Being brave and loving with my whole heart

For the past two weeks Emma has been trying to get up enough courage to go down the fire pole on the play structure at school on the playground. A lot of her friends are already able to do it no problem and I think it really bothered her to not do it herself. Well, for the past couple of days after school she would climb the stairs up to the pole and stand there trying to talk herself into just doing it. Each time she would psych herself out and we would wind up leaving the playground with her in tears because she couldn't do it. I tried everything to help her...telling her there is no way i would let her fall, i would stand at the bottom and help her, i wouldn't let anything bad happen! Nothing seemed to be working though. Well, yesterday after supper she asked me if we could go to the school so she could try one more time. It was pitch black outside (thank you very much daylight savings time! grrrr!) and pretty cold out too. I still had dishes to do and I was tired from being up at my usual stupid o'clock the night before checking blood sugars. I wanted her to be able to stop stressing about it though. I wanted her to be proud of herself for doing something that was scary. So, off we went to the school. It took about half an hour of standing there at the bottom of the pole...convincing her that she could do this to just trust me, the whole time shivering and trying to stay warm. I tried to look at it from her point of view...how scary it must have looked from up there...how hard it must have been to step off that platform and grab ahold of the pole. She did it though! I was so happy to see how proud she was of herself finally!
Sometimes I forget that she is only 6 years old. She is so brave about things like getting needles everyday, finger pokes for blood sugar checks, getting blood work done every 3 months for clinic appointments...dealing with everything involving diabetes. She knows about things that most kids don't know about it. She knows how everything she does can affect her blood sugar...she knows that playing with her friends can be fun of course...but it also can cause her blood sugar to drop too low. She knows that she is different. Just this morning she told me that she knows she is special at her school because she is the only one who is diabetic. She sometimes seems to me like she is older than she is...and yet other times she is still my baby girl. She still needs me to hold her hand and comfort her when she's scared. I hope she knows that I will always be there to hold her hand...Before she was born, I never knew how much you could actually love someone else. Love is not even a good enough word. From the minute I knew that I was pregnant I loved her. From the moment i looked into her eyes for the first time, she had me...she had my whole heart that very minute. I love her with my whole heart and soul. I wish I could make other people understand that is why i do what i do and say what i say in hopes of a cure being found for her diabetes. I guess people know that I do it cause she is my daughter. But it is more than that. I do it because i have such an overwhelming need to fix what is wrong...to fix it so she can live a long and healthy life...so she can someday have kids of her own without having to worry about diabetes complicating things..so she can know what it feels like. So she can know how I feel when I look at her.