Without Envy

As long as I am talking about parenting, it would be shoddy of me not to cast a little more light on the tenets of what fatherhood means to me, especially at this time of year. Of course tenets is too strong a word for any manner of parenting, which should be flexible and give with the priorities of the moment and the needs of the whole and not center on one individual, but just imagine if every father funneled each decision they’d ever made with a mind toward the sustainability of their children’s future how much kinder and gentler the world would be. And precisely because of this and because any attempt on my part to break practice down into theory rings of both lecture and boredom, I do this at the risk of highlighting my own shortcomings, of which there are many, especially related to parenting and family. But with diabetes in the family picture now our understanding of how actions today affect what happens tomorrow takes even greater meaning. This is not drilling for dinosaur bones we’re talking about, but life and death.

Some of what I learned about being a father came from my own father, an often cantankerous yet warm-hearted man who over his life taught me little in terms of parenting but whose example of hard work and resilience I carry with me always. Because he had few close male friends, or none anyway that he brought around the house, I seldom had other real life men to watch and learn from and one day imitate in my own decision-making as a father. There were coaches and father’s of friends of mine, but not any I ever really watched with an eye toward their principles on parenting; and the most influential teachers I had were women not men, which contributed to my parental make up in very substantial ways.

But this is about being a father, not a parent. So as a boy my patriarchal design and aspirations were influenced by other, less-actual factors. I would love to say that more came from books, than from television or the movies, but I grew with the onset of televised drama and sitcom, so there is probably more Charles Ingalls in me than Atticus Finch; more Cliff Huxtable than King Lear. Fortunately, fatherhood evolves (or we might all still be stuck driving horse-drawn buggies to work, the demise of which is about dinosaur bones, incidentally), and through periods of soul-searching, I find myself occasionally reinforcing or reinventing what being a dad means to me. With Lia’s diagnosis late last year came one of those rising-within-you moments.

With diabetes, there has been fear, worry and frustration. There have been obstacles to overcome, difficult new things to learn, aggravating changes to our day to day lives. But also there has been opportunity. The chance to become closer, kinder, to appreciate more one another; to become stronger, more confident, more determined; to live in each moment. It’s not easy. There are myriad times where it seems endlessly impossible. Where the risk and the cost challenge the theory that all hardship can be overcome with attitude, that less is more, that newer is not better, that to be happy and healthy you don’t have to become a millionaire. That the best things in life are not bought, but given freely.

Diabetes opposes simplicity. There is not just food to consider. You do not just exercise. There is no such thing as just another cookie, or lap around the park, or physical exam. Life is more difficult. It requires harder work, greater attention to things that might normally go unnoticed. The reward of course is worth it. As Geppetto once said to his little once-wooden boy: You’re alive!

But to quote another famous father when his daughter became ill and he was told by a minister that this was chosen by God for some special purpose. Charles said: Tomorrow, I have to tell my daughter that she’s going blind. What shall I tell her is that special purpose?

Being a father is wonderful. It would be wonderful too if raising children was only about teaching them right from wrong, how to be a good citizen, set a good example and point them in the right direction and then step back and cheer them on. It is not that and has never been that for all of time. Being a good father, like being a good mother, evades definition. It is more than words. It is the action of adapting and changing to fit the situation, for himself, but always with the greater good of the family in mind. It is about safety and security and providing and about making this life as hospitable as possible for all. Though it was probably a mother life form in search of a better existence that led her brood out of the first gloopy seas, it was a dad that tamed the jungle and helped make the land a home. It wasn’t easy then and is made only easier now because of their and our other ancestors’ enterprise and ingenuity. And that is what fatherhood means to me.

For another account of the effect diabetes has had on our family since Lia’s diagnosis I’ll turn to one of our two other children. Though I am not always a very good practitioner of this, if you can be successful in getting them to open up honestly or are yourself perceptive enough, children can be a good gauge for ascertaining which things work well in a home and also for those things that do not. Sometimes, if a parent is in the midst of a crisis, as we were and sometimes still find ourselves, children may be the better and only true barometer for how well a family is functioning.

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.

Word of his death came to me in the middle of the night as I was making my lone way back to where he had lived. I had been far away visiting other family when his heart condition worsened to the point that I felt that was where I needed to be. I came as quickly as I could but he died before I arrived, in his sleep, at his home, with my mother and my siblings close by. He was old and tired and very sick and I will always have the regret of not being there with him at the end.

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.

