This is Caleb…
I’m sitting at the kitchen table after dinner with Caleb beside me
finishing his homework. While he’s working, I scan the computer and come across a video about a young boy living with diabetes. He is younger than Caleb and there are pictures of lancets and needles and of this boy as a baby and a toddler, smiling and enjoying life and being cute, and clearly living with diabetes.
I realize that Caleb is crying.
I look at him and he says, “I’m not crying about my homework.” I didn’t realize he was looking over my shoulder. “I’m sad because that boy has diabetes and he’s just a kid.”
“He’s just a kid”?
But Caleb himself is just a kid.
I am not exaggerating when I say that Caleb does not complain about anything he has to do because he lives with diabetes. There may be the occasional hem when we need to change a Pod, or a haw, when I ask him to check his sugar. But these hems and haws are no different than his reactions to having to make his bed or put away his laundry.
Even when asked what he thinks about living with diabetes, he is relatively indifferent. It’s typically a “good”, “whatever”, “it doesn’t matter” response. He’s got bigger things to worry about.
To see and hear him get upset at seeing a young child going through everything he goes through, things that never seem to phase him when he does them, left me speechless.
I took him on my lap and hugged him. I had many thoughts and emotions running through me, but no words. We both had tears. That seemed to say it all.
