hoping to inspire in John. Revelation. Understanding. Acceptance.

Of course, roads everywhere parents travel are littered with ambitious pipe dreams for their children. This one was no different.

John’s essay began straightforward enough, highlighting Lia’s inspiring rise to the occasion of her diabetes, then went on to talk about the subtle changes to his eating habits. He mentioned, incorrectly, how his mother and I became incited, because of Lia’s diabetes, with corporate food processing and its effect on nutrition, specifically sugar. From there though the essay took a much more open and personal turn, as he accused his mother and I of constantly reminding him and his sister of how lucky they are for being healthy, thus adding more guilt than he already felt to the insurmountable truth of that fact.

I read this and at first I was angry. Constant reminder? Guilt? Blame? Where was the inspiration to make all he could of his life? Where was the yearning, the passion, the power of persuasion an illness like this should have over him? His essay wasn’t about him. It was about us, about me, about how Franca and I were treating him and his sister in relation to Lia’s diabetes. And that, as they say, is the rub.

I approached Krista and discovered that this was how she felt too and began to realize that although what we got from John wasn’t exactly what we had asked, it was honest and had required his private reflection. A parent can ask for no more than that and while it may not have been completely accurate, it did in it’s own way reveal a good bit about him (and us) and was, with some hope, inspirational, or at the very least empowering, for him to share.

So where does this bring us?

How do I know what I think till I see what I say?

It is nearly impossible under normal conditions for a family to know the aftermath our words and actions will have on one another. When you add something as frustrating and time consuming and as puzzling as diabetes, it’s a hundredfold harder, so the consequences are greater. John’s essay reminded me of that. He meant it not as a condemnation of our actions, though it felt that way as I read it and maybe even to him as he wrote it, but it was simply the view from another set of eyes watching out for the many dangers that lurk on this rough passage we now find ourselves. Like the view of the ocean from the ship’s crow’s nest, no other sailor aboard sees that vast body of water the same way. Of course there will be swells of uncertainty, periods of grief and solitude, far-off distant mirages that bring false hope, and also false sorrow. But there will be wonder too and the comfort of togetherness as we each rise above those occupational hazards to find that we are not after all alone, but a family.

And that much, I am happy to say, Diabetes has not changed.

I wonder what he would have thought about this, my father. A patient himself of chronic illness for over two decades, what might he have to say about Lia’s diabetes? Would he accept it for the illness it was and as such assign to it his steady and unrequited worry, much as he did for his own incurable condition? Would he become an expert at her treatment, studying everything he could get his hands on in order to keep his grandchild from harm? Or would he, as he had proven himself in the past during times of child-rearing hardship, serve quietly and simply as our faithful companion as we went about our parental duties of caring for her?

His response, I imagine, would have been a grandfatherly concoction of all three: worry, preparation and support. But people will surprise you and my father was no exception to that rule and so in saying he would have reacted in any one manner over another would seem purely a guess on my part. Life is such the classroom that no one holds all of the answer keys. Instead, we all lack bits and pieces of information, some of which might be good to have, while others might lead to prejudice and like some scientific experiment skew the results, perhaps even sometimes favorably. There is no question, for instance, how my regret would have found closure had I prior knowledge of the minute and hour of my father’s last breath.

Such as it was, for months afterwards, whenever I visited my parent’s house I would wander and look through the things that my father owned and with which he spent his time: books, tools, containers and cartons of goods he’d collected over his seventy-six years. Amongst them I hoped to find some less rueful memory of him than that of my irreparable mis-spent time. Then I quit one day after my mother caught me in this act of inventorying his life and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, You walk around here and you see the places he used to be. I walk around and all I can see are the places he isn’t.

She was right, and my father, I think, would have agreed. We live each day blind to all the things we don’t know, about ourselves and especially about one another. We try as best we can to move past the hurdles, the biased and skewed results, the many unintended consequences, and look for meaning not in the things we own or the activities we pursue or even in the afflictions that haunt us, but in the simple, daily presence we share in the lives of those we love.

It has been almost three years now since my father died and that lesson is still not lost on me, nor has it sunk in permanently. Just the other day I was in my garage and I opened the door to the extra refrigerator we keep there and several bottles fell from the shelf in the door. One of them shattered on the floor. I cleared the mess and saw that what had broken was a bottle of non-alcoholic beer. The beer had been bought for my father during one of his last visits to our house, I couldn’t remember which. With so much time having passed though, I don’t know why I’d chosen to hang on to it, other than it was his and as such had become a part of him. More likely, I was just not throwing it out as I was keeping it for some intended purpose. As it were, I cleaned up the bottle to throw it away but before I did I thought to check the label to see if there was a date that might suggest just how long the beer had been lingering in my cold storage. It read: Best if used before October 2007. One month after his death.

Strangely, I felt only a tinge of grief over throwing the broken pieces away, just as it finally felt right to stop wandering his house like some misinformed ghost hunter. I was never going to find him in any of those things, and it’s true I’ll never know how he might have reacted to Lia’s diabetes, you can bet he would have handled her with tender loving care. Of that much, I am certain.

But days after my friend’s comment I decided to take a bit more time to consider the question again. What exactly was it about this icon of circling light and dark that I felt it could represent something as momentously crucial as raising a daughter with type 1 diabetes to live life to the fullest? Wasn’t the very concept of yin and yang — two equally dependent opposing forces, each giving rise to the other — in stark contrast to what we most wanted for our child, a life free of this damned chronic illness?

On top of that, I had spent less than an hour, at most, on the internet searching for an appropriate image in response to what had, in an instant, changed our lives forever. Granted in the weeks leading up to Lia’s diagnosis, the Tao philosophy of kindness, moderation, and humility had been a focus in my reading, so it had clearly been on my mind for some while. But where was the balance and natural order of opposition and equality in a life made more difficult because of a non-functioning pancreas? Where does the sunset end and the sunrise begin? How does the seed reach its greatest potential?

The answer: I don’t know.

I honestly don’t, which I suppose is the challenge. Living with reality. Creating a path of sorts through the universe, finding balance where you’re able and learning to embrace the whole and not the parts of who you are.

Lia has diabetes. That is a fact. Also a fact is her wonderfully ordinary life. This journal is where I write about how we manage the two of those things together. There are days where the words and our lives unfold easily, without tears, without envy, without too much of any one effort. Then there are days when they don’t, when it seems only darkness prevails. For comfort we look to one another, or find it in the community and from friends such as the one I mentioned above. For hope we turn to science. Both make the journey we’re on feel like we’re not so alone. Yin yang is there for those times we feel like we are.