Other than Franca, there are a few people who know me very well to whom I look for friendship and support in handling the routine face-off between family, work, and pleasure, and of which of course in our house, diabetes plays a significant part in all three. Their opinions, advice and experiences help shape my own philosophies and behavior. So when not long ago one of these friends, a person of very strong faith and commitment, appeared surprised by my use of the yin yang symbol to represent Without Envy on the web, I responded candidly, but with some  nonchalance: It represents balance, I said simply and then went on in some disjointed, ineffective manner trying to connect this image of well-being to my concept of spirituality. After all, overcoming hardship has always been a process of moderation and mind-over-matter for both Franca and me, regardless of the circumstance. Why shouldn’t it be the same for diabetes? With the right focus, discipline and prioritization we could do for Lia’s diabetes what we had done with every other conflict that had entered our lives: we’d manage.

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.

When you first learn that a child of yours has diabetes, if there is no family history of diabetes or the root of it is not otherwise obvious, and it rarely is, the parent will do not only whatever they can to make life with diabetes better for the child but they may also work tirelessly to pin down whatever it was that caused it. There is nothing unnatural about this because if you were successful at finding the cause of the diabetes perhaps you could keep it from bringing more harm to the child or other children, which is after all a parent’s first responsibility: keeping children safe. Of course with diabetes this is impossible to do and giving up on the search is usually the most helpful advice anyone can receive in terms of finding the origin. Not all of us, myself included, ever fully reach that point but it is helpful to know that the odds are stacked against us and any tidbit of information that helps shed some light on the topic is a gift.

What is possible, almost always, is for both parent and child to accept the situation for what it is and deal with it as best you can. This is important for several reasons but mostly because it is the reality and no good comes of hiding from what is real. Always in the end the truth finds you. Once you do this and are successful enough at it you can find little ways to defy the life-and-death seriousness of the circumstances and make good on the promise to live life to the fullest.

This last week we met with the reps of both Medtronic and Animas to decide which pump best suited Lia’s purposes. We had attended a class at our Endo’s office to hear spiels from the three top suppliers and had settled on these two, but were finding it a difficult decision as there were characteristics of both that we liked. So we invited them each out to the house on separate days to sit with Lia and talk about their pumps. Over the last few months we had made ourselves knowledgeable about pumping through books; and the internet and online diabetes community had provided us with a wealth of information and first-person experience. But nothing, we felt, could replace one-on-one, live conversation. In this way, we could relate our own experiences with food and insulin and the effect both have on Lia’s blood sugar and use these as our foundation from which we might sort through the gimmicky talking points and uncover useful information that would truly help guide us in making our decision.

Our efforts were not lost on Lia, as many of the things we do or say are not. During one of the sessions I looked over at where she was sitting in the small chair she had pulled up for the conference and I noticed she was holding a clipboard. She was making notes on it as the rep talked to us about her pump and afterwards, I asked her what she had written down. She handed me a single sheet of paper with the title: Cool things about the Animas scribbled at the top, and this, in her own words, is what followed:

1. It allows me to sleep in.
2. It lets me cosumize <customize> my dose.
3. Let’s me manage things
4. You can disconect for an hour and be flat.
5. Have an infushun set.
6. It has safety
7. You can redial it.
8. I can get a monitor from a long way away.
9. Your water proof.
10. Go to 0.025 units.
11. It can tell you to check for keytones.
12. Back up pumps.

Lia has never asked why she has diabetes. She has on only one occasion questioned what caused it and when given the answer equivalent of Who Knows, she walked away fine with that. She’s that kind of kid. A realist. A survivor. Don’t tell her it won’t hurt if it will, she will see right through that smoke screen and if she doesn’t she will the next time. Her own experiences have taught her that too.

A few weeks ago had I witnessed her writing this kind of list about a tiny little box designed solely to help keep her body functioning the way nature intended I would’ve mourned and written about her lost freedom and innocence. For sure there will be moments for that again, brief but intense outbursts of grief, frustration, even anger at her diabetes, at science and the medical community that has failed to find a cure, at the inability to uncover what caused it, and for how Lia has had to grow up much faster than anyone would want for a child. But it is this kind of thinking that it takes to move past the sadness and shock and get on with living. If a little blue box will help with that, then all the better. Just as long as it makes you waterproof.

