Life with older children

 As I write this I am sitting in the garden whilst the almost 18 year old child with diabetes is at a party and the almost 16 year old child with diabetes is not long back from the gym. I’ve logged onto my blog and realised that I’ve not posted for almost a year! That seems crazy to me as it’s not like nothing has happened this past year, in fact it’s probably been one of the most turbulent ones. 

It started back last year when we had a hospital admission with Victoria, she presented with high ketones and I had ran out of ketone strips so had no way of monitoring them. It left us no choice but to go to A&E locally, which in all fairness to them and point of entry they were extremely efficient and red flagged us straight through as they suspected DKA…it wasn’t, however, the experience was extremely frustrating. Around the same time the eldest child moved out, not she is 20 so it was always just around the corner, but the way it happened was quite traumatic for me. Thankfully it has all worked out and she now lives less than a mile away, so literally just around the corner.

Victoria had another hospital admission, this time with a stomach bug which resulted in high ketones and a two night stay in hospital, made all the more exciting by me picking up the same bug! Foolishly I allowed her to drink from my water bottle……schoolgirl error.

That’s a quick catch-up so now the reason for the post. By nature I am a bit of a control freak, I can’t help it, and what I am finding now that the children are that much older is that I have much less involvement in their diabetes care. They both have the Minimed 780 pump which is an amazing bit of technology, it does much of the work itself, and I am only really needed to insert the sensors, neither of them like doing that. Other than that I am not needed, so have become increasingly redundant. This is causing me much anxiety and stress, it’s hard for me to set back and allow them to make their own choices, especially as sometimes they are not the most sensible. Victoria has a much more reckless personality, and Samuel having had this condition for 13 years doesn’t want to be advised, especially by me as I don’t know how it feels to have diabetes. I get told by the pair of them that I don’t understand and never will, which is true. However, they don’t understand what it is like to be their mum and watching them do things that are not necessarily the most sensible. It’s such a tricky path to walk…..any advice I’d welcome! I suppose the only thing that I can really do is have the confidence that I have given the skills to make sensible decisions and always be their, in the background in case they need me.

Parenting big kids is much more challenging than little kids x