The Mistakes We Make

In my children’s first grade classroom, there was a sign:

Everyone Makes Missnakes

I loved that my children went to a school that emphasized that mistakes are normal and part of learning. That’s the deal with doing new things. It doesn’t always go according to plan. It’s one of the beautiful risks of just living your life.

But then came diabetes, an exacting disease that made me feel like mistakes could be catastrophic. Everything felt like life or death — and, in some way, of course, that was true. The problem was that, in my mind, the solution was to get everything absolutely, positively 100% right.

Except I couldn’t. I am human and made plenty of mistakes. Like the time — just the other day (after managing this disease for well over a decade) that we were heading out for ice cream and my daughter’s pump started to beep that she was out of insulin. Like the time we went away for the weekend to a rural area and found — at 9 o’clock at night with 10% charge on my the pump — that we had forgotten to pack the cord to charge the thing. Like the time with my son — pre-CGM — when he looked up from the far back of the minivan to say he felt low, and I discovered that I hadn’t restocked the glove compartment with low supplies. And there have been the smaller, less dramatic mistakes: When I’ve miscounted the carbs and my poor kiddo pushed past a full stomach to eat through a pile of jelly beans. Or when the miscount went the other way and they were high for far too long.

Of course, I got more organized. Of course, I learned to count carbs with a crazy savant fluency. But mistakes still happened. Life still happened.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I had to account for these mistakes. And I realized that I was making a jump — that just because diabetes is serious doesn’t mean that every single thing has to be perfect. In the end, I think that’s the most important thing that I have learned from this disease. And it’s the lesson I feel most passionately about communicating to my kids: that they will be able to recover from the mistakes that they make. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to suggest that we — or our kids — should unclip our diabetes seatbelts. Of course, we all still need to engage in safe diabetes management. But I want my kids to know that, despite the mistakes, they will be okay. That they can brush themselves off and try again. That they can keep living their lives, even when everything doesn’t go to plan. We all have to find a way to be gentle with ourselves so we can keep doing this relentlessly hard job.

Early on in my diabetes journey — back when I was still calling the nurse every day to think through all the crazy diabetes details, I remember feeling like I had made a big mistake. I had let my son have a lemon bar — a lemon bar! from a bakery! — and had no carb count for the thing. I had made a wild guess, done my calculations, given him a shot and crossed my fingers. I was confessing this to the CDE.

“And what were his numbers two hours after the lemon bar?” she asked

“In the 190s,” I reported, anxiously, as though waiting to hear judgment after a critical exam.

“Well, then,” she said reassuringly, “then you got it just right.”