With Lia unable to attend the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes because of stomach ills the morning of, we decided to host our own and invited some friends to participate in a Walk to Cure Liabetes this past Sunday at a local park. It was Mother’s Day and the weather that afternoon was gorgeous and the park was crowded with families and everyone was happy. After a short walk we ate picnic dinners and listened to a free concert that was being presented by the town. There is much more I could write about our day and the feeling of community which it brought us but I am happy, on this one occasion, to let a few pictures speak for me. For this and more pictures of Without Envy, please check out our recently created Flickr page.

The bed shuttered slightly as the train passed out of sight in the dark just down the hill from my sister’s house. Franca and I were sitting on either side of Lia, holding the hair back from her face as she vomited again into a wastebasket. The nausea had come on just after midnight when she’d woken from sleep with a whimper, then jerking upright in the bed and clutching both hands to her mouth we hurried with her to the toilet. The spells of sickness continued every thirty minutes or so and after a while we stopped making her get up and shuffle through the hall to the toilet while trying to catch what we could with a towel and I carried the wastebasket to the bedroom and set it beside the bed. We checked her blood sugars and felt for a fever, and believed by the looks of the contents she’d thrown up that she was sick because of something she’d eaten, a clementine perhaps, or a cracker. By morning the vomiting had ceased and Lia said she felt better. She asked to get up and we did, relocating downstairs to the couch, but after a few minutes she was back asleep. Two hours later when she woke again, her urine tested positive for moderate to large ketones. I looked at Franca, she looked at me. Both of us knew what was coming.

We were there visiting my sister and her family for the weekend to attend a JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes. It was our first Walk since Lia had been diagnosed and we were excited to be participating in such an event and moved by the opportunity to see and meet other people so intimately connected and familiar with juvenile diabetes. With my sister as captain, we’d formed a team, collected donations, had t-shirts designed and printed. For Lia and everyone of Team Liabetes this was our chance to experience firsthand the compassion, commitment, and community of which we all now belonged. But by now everyone was awake and there was a collective sense of dread in the room. No one mentioned the Walk. We knew we had to get fluids in her to bring down the ketones and we focused on that while we waited for the nurse hotline to call us back. So then Franca filled her in on the details and the nurse confirmed what we both had been thinking, that Lia should go to the hospital.

Hospitals, I think, especially emergency rooms, are typically not very good places for people who are sick and wanting to get better quickly. They are cold and impersonal, with form-letter questions offered and responded to in haste and in some cases not asked at all and therefore let unanswered, which may be okay if what you need is a broken bone set — all the proof is in the x-ray — but in caring for chronic illness you have to be on your guard, and in the overheard words of the doctor treating Lia, we looked like a couple of novices. Had I heard her then I might have had something to say about that, but later, after we took her back to my sister’s, well after the Walk had ended, it occurred to me that it wasn’t our lack of experience that had gotten us in trouble. It was our confidence, and it started really before we’d even left our house.

When you do something day in and day out, hour by hour, minute by minute, it becomes routine to you, and though it seems the first rule of diabetes is that there are no patterns, our watchdog treatment of it had become second nature to Franca and I. Checking blood sugars, monitoring food intake, giving multiple daily injections, observing activity, evaluating temperament, watching for signs of physiological distress. We’ve learned in the last four months to do these things in the dark, while half asleep, at work and in keeping a house and while struggling to preserve a strong hold to our family’s non-diabetic identity, and though we never feel like we have it licked, we do work hard at maintaining — a word I hesitate to use — Lia’s blood sugars.

The trouble with travel is believing that the confidence you carry at home is the same one that comes with you when you go to another place. I knew that it wasn’t from when Franca was gone to France. It may look and feel like confidence but away from home routines crack and break, they fall apart. There are too many new things to consider, new people, new foods, new lifestyles. If you let them they will get in the way of what has worked for you in the past and instead of having the effect you’re familiar with it has the opposite. When that happens it takes great courage to move beyond it.

We think it was something she ate, we said. Plus, there was lots going on, the car trip, then we stayed up later than usual. There was other company too, lots of running around. It may have just been the excitement.

Did anyone else get sick? the doctor asked.

No, just Lia.

The doctor looked over her vitals, checked her ears, peered down her throat. Asked her to take deep breaths. She stepped back and wrapped her scope around her neck. I knew what was coming and had already cautioned the doctor that it wouldn’t be easy. Lia would soon know this too.

The doctor looked down at her as she spoke. Well, little miss, we have two choices.

Okay, Lia replied.

We need to get some fluids in you to help your body get rid of those ketones. One way of doing that is for you to drink lots of liquid and stay here for five or six hours while it does its thing. The other is you let me put in an IV and you’re out of here in two or three.

I can go back to my aunt’s then?

