Monday, December 3, 2012

The secret lies within carrots!!

Let's talk carrots, shall we?
When I was a little girl back in the olden days....you know...the days of the cool wood panel sided table top PacMan game in the local Pizza Hut, the stirrup pants lovin...banana clip wearing...jelly bracelet stylin...holdin hands on the roller rink while "Take My Breath Away" blasted from the speakers? Yea, I'm an 80's child.
Anyhoo, back when I was a little girl, my Mom always told me that carrots were good for my eye sight. I believed her wholeheartedly...I mean why would I doubt?....she's my Mom. I would stand at the garbage bin and peel carrots like nobody's business...sprinkle salt on it...and crunch away...fully imagining my eyes gaining strength and my vision rivaling that of Superman with each bite.
Fast forward 27 years....I have awful vision...I wear glasses all day every day...without them I would probably spend the majority of my time walking into walls and mistaking strangers for my friends and family. So, either I am some sort of anomaly....or my mother lied to me just so I would eat all the carrots on my dinner plate. The jury is still out on that one.
Rewind 4 1/2 years....the day of Emma's diagnosis. We were sitting in that little hospital room trying to absorb what the doctor just told us...our daughter has type 1 diabetes. I struggled to maintain some sort of grip on reality as I watched my then 4 year old daughter play with the bubble wrap covering the floor...the bubble wrap that the receptionist laid out for her to play with and jump on while we waited in that little room. I watched her and tried to figure out how in the heck I was going to explain to her what had happened...what would now be our life....her life...until a cure was found. I tried to pull the right words out of my head to make my 4 year old daughter understand...to make it not sting so much to know that she would have to have multiple needles every single day...multiple needles jabbed into her tiny little perfectly unblemished fingertips. I struggled knowing that she was so young...how much would she really understand...would she even know what i was talking about...did I even know what I was talking about? I pulled her into my lap and I did what I usually do....I opened my mouth and let the words flow straight from my heart. I told her that she has diabetes now....but it would be ok....all it meant was that we had to pay close attention to her body and what she eats now more so than ever. I told her about the needles of course...and she cried of course...and I tried to lighten the mood of course...and I tried to fix it of course. Naively and ignorantly on my part because we had yet gone to meet the dietician at that point, I told her that it meant we would just have to eat better foods....like carrots.
Damn those carrots.
I told her that we would have more snacks that were good for our bodies....snacks like carrots.
For whatever reason, carrots seem to effect my life in the weirdest way. How wonderful would it be to have carrots be somehow remotely related to a cure for diabetes.......I can see the headlines now......Cure for diabetes discovered!! Secret lies within carrots!!........I would definitely forgive carrots for letting me down on the good vision thing if that was the case.

1 comment:

  1. isn't it funny what we parents pull out of our asses when it's time to try to explain things to our kids? especially when we are struggling to understand the topic ourselves?!?!

    ReplyDelete