In Which I Find My Tribe

It's Valentine's Day again, and that means it's time for my annual Valentine homily. In case you're new to this, or you've forgotten since last year, I'll give a brief introduction. A long time ago on a campus far away I was a woefully single college junior looking forward to celebrating Valentine's Day as Black (whatever day of the week it was). However, I had a change of heart and decided to embrace it as a day to celebrate the love of friends and family and ultimately the love of God. I sent an email to that effect to some friends and family and it was well received. I decided to do it again the next year, and thus a tradition was born. This annual message has since evolved into a reflection on my faith and life with some kind of connection to love and Valentine's Day. If you like it, feel free to let me know and also feel welcome to share it. Just don't pretend you wrote it :).

This Valentine's Day finds me with a broken wrist. I wasn't sure I'd even be able to write this a week ago, but my pain has significantly lessened and I've managed to type quite a few long Facebook messages and even a blog post with one finger on my phone's keyboard, so I figured I'd give it a go :).

It turns out that breaking your wrist, in addition to being exceptionally painful, renders you practically useless in a lot of ways. This is especially true when your main "job" is to run the household and drive kids around. I'm starting to learn to do a few household tasks with just my left arm, but there are a lot of things I simply won't be able to do until my wrist heals, including driving.

This has required that our family depend on other people more than we normally do. It started as soon as I broke my wrist, because the accident happened when we were out roller skating for Kittygirl's birthday party. We could have called all the parents to get their kids and brought our own kids to the ER, but we decided we didn't want Kittygirl's 9th birthday to stick in her mind as the year her party was ruined. So I started calling the parents of the girls. First one dad showed up to stay at the roller rink with the girls while Mr. Engineer took me to the ER. While Mr. Engineer was gone another set of parents showed up, which allowed both of our vehicles to be driven home with all the girls so the sleepover could continue. Finally one more mom left her book club early to help with the party and then stay with the kids while Mr. Engineer went to pick me up at 2am.

None of these parents are my good friends, let alone Mr. Engineer's friends. I like them all, and some of them are closer to friends than to friendly acquaintances, but it's not as if I live in a mythical world in which the mothers of my daughter's friends are my best girlfriends and we all go out for drinks or coffee once a month. However, despite that they were willing to drop everything to help us when we needed help.

Since then, my mother and then my mother in law have come to stay with us and help. Next week my mother in law will have returned home and we'll need help again, particularly with driving the kids around. I put a call out on Facebook, not sure what would come of it. I was surprised with several offers of help, including some from people I know even less well than the parents who helped at the party. It looks like we'll be able to get the kids home from school every day.

All this has led me this Valentine's Day to reflect on two related concepts. Because I've never been that great at making friends I've always been a little skeptical of the phrases "Find your tribe and love them hard" and "it takes a village to raise a child". I never truly felt like I had a tribe, and the village, well, I wasn't sure I needed it anyway. 

This need to depend on people lately has shown me that I really do have a tribe. We don't go out for regular girls nights, but they show up when I need them. It turns out that they're also part of

the village that is helping me raise my kids. My kids need examples of other adults who are adulting well and particularly other adults who can show them what it means to love and follow Jesus. Another part of this tribe/village showed up big-time for Squirrelboy a few weeks ago when one of his teachers challenged his faith and he was looking for resources to show that Christianity isn't entirely illogical.

So what's my point? John Donne wrote that "no man is an island" and I think that applies to families too. If you already know who's in your tribe/village, awesome! Don't take them for granted. Make sure they know how much you love and appreciate them. If you're more like me and you feel like you're the last living member of  your tribe or your village is a ghost town, look around. They may be just out of your sight. If you still can't find them, take the first step and find something you can do to be part of someone else's tribe/village. That may be the first step to finding one of your own.

This Valentine's Day, by all means express your love for your significant other if you have one. Also make sure you look around for the less obvious people who show you love in some way. Maybe you can find a way to thank your tribe on Valentine's Day. If you're part of mine, consider this my Valentine to you. 

Find your tribe and love them hard, on Valentine's Day and otherwise.

In Which Being Proactive Backfires

When I decided to stop blogging daily I didn't intend to ever have as long a hiatus as I've just had. What's to blame is the fact that I broke my wrist on January 31st. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say roller skating can be really dangerous for adults. And, yes, it's my dominant hand, because of course, why wouldn't it be as difficult as possible?

I could maybe find a voice to text program that would let me blog or otherwise write more easily, but I hate the ones I've tried because they so often misunderstand me. So I've gotten surprisingly fast at typing one letter at a time on my phone with my left hand.

Anyway, on to the actual subject of my post. You may remember that all I wanted for Christmas was a hybrid closed loop system for Kittygirl. It could happen at any time, in theory. All we're waiting for is a prescription from Kittygirl's doctor so we can get a link for the training modules (just a couple hours of work) and then get the download code.

The endo's office, however, is keeping us in limbo. A couple days after the prescription was sent Mr. Engineer contacted the diabetes educators via email to find out what was causing the delay. He was given the response that no prescriptions would be given out until all the doctors and educators were fully trained and understood the new system. He asked how long that would take and he was not given a timeline. Mind you, Tandem started to offer training months ago.

I'm trying to be patient. I understand, in theory, that they don't want to release their patients willy nilly into a new system before they understand it. It will definitely require a new way of thinking.

The thing is, though, unlike many of the families they serve, we have no intention of asking them for help or advice. The last time we got help adjusting ratios was just a few weeks after Kittygirl's diagnosis. The third anniversary of her diagnosis is in a week.

Kittygirl had her quarterly Endo appointment on Monday, and I wasn't there for the first time ever. We could have worked it out, but, since I can't drive right now, we decided it was best for Mr. Engineer to just get Kittygirl at school and bring her by himself.

He came home frustrated. He tried to press both the doctor and the educators  to just give us the prescription based on the fact that nearly three years of evidence indicate that we won't need their help. They remained firm that they were not giving out prescriptions until they decided they were ready and remained vague about how long that would take. He even offered to let Kittygirl be their trial case, but they didn't bite.

I've read experiences of people who feel like they have a full partnership with their child's Endo (or their own in the case of adults). I'm kind of jealous of those people. At the same time, I've read about people who can't employ techniques they want to employ like Sugar Surfing because their Endo didn't approve and they were afraid of being reported for medical neglect if they didn't follow the endo's exact orders. When I hear those stories I'm grateful our Endo is willing to let us go our own way.

If it's our situation versus the second situation above I'd take ours any day, but part of me would like to have the partner experience. We'd have to switch practices for that and drive at least 90 minutes each way. Our current practice is only about 15 minutes from us. That didn't seem worthwhile to us in the past, but now I'm kind of wishing we'd done it. I might have my Christmas wish. At the snail's pace our practice is moving it might be Easter before my wish is granted.