That’s right.

Lia looked thoughtful. We had already talked about this, about how when she’d had an IV before, on the day of her diagnosis, her body was severely dehydrated. Then her blood vessels were collapsed and very thin, it’d been very difficult to insert a needle into them. Today was different. Today she was much better, stronger and it would hurt but not like before.

Lia made her mind up and when she spoke her voice sounded strange, far too grown up for the small little figure sitting up in the bed. Then I’ll take the IV, she answered.

The doctor nodded and left to go put in the order. Lia looked over at me and her mother.

I didn’t know what to say to her. Somehow sorry was just not enough.

Nighttime sometimes is the hardest. You wake, you think of her. Maybe you get up and check her blood, or just feel her shoulder and listen for breathing as you might a newborn. A slight nudge perhaps if you’ve caught her in a long mid-breath. Maybe you lie there in bed thinking and wondering and tossing and turning and watching the clock, waiting for something of a less pathetic hour to just go ahead and get up. There is certainty in waking, and while there’s no justifiable cause for worry, other than her diabetes, you cannot be sure of ever getting back to sleep. If there had been good reason to be concerned we’d have set our alarm and one of us would have been up anyway to check her blood. But when you go to bed thinking all’s well, we licked it today, we managed, there is a feeling of peace that comes over you and the nighttime you think will be restful and spent sleeping.

A few days ago it was just before one in the morning when she woke us. She was standing at the bedroom door, a small dark shape backlit by the nightlight in the hall. She was crying, sputtering through the sobs about a bloody nose. You could just make out in the darkness the little figure with both hands cupped to her face. We were both awake immediately. Franca walked her to the bathroom and in the light we checked her over.

The tiny bowl she’d made with the palms of her hands were pooled with blood, so I ran them beneath the faucet while Franca applied a wad of tissue to her nose to stem the bleeding. After a few seconds, she left to get a damp washcloth, then retrieve the glucose meter from another room, and I sat Lia down on the floor and leaned her back against the tub. The bleeding had stopped and she had stopped crying and the panic in her too had subsided. She closed her eyes and looked ready to fall back asleep. I washed from her face the smears of blood and asked how was she feeling. She knew what I meant and said fine. Franca came back and pierced her toe and checked her blood sugar. And she was.

We put her in our bed and laid next to her. The worry was over but not the response as we both found it difficult to return to the sleep we’d been lost in twenty minutes prior. Was the nose bleed somehow related to her diabetes, a warning sign that we should not take lightly, or was it dryness caused by high pollen? What if the meter was wrong? What if the reading was trending down and if we didn’t do something about it now she’d suffer a low? How much longer should we wait until we tested it again?

Honestly though, it wasn’t even these questions that kept me awake. These were things we asked ourselves everyday, all day long. We work very hard to anticipate and address these questions and are learning ourselves out of necessity to work just as hard on getting rest. You run yourself ragged if you don’t. What kept me awake was the fear that the fright and the hurt and the worry of something going wrong wasn’t ever going to go away. It is something that is with us for good, unlike a newborn which grows and flourishes, the same as a parent’s confidence. What kept me awake was the cruddy and erroneous suggestion that something as commonplace as an allergy-induced bloody nose might forever be connected in Lia’s precious mind to her diabetes, simply because we had tested her blood. The same as we do when she eats, or plays sports, or stays over at a friend’s house, or feels miserable or looks tired or generally acts something other than her usual illuminating self. What kept me awake was the wonder of just where does it all fucking end?

I know the rejoinder, it doesn’t. We’re not strangers to this anymore. I get it, this is the way that it is. But hold in the palm of your own hand this little girl’s life and tell me that that is okay. Tell me that we can control it. Tell me that it gets better. Even peace of mind can prove sinister sometimes in its motives. Lia is catching on to this fact and to some extent that is good, she needs to be burdened with the knowledge that to stay healthy for every decision she makes there is a consequence. But this awareness comes at a cost that as a parent I am saddened to see her pay.

Take for instance, this valuable diabetic lesson: This past weekend she was at a friend’s birthday party. Like before, I had her call and tell me what she was having to eat. She said pizza and ice cream cake, and I dosed her for both. Later, when I picked her up I asked how she liked the cake. She said she didn’t. I said what did you do about it then. She said I ate it. When I asked her why she said because I had to.

