The “D” World and What It Means To Be a Mother Of a Child With Diabetes
By: Ashlea Mello
When my son Landen was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, I had a predisposed idea of what type of people were affected by diabetes and why they were diagnosed. I mean if you look around in America, everything we read is in regards to Type 2 diabetes. Along with ways to help prevent which include dieting and exercising.
Type 1 is the darkest corner of diabetes and when it becomes your life you become a passenger or a spectator in your own life; controlled by the darkness and fear that is Type 1 diabetes. And when it takes your child it is consuming and crippling.
Your whole life begins to revolve around caring for that child. Every waking moment with Type 1 Diabetes is consumed with my need to control, to manage, and to not feel what this diagnosis has done to my perception of myself in the walk of motherhood.
I went 10 years without so much as an emergency ER visit. Both of my children totaled maybe 5 antibiotics together in their lifetime and one day we woke up to a new reality. The reality that Landen’s body waged war on itself and he was no longer healthy.
He now had to inject into his body a man made insulin to stay alive because his body could no longer do its job to keep him alive. No one understands this loneliness like fellow D Moms.
They can look at this photo and see in their own life the depth of what I see and feel in this photo.
When I had this made it was to commemorate the closing on our new home. But Sarah happened to capture so much more. She captured how I have felt this entire year. I know I’m not alone in this fight against this disease, but the fight is isolating.
It consumes you and makes you question your capabilities, but everyday you prove to yourself again that you are capable. The fight is ever going, even when you close your eyes it doesn’t stop. Diabetes becomes more aggressive at night. While your guard is down it lurks in the shadows threatening the thing you hold most dear.
This photo represents so much to me. Calmness, loneliness, fear, separation, darkness… but there is light. Somedays I feel like all I’m doing is chasing the light. I feel I see it only to be drained from trying to obtain it. It slips my grasp and I am left exhausted and defeated.
Somedays I am there looking out the window of my life feeling the warmth of the light. Only to not fully be able to obtain it because we are trapped by the “D” world.
Not many people understand how hard living with type1 diabetes is. There is also much public confusion concerning the differences between type1 and type2.