31. And 21.
My birthday is tomorrow, and Christmas is of course only a week away now. This is my absolute favorite time of year. People always ask if I hate having a birthday so close to Christmas. When I was a kid, I didn’t like it because I thought the holiday took away from the specialness of having a birthday. But now as an adult I absolutely love having a holiday birthday. It’s such a festive, joyful, fun time of year, and everyone is already in a celebratory mood so you just kind of throw your birthday in there too and everyone is down to party. The whole month of December feels like one long, awesome party to me, and I love it.
This year I am turning 31. And I cannot believe the year we have had. We left jobs. We left the country, and visited six others. We moved cities. We got a dog. We got married. We got new jobs. We hated some things about Portland, we loved some things about Portland. This was a year chock-full of blessings and just as full of challenges. Indeed, my 30th year on this planet could not have been more crazy, scary, or exciting - and what more can you ask for during that pivotal, life-affirming year of 30? Truly, I have been blessed this year.
December has another special anniversary for me though. On the 24th, Christmas Eve Day, I will mark 21 years with diabetes. Two-plus decades with this disease. Wow. When I was first diagnosed, I wondered how it would be to grow up with this disease. Would I have a job, a family, a normal life one day? Would I travel and be able to do sports and have friends and go to college and have a career and not feel like I was defined by this disease? I didn’t know at age 10 if that would all be possible. All I knew is that Christmas would never be the same.
The year I was diagnosed, we were in Minnesota at my grandparents house. My grandpa, who was a retired endocrinologist, actually diagnosed me if you can believe it. Such an irony. I remember that night of my diagnosis, at our somber Christmas dinner, asking if I could have a cookie from my Aunt Florence’s cookie tree. The cookie tree was a project she did every Christmas with us kids. I remember my grandpa saying I could have one small cookie. He was just trying to help me feel ok with the fact that my entire world was changing.
My Aunt Florence passed away this year, but she did make it to age 100, like she had always hoped. Last week she would have been 101. This year in her honor, I made her famous cookie tree. It wasn’t as pretty as when she made it, but it tasted the same and it was just as fun as ever to make. Then I bolused with a few buttons on my pump, and followed my CGM line to make sure I didn’t spike too much, and I ate a few cookies from the tree in the kitchen of my Portland house, the dog circling at my feet and my husband upstairs typing away on a volunteer project.
That little 10 year old who was diagnosed with diabetes on Christmas had nothing to worry about. It really was all going to be ok.
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