I went away the other weekend. It wasn’t a long away, just an overnight with a friend of mine spent camping in the mountains and fly fishing the next day. Franca had been back from France for a week and with spring and the weather turning I was eager to log some solitary time on a river somewhere. It’s not healthy to never take time for yourself, even if seems requited at the time, and while Franca and I have never treated our relationship with give-and-take reciprocity, we both knew I needed a break all right.

I am not a very good fly fisherman, I lack the resources required to give it the attention you need in order to become good at it. Often I go and never even see a trout. They are there, I know, their noses pointed upstream, wavering in the slick dark current, because I see other fisherman catch them or the satisfied angler comes clomping through the brush on the path along the riverbank carrying a string of rainbows, or browns, but mostly rainbows; nodding their head in my direction and raising their catch just high enough to catch my eye. I’ve never been that fisherman, nor that much of a braggart. Whenever I did catch fish, I let them go. It wasn’t for the fish that I went there.

The morning we woke at the campsite was cold. The firewood was damp and only would burn for a while if someone was not there feeding it twigs and blowing it back to life whenever it went out. We made coffee and ate fruit and toasted slices of bread over the stove and ate it with peanut butter while waiting for the sun to peek over the ridgeline and begin to warm things up. Afterwards we cleaned up and broke down the camp except for the tent and got into our waders and readied our fly lines and watched as the daylight slowly crept down the opposing mountainside until it reached the open meadow just to the south of our camp. Then we walked down the hill through the field and followed the sound of the river. We passed through a thin strand of woods and the river was there. It was wide and fast moving and shallow too except for a couple of deep-looking pools. Already several fisherman were scattered standing knee deep in the current in the various poses of fishing, but they paid us no attention as we climbed down the bank and into the river.

I left my friend at a wide open stretch of water where low hanging branches would not interfere with his cast and I walked up along the side current to one of the pools I’d seen. I did not see any trout, but trout like most wild things understand the importance of camouflage while man only knows how to get from one place to another as quickly as possible, so there is no guarantee I would have spotted them if they were there, which they were. I was encouraged nonetheless as I made my way upstream, choosing my step very carefully and keeping to the shallower sections where the brown bottom was clear and the current was slow and the footing on the rocks more reliable.

I stood at the edge of the pool, the water up to my thighs, my feet staggered against the undercurrent driving against my legs. In the pool the water was darker and the sunlight that passed through the glassy surface reflected off the tops of sunken boulders then was swallowed by the depths of the hole. I read the lay of the pool and fed out some line with a few false casts and then laid the fly down in a spot just upstream. The nymph at the end of my fly line lit on the water and sunk and the floating line caught in the current and brought the whole rig floating back towards me and I quickly began stripping line to stay ahead of it, feeling and watching for a strike, of which none came. I cast again. And again, and again.

For five hours I fished the river, hole after hole, bend after bend, one white-capped ripple after another. I stopped only for a bite of lunch and not once did I let my mind wander to think of needles, or of test strips, or of boluses and blood sugars. At one point a river otter passed a few feet away from me on the opposite bank and I watched after it as it went bouncing and bounding over fallen trees and rocks until it disappeared into a rock crevasse and I thought how nice it would have been for Lia and Krista to have seen it too. But mostly I thought of nothing more than just being a part of that river in every moment, letting my mind clear itself of the worry that had been with me the last three months.

Not long before this getaway I was sitting at my desk one workday when Lia called to say she was having a low. I thought about it and I told her what to do and hung up and sat there and thought of my wife and felt a bit of envy for her. How nice it must be to have a job away from home to occupy her attention. Not waiting for the school to call. Not dosing from long distance. Not sitting there wondering if the treatment I’d just given was right. That was foolish thinking of course. Occupation does little to free someone from the worry and stress that is the daily routine with diabetes. There is no such thing as down time.

But that afternoon on the river did something for me that sitting at home at my desk day after day could never do. It gave me permission to play, to take a small break from the worry. To let go. And take something back of myself.

At the end of the afternoon I sat down on the riverbank with my feet still in the current. I took off my hat and my sunglasses and closed my eyes and felt the river’s heartbeat with my own. It felt good. I felt happy.

On this Earth Day 2010 I encourage everyone to get outside and enjoy the peace and pleasure and tranquility that being in nature can bring you. It’s out there, on our planet. Go find it. Get involved.

After the last of the kids started school and we were both working for someone else the money was abundant and so too was the impulse to have the things that money could buy. If you let it money can spoil a perfectly good thing, such as happiness and peace of mind. Some have it backwards, that you cannot be happy or have peace of mind without money, but on those occasions it is the money talking, not the people, and so you can only hope they turn it around before it does all of their thinking for them.

