Ten months into parenthood we got the bombshell. While I poured a margarita to celebrate finishing up another semester of essay grading, my wife called from up in the mountain town of Breckenridge––she and Lucas were up there visiting with her mom––to say that our firstborn was heading to the emergency room. He'd been a little sick for a couple of days, and the first doctor who saw him thought it might be a virus exacerbated by the altitude. 

It got worse. Eyes rolling back, severe dehydration, pissing through diapers. At the emergency room, they figured out it was diabetes. (Ten months old is early to be diagnosed, but not unheard of.) They tried twelve different spots to stick Lucas with an IV so they could  hydrate him before finally inserting a dangerous needle into his jugular vein. If there hadn't been a new hospital up there––and I mean brand new, just opened a couple weeks before––he would have died. (You can read in more detail about on the next page in this path.) We didn't take pictures then, as people usually don't in miserable situations, but here's one that came shortly thereafter that shows his fighting spirit. 

He wasn't going to quit, so I couldn't either. Compared to the fight Lucas had to keep alive, my fight for selfhood seemed paltry. Parenthood is going to take away your free time, there's no doubt about that. Everybody scrambles and most of us (except the saintliest among us) bitch about it. Whether fathers or mothers, we become machines for serving our children. I absolutely felt the loss of selfhood that goes with losing "me time," but the whole diabetes thing caused me to lose myself in a much more productive way. 

Of course it didn't seem productive at the time. Then it seemed like the absolute end of my selfhood. And don't a variety of religions, from my own Catholicism to the increasingly popular Zen Buddhism, stress a separation from the self's desires? Couldn't being violently separated from my own desires actually be good for me?

Indeed, it could. Lucas getting diabetes was a double-edged sword. On one side, it set up the incredibly stressful conditions for the earplug phase. I don't believe I would have been so stressed when Landon came along if I didn't have to constantly worry about a young child's incredibly volatile blood sugars. I was a basket case. So was the normally unflappable Jenny. Any phone call could be "Come quick, he's dying." To this day, I don't know exactly how we survived it.

On the other side of the sword, I don't believe I would have survived the earplug phase––or any other subsequent trial in my life––without two things I gained from the diabetes experience. One was a very visceral sense of the preciousness of life. And I don't mean that in a sappy greeting card kind of way, I mean that in an almost-watched-your-child-die-(twice) kind of way. The other was an incredible sense of teamwork with my wife. We had to communicate and work together. I mean HAD to. A child's life depended on it. What could have destroyed us as a double brought us together, which came in handy when I was on the edge of crazy.  

Without the subsumation of myself to caring for my eldest son, I would never have gotten as close to a nervous breakdown as I did. But without that same subsumation, I never would have survived it. This conundrum is so much a part of my identity that I no longer understand the self of long ago, who wasn't driven by it.