The many hats we wear

I was just sitting here doing my usual "wait until 1:00am so I can check Emma's blood sugar" thing and I was checking out Facebook. I came across a status update of a friend and fellow D-Mom who is currently dealing with her son's high BG reading. She mentioned how she hoped that he wasn't getting ill and that the high was simply a result of a forgotten bolus while her son was at his father's house. It really got me thinking about how we all deal with those mystery high's and low's. The fear of an impending illness is horrible. It is something that is constantly floating around in my brain. I know from experience just like all of you do what it really truly is like to deal with a "simple" stomach bug in a diabetic child. It's a tortuous battle of ketones, dehydration, throwing up, low BG's, and no sleep. It brings us to the brink of insanity sometimes...before backing off finally. Diabetes forces us all to be so many things to our child...doctor, nurse, dietician, therapist, mathematician, and even detective.
I was watching an old episode of "The Suite Life On Deck" with Emma yesterday and there was a character on it who lived on this island and he basically held the position of police, judge, taxi driver, pie maker, everything. Each time he would "switch" roles...all he did was change hats...police hat, judges wig, etc. I couldn't help but think of our D-Mom roles while watching this guy. We walk through life appearing to be just like every other Mom out there...doing the "normal" Mom things like taking our kids to the park, making them supper, going along on field trips at school. To the untrained eye (i.e. the rest of the non-D world) nothing seems different. If they really truly knew the life of diabetes though, they would see the slight differences...they would see the doctor hat we slip on while testing BG's at the park hoping not to see a low, they would see the dietician hat we slap on our heads when we are reading nutrition labels or totally guessing the carbs in restaurant food before bolusing our kids, they would see the Sherlock Holmes style hat we bust out of our purse and wear while we are trying to determine what in the world caused such a wacky out of target range BG while riding on the school bus on that field trip to the fire station. We wear many hats during the day and right into the wee hours of the night. We wear them proudly. We wear them with a love for our kids that is so fierce and so unconditional, that no one could ever really understand it. We wear them during our most joyous and hard fought victories with this disease....and we wear them as we sit up in the middle of the night with tears streaming from our eyes, praying for the strength to continue on, praying that our child will make it through this current stomach bug unscathed and not have to make that dreaded trip to the hospital, praying that the researchers looking for that cure will find it soon. We wear our many hats in silence. We wear them as we attempt to educate the world. Most of all, we wear them for our children...and we will continue to wear them rain or shine, tired or well-rested (what is that again? I've forgotten...lol), sick or healthy, happy or sad. We wear them because we love our kids.