But the idea of both of us earning an income was new to us and for the first time in our lives we could consider making some significant changes: A bigger house. A better car. Nicer furniture. A well-funded retirement. The list of possibilities was long and the obstacles seemed small and insignificant. It was just money after all and with Franca planning to re-enter the workforce after an eight year hiatus to raise children we saw ourselves, finally, having more of it.

Before that time though when we did not have those choices or the pressures that come with them we were happy still and made time for the things we loved, such as writing and the outdoors and spending an active time together. During the week, before I would head off to my workday as a director of supply chain for a major company well known for its skin and personal care products, I would wake at four in the morning and come downstairs in the dark and pour myself a cup of coffee and sit down at my desk and spend the next two hours alone writing. It was a wonderfully quiet and still time of the night and there was little else to do but write, so I learned through the discipline of doing the same thing every day how to focus on the words and the telling of the story and nothing else. For fifteen years this was how I wrote: two novels, a few short stories and several creative non-fiction pieces. In darkness, quiet, solitude. This was the terrain of my apprenticeship and though it was often frustrating to stop to get ready for work, I left my desk knowing that no matter what happened the rest of the day I had pursued my passion.

On weekends I would do the same, but afterwards we would do things together, especially in the spring and fall when the weather in the southeast is the nicest and we might go camping or for a hike or visit with family. We shopped for the things we needed, not for what others owned or what we may have thought for ourselves that we wanted, and in so doing learned to live in sync with our means. This was important because as Franca and I contemplated the opportunities that presented themselves with the possibility of two incomes, we were not accustomed to even wanting to spend great amounts of money on unnecessary things, like new cars (I write this, of course, as two of ours sit in a shop for repairs). As long as we could afford the things we needed, we were fine.

Nonetheless, the mood as Franca prepared to re-enter the workforce was upbeat, I won’t lie. We both were, as I mentioned, thinking of the changes two incomes would have in our lives and for our children. Then something happened that changed everything.

Franca was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, and because she loved the story and the writing she was moved to learn a bit about the author’s history. Afterwards she came to me and told me of his frustrations first with law school, then journalism and eventually even his fiction writing. Then one day, while he and his family were en route to Acapulco on vacation, inspiration struck and he stopped and turned the car around and went back to his home and put his wife in charge of the family and he wrote, crafting for the next eighteen months the mythical world of Macando around which One Hundred Years of Solitude was centered. When he finished they had sold the car, pawned many of the household items they owned, gone greatly in debt, and in García Márquez’s case, was mentally and physically spent. But he was happy.

I listened to her and I thought about it for the next three days and then sat down with Franca and said that, if I was to become a good writer, I needed to do what García Márquez had done. I needed to remove the obstacles and focus on writing. I had spent all those years toiling at four in the morning, developing the diligence, the discipline, learning how to write, then leaving them two hours later and going off to work, for what? A bigger house. A better car. Nicer Furniture. Those things weren’t important to me, writing was. More importantly, they weren’t important to Franca either and she agreed and for the next year and a half, part of which we were both employed, we set aside thoughts of spending and tucked as much as we could away to provide in the future for our family. Then in the spring, on April 13th, 2007, exactly three years ago today, I left my job and became a full time writer.

Following this dream, I’ll admit, has had it’s share of downside with the upside. I’ve not published a book, though I was recognized with an Arts Council Grant for the opening chapter. Some of the reserves we set aside have been used to pay for costly unseen emergencies, but we have not had to sell any cars or pawn appliances. I am home more with the children, but presence sometimes incites participation and I find it difficult to write when there are more exciting things to do, like jump on the trampoline or ride bikes. Finally, there is the usual constant barrage of commercialism telling us we need new things, better things, more and more stuff. Mostly though, we have all learned how to do with a bit less and none of us are generally bothered by it.

There are moments though when not having more freedom financially causes me to second guess my decision. Lia’s diagnosis with diabetes is one of those. I worry about our ability to give her what she needs. I worry that we will not be able to afford the newest technology, the best treatment, the most effective care. And I worry that the stories I wanted to write about and which inspired me to leave my job are not worthy anymore of attention. Reality now occupies me; it, more than imagination, primes my writing.

So it is that Without Envy is my story too, one that has been in the works for much longer than any archive or calendar can give credit to, but one I won’t ever regret. It has been a wonderful experience and though in a way I have Gabo to thank, I know the great writer would understand if instead my dedication read: To Franca, of course.