A Simple answer

Next week Emma and I will be attending the JDRF Ride for diabetes research. It will actually be the first Ride event that we have attended, so I am excited to see what all goes on! Because Emma is one of this years youth ambassadors, they will be asking her to answer a few questions from the media that will be there covering the event. We received the questions ahead of time, just to kind of go over them and give her a chance to think about what her answers would be...which I think is a fabulous idea seeing as how she is only 7 years old...and I don't know about any of your kids...but 7 year olds tend to take a looooong time answering things and describing things and telling stories....it's a bit exhausting on my poor brain sometimes...but then I force myself to remember that I would choose this type of exhaustion ANYDAY over the exhaustion that comes with a type 1 diabetic being ill.
Anyhoo, one of the questions was "What would a cure mean to you?"....I asked Emma this while driving to her piano lesson tonight. I expected the usual big loooong drawn out answer full of uuuuh's and ummmm's. Instead I got this as an answer.....

"Mommy, it would mean the world to me!"....said in a total "DUH Mommy!" tone of voice.

Simple as that...it would mean the world to her. It would mean the world to all of us I know. As each day passes and we get closer and closer to that 4 year mark, this feeling in my stomach grows. It gets heavier and heavier...weighing me down...trying to break me and let the despair of the situation take over my spirit.

 The first year was most definitely the hardest for us so far. Everything is new, unfamiliar, and scary. I spent the majority of that first year hating diabetes. I hated what it had done to us. I hated how it had invaded my daughter's life. I hated how it was always there...taunting me...trying to make itself comfy in the forefront of my mind every single second of every single day...making me feel like I was losing my mind at points and making me feel like I was no longer able to simply have fun with my daughter. The second and third years passed with a tiny bit less of a sting. I was learning to let go of the hate...I was learning to recognize that the only way to make this work was to live....live our lives just like we did before diabetes moved in...live, have fun, learn, experience new things, laugh, cry, rejoice....just live. I was learning to not let diabetes get in the way. I was learning to make sure that it knew that it's place was no where near the forefront of my mind...that place was and is reserved for my child, my husband, my family. We've still got 9 months to go before we reach that 4 year mark. I think the thing that hurts the most for me to think about that day arriving is that it will mean that Emma will have had diabetes for half of her life.

I'll say it again.....half of her life....

That is going to be a hard one for me to swallow. Who knows though...maybe a cure will come before that day...it would mean the world to her...to me...to all of us.