Diabetes and Moms
Let’s talk about moms for a second. Actually, let’s talk about *my* mom.
It’s a cliché to say that your mother is “your best friend”, but this is my story, my mother and my cliché.
I was my moms miracle baby. She’s always told me, all my life, how she always wanted to be a mom, and I was the one who made that happen. I was her rainbow baby, the one that doctors told her (like they’ve told me) she would never have. She loved me from the first time she set eyes on that positive pink pregnancy test. She adored me from the image of my first ultrasound, heart beat, and the first time she held me.
Already I had the world stacked against me, since I was born not breathing, but I think — somewhere deep down in my tiny little newborn body — that somebody needed me. The woman who carried me and loved me and read to me needed me as much as I needed her. So I fought. I was as stubborn then as I am today.
Already, my grandmother (on my fathers side) made wild accusations of me not being my fathers daughter. Though the irony, I look quite a bit like my father…But I digress. It was my grandmother (on my mothers side) who fought for me to belong. “I swear, if she says one thing about my grandbaby today, I’ll deck her right there in the church.” My grandmother said with her southern drawl.
Sadly, we lost my grandmother exactly 2 years and 1 month to the day of my birth. My mom lost her support system when it came to raising a daughter, and I lost the woman who loved me as much as my mother loved me.
Again, I knew that somewhere deep down in my tiny little two year old mind, that my mother needed me, just as much as I needed her.
After my mom had my sister, and we both grew up a little, anyone could tell the two of us were magnets — just, polar opposite ones. If I liked pink, she liked blue, if I liked dresses, she liked pants, she was thin, I was fat, she was the social butterfly with tons of friends and I…well…
My mom saw how that effected me. She tried to make up for it, which would eventually bite us both in the ass. She told me I could always talk to her, like most mothers do, and of course I did, like most daughters do, but I had no friends, so she became my friend. I would tell her about most of my “childhood crises”, or a boy I had a crush on, or the new girl in school that I hoped would become my friend.
When you’re a mom, and you see your child struggling in life, you see your daughter longing to be a “popular” girl or even just a girl with some friends, you try your damndest to make it happen. Of course, as a mom, you also see — from experience- the fake girls, the mean girls, and the ones that are actually worth your daughters time and effort. A mother wants to protect you from the hurt, from the pain that will inevitably ensue for your first “best friend fall-out”.
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I think one of the most defining mother/daughter moments (and we had several) that stands out, and always will, was when a kid in my elementary school threw a rock at my back. The school, the teacher, none of them did anything, because this boy was already known for most of his antic behavior. But remember, I am my mothers daughter. She took one look at the giant welt that had formed on my back, marched into my classroom and told my teacher that either he sit down and have a very serious conversation with that boy and his parents, or she’d hire two middle schoolers to do it for him — but that they wouldn’t be as nice. That day, I knew, my mom would do anything for us kids. She was our mom, our outer-wall guarding the castle, she was our protector.
But there was still one thing that I didn’t know how to talk to her about. My food obsession. I think she knew, deep down. I think she knew that I would sneak crap from the fridge, and she didn’t really say anything when I would have seconds at dinner. I think she wanted to, but I don’t think she knew how. She didn’t want to hurt me like the kids at school did. So, instead, she said nothing.
Now — let me make perfectly clear, I do not blame my mother (or my father) for my eating disorder. I don’t lay that burden on their doorstep, as this is my “cross to bear”. But there are parts of me that wish that my mom had tried harder to change things. Sought help for my eating. Sure it wasn’t bulimia or anorexia, but it was still an eating disorder, with just as deadly effects as either one of the latter, as I would eventually come to find out.
I don’t think, truly, that either one of my parents knew how to change. Both of them have always been creatures of habit, set in their ways, “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” mentality. However, I can’t blame them for doing the best with what they had. My parents had to stretch pennies into dollars some days, we didn’t qualify for food stamps because we made .36 cents too much a month. My mom had to stop working after getting sick with fibromyalgia, and they denied her for disability. So for a long time, we were on a 1 person income, a family of four — soon to be 5. So yeah, they tried their best with what they had.
The unfortunate part came to the grocery shopping. It was a treat, I would later come to find out, for my mom to buy grapes or strawberries. It was splurging to buy the leaner ground meats because saving even just 50 cents could mean paying the electricity that month or not. It became that my mom would have to buy bulk items and stretch it for the month. It wasn’t just for me, but for my sister, my dad and my mom. But…I didn’t know how to control what I was doing. I saw through selfish eyes. I didn’t care if my family went without as long as I could “get my fix”.
And my mom never once blamed me.
Not ever.
She would talk to me in round about ways, and I wish mental health had been more readily available back in the middle to late 90’s. It hurts that today, through a pandemic, we have finally opened up doorways for affordable and readily available therapists and support groups. That it took us going through a global pandemic for government aid has become a bit more accessible. But, again, I digress.
It wasn’t until I got sick, that I saw for the first time, the cracks in my moms barrier. It wasn’t until that doctor came in and said “you have diabetes” that I saw my mom waiver. Anything else, she felt, she could fix. But how could she fix this? How could she make this better? It had already been 17 years of “closet eating”, 17 years of seconds at dinner, 17 years of fresh baked cookies fixing everything…So how do you change 17 years over night?
And how the hell do you change 17 years of your stubborn, bull headed daughter?
For the first time ever, my mom, couldn’t fix this.
