Celebrating Dia-anniversaries
In general, we think of anniversaries, birthdays, milestones as an opportunity for celebration. A 10th birthday! One year on the job! Married for five years!
But a diabetes anniversary might feel a little gloomy. In some ways, it feels inappropriate to celebrate. Another year of finger sticks and pump pokes? Definitely not worth celebrating. There certainly are families who don’t acknowledge a diabetes anniversary at all. They let it slip by on the calendar without any fanfare.
And yet, from my perspective, there is something worth celebrating about a diabetes anniversary. After all, with each passing year, we parents grow our diabetes knowledge and experience. We are generally calmer in the face of the emergency-du-jour. More importantly, through a magical combination of luck, hard work and the powers of insulin, our children have made it through another year — healthy and alive — despite the burden of diabetes. Surely that is worth celebrating.
If you want, go for streamers and balloons. More power to you. Life has enough heavy moments and we have every right to seize joy and make it colorful when we can. Personally, though, I’m all about creating meaning. (I think it comes with the territory of being a therapist.) In our family, over the years, we’ve created a diabetes anniversary ritual to commemorate the date for each of my kids. We light candles and read a blessing that I write each year, a blessing focused on their ongoing health and increased competence in management. We include a gift of a beautiful stone that my T1D kid saves in a special bag. It very well might be that my kids will never go back and look at these , but I suspect that the ongoing, increasing weight of their bag of rocks will mean something over time. It certainly means something to me — something about the very real weight of their longevity, of their health, of their lives.
There’s something else, too, to note on a diabetes anniversary — and that’s about us, the parents. In this way, it’s a little like a birthday. On birthdays, we also acknowledge, after the celebration is over and the kids are safely tucked into bed, that it’s an event for us too. After all, we’ve done the heavy lifting of raising them, of getting them to this point. We are the jet fuel to our kids’ flight, the gas for their drive. In the same way, a diabetes anniversary isn’t just about our kid’s ongoing health. It’s also about the ways we accompany them on another year of this journey, an acknowledgment of the work we have done, the things we have learned, the ways we have grown. And while I personally don’t make that part of our family’s ritual — because, of course, the diabetes is in their body and it’s their health we applaud — after the dishes are washed and everyone is back to their evening routine, it’s worth a moment to acknowledge this part of the anniversary as well. Here we are, making a beautiful life, even with diabetes in the mix.
It’s something to be grateful for.
Do you have a special way to celebrate your child’s dia-anniversary? Just email to let me know: I’m hoping to publish a list of ideas in a future newsletter.