The Other Sibling
When my family got hit with our first diabetes diagnosis, I had my hands full: In addition to all the finger sticks I had to start doing, I had a baby – still not sleeping through the night – and a sweet kindergartener. You can almost predict how this would go. Obviously, I had no choice but to watch every bite that my newly-diagnosed T1D son put in his mouth. And I had to pay attention to the baby – it’s hard to ignore a baby. But my poor middle child was sadly dropped.
Now, let me be perfectly clear: Of course, I covered the basics. I still fed her and got her to school and made sure she had a regular bath and that her teeth were brushed. But I also definitely didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to really be there for her. And it showed: She started acting out in ways that made it even harder to connect with her. She got a little more wild and a little more needy. I would take deep breaths and try to tell her that I understood how much she needed me. But in that moment, it felt like there was really nothing I could do. I didn’t have the time or the bandwidth to actually do anything differently.
But even with limited time, I could still worry. I knew I wasn’t parenting her as well as I wanted to. I could tell that she wasn’t herself – and I was concerned about the impact on her. But slowly, slowly, the baby got bigger and slowly, slowly I learned the basic skills of diabetes management. And then I started to be able to turn my attention back to my much-ignored middle child.
I know that I’m not alone here. Likely many of you wonder and worry about the attention that you’re not able to give to your own “other” siblings – the ones who don’t have diabetes. I hear this from parents often – there’s a terrible pang of guilt that they aren’t able to give those other kids more – and at the same time they are so clear that they can’t or don’t know how to create balance while they are balancing diabetes. Parents worry that the shift in focus and the fact that the child with diabetes is getting so much attention means that the others will suffer.
The good news is that research shows that these kids actually can gain interpersonal strength from living with siblings with T1D. And when there are problems and challenges, there’s always room for repair. My middle child had to live through a second diagnosis – the one of the youngest child – before we were finally able to start truly turning attention back to her. But along the way, I learned some important tools about how be more attentive and supportive, even with a diagnosis. I also gained a deeper understanding of what kind of attention those other siblings really need. And even though my middle had some rough patches, we were able to do enough repair by acknowledging her pain along the way that today she’s a wonderful empathetic adult — who has an awful lot of knowledge about diabetes.