I’m pretty sure that God puts certain people in our paths for two reasons:
- He wants us to bless them
- He wants them to bless us
Sometimes, it’s both.
Until I “met” Jeannie Ewing through her blog, Love Alone Creates, and her work at CatholicMom.com, I never considered myself a caregiver.
What was I thinking? I have a teenager with Type 1 Diabetes. While he’s quite independent and generally adept at handling most of his own care, Hubs and I are still, most definitely, his caregivers.
That means we wake him up in the night to give him juice when he sleeps through his continuous glucose monitor’s alarm. (Last night, 5 times. That’s unusual. But it can definitely be frustrating and exhausting.) It means we measure his food and calculate the carbs on every recipe. It means we cannot let him leave the house without his backpack containing insulin, a juice box, and emergency glucose supplies. Ever. It means every-3-months visits to the endocrinologist and the dread of ever having to repeat the emergency-room episode just before Thanksgiving 2013 when we learned his diagnosis and just how sick he was.
Jeannie has written the book on caregiving–more accurately, the workbook on caregiving, and I’m going to be working through that book. It’s called Navigating Deep Waters: Meditations for Caregivers. She speaks from her own experience as a mom of two young daughters with special needs: one child on the autism spectrum and one with a craniofacial disorder called Apert Syndrome.
Jeannie is wise beyond her years and she has a lot to teach me. She recently shared one of her articles I’m going to keep handy and reread often: 5 Ways I’ve Changed Since Becoming a Special Needs Mom.
You don’t have to be a caregiver, or a special-needs mom, to appreciate the wisdom in that article. But if you are, you’ll understand just how priceless a gift Jeannie has given you by taking the time to write and share from her experience.
Please note that the link to Jeannie’s book at Amazon is an affiliate link. Your purchase of this book through my Amazon link costs you nothing extra but helps support expenses associated with this website.