Superpowers

This will be a short one today. I’m off to get my vaccine, which is bringing me surprisingly mixed feelings. On the one hand, yay! I’m so pleased for myself and for doing my part to get our country safe again. On the other hand, I feel guilty. Our state recently said if you are the parent of a child with an at-risk condition that requires 24 hour care, you are eligible for the vaccine. I feel like I’m getting in on a technicality.

But I won’t say it isn’t a relief. Throughout this, one of my first and longest lasting fears wasn’t death, but getting too sick to care for our daughter with Type 1. She’s too young to do it all herself, and way too young to be expected to wake in the night to check her own blood. What if we got coronavirus and it was like a bad flu and both of us slept through our alarms? What if one of us had to be hospitalized and the other missed something in between the worry and the work? Could we ask a friend to knowingly expose themselves to coronavirus in order to care for her if we could not?

It’s moments like this that I realize the toll that parenting a child with chronic illness has on me. I beat myself up a lot. I feel like my brain is mush a lot of the time, and my multitasking abilities have virtually disappeared. I lose my temper if there’s too many demands on me at once, and I can’t work in the middle of chaos like I once could. And then, I will glance at Willow and something in that mushy brain pings a warning. Some expression or maybe some change in coloring, I don’t know what, but that seemingly unreliable brain of mine tells me to check her for low blood. And it’s usually right.

From the beginning, we told Willow that although she had an illness, she also had a superpower. She can tell when her blood sugar is low, high, or changing quickly. Even at age three, she realized that this awareness could save her life. And although I’m not as accurate as her, I think I’ve learned that superpower too.

I wonder what other superpowers I have, or you have, that we don’t even know about. Things that come on by instinct, that ping a warning in our brains, even in the midst of forgetfulness and frustration. Forrest, for example, can tell me what pace he’s running without any device whatsoever and speed up and slow down to make sure he’s hitting his goals. I have no idea how he does it. A good friend of mine can ask the most insightful questions, questions that might seem rude or hurtful, and do it in a way that makes me feel cared for rather than judged.

So in the same way I am bittersweetly grateful for that blood sugar sixth sense, I am grateful for this technicality that gets me the vaccine. In some ways, it is another tool that lets me continue on a difficult path. I’d venture a guess that those superpowers that I see in others come from having to walk similarly difficult paths. Paths that, on first glance, look easy because of those superpowers. It’s no problem to care for Willow! I just have to look at her and I know how she’s doing! Forrest can run a 5k easily! He can slow down to help me or speed up to challenge himself!

But the paths began before the superpowers arrived. None of us started able to do extraordinary things. Those instincts? They came from a deep familiarity with hardship. Which is, I suppose, a heartening thought to those of us currently in hardship. I wonder what our superpowers will be.