“By praying for one another, we’re giving each other insulin,” my friend A says after we’ve dropped off our kids and dashed over to the near by cafeteria, half a block from our kids Upper Westside school. We selected the side booth, to the right, our go to position, permitting us to set our backs against the room, against the outside world, for a time.

“This is our praying booth,” A says, her head cocked, causing her long, chestnut hued locks to tumble around her small shoulders.

“Just like a confessional,” I answer. “But only with more crying.”

We chuckle, motivated not by humor but from truth.

I’ve always been a praying sort. First I prayed for a child, and then I prayed for that child’s good health. Now my praying has taking on a smorgasbord quality, prayers sent up here and there, from the time my feet hit the floor to midnight when I turn down the covers and I launch my final salute just before sleep. They run from, “Please God let there be enough milk for breakfast and coffee”; to “Please God let the subway come now so we can get to school on time,” to “Please God let my Spanx smooth out my pouch enough that I don’t regret wearing this dress out of the house.”

Becoming a mom may have ramped up my requests. Through my friendship with, A I have lifted up my prayers to mystic levels. Praying for others will do that, taking you out of your own head, your perceived quagmire of troubles and problems. Once upon  a time I’d believed serious trouble stalked me. Not anymore. Sure, I have bad days. Living a faith-based life does not make you immune from crampy-hit-me-with-another-bar-keep-days. But whatever thorny briars I land on are more of the artisanal variety, handmade by my or another’s neglect, or circumstance, or my miscalculation. Now I pray for right out comes on a higher level. For you see, through witnessing A’s journey, her worries, her journey, I know I have everything. A healthy kid is the greatest gift any parent can have.

“We happened to visit our old church last week,” A says as she takes on the jet-fuel of caffeine, “and we happened to met a nurse advocate, one we could never afford. She’s going to help us get the equipment we need.”

“That’s God at work,” I say.

“She only works with private diabetes clients, so she’s really a gift.”

A’s mouth says the nurse advocate is a gift. But it’s her eyes, gray-green and still that contain oceans of worry, dark half moons set below that tell of her long night that speak the loudest.

Ever since my friend’s four-year-old daughter, a bright shining child with dancing eyes just like her mom, received a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes there have been odd gifts that have come her family’s way through this new upside world. The first gift came when A and her husband took their daughter to the hospital after the child started vomiting with such a force on vacation than it moved them toward the nearest emergency room rather than to the airport to board a flight to the east coast as planned. After the EMS team stabilized their four-year-old, five days later, the doctors informed A and her husband that if their family of three had boarded the aircraft for the east coast, only two of them would have exited the plane in New York City.

Now A lives in a world where she wakes her kid throughout the night to test her blood sugar levels, a land where the poking and prodding and worry has no end.

“Forgive me for saying this,” another mom at our school moaned in the sealed, privacy of the elevator car as we descended to the first floor and headed into our day after drop off, “But it’s not like her daughter has cancer, I mean people don’t died from diabetes.”

Heat crackled on my skin. Like gas and electricity. “No, actually she could die,” I blared back leaving off the “you asshole” final punctuation to my statement. “She could fall into a coma if her blood sugar level plummets, while sleeping and not wake up.”

“Oh, I didn’t know, “ the mom said to the back of my head as I huffed off down the street.

Only in New York does one need to qualify just how bad of a time you’re having. Across America, when you share news of this level, people just give their condolences. Ask if they can help. Send out prayers if they are the praying kind. In Manhattan folks want you to prove just how bad it is, say, on a scale from one to ten because, hey they could be working on an eleven situation you don’t know about.

Since last August A and her family have always hit an eleven.

“Getting your kid up school is equal to executing a military operation every day,” a mom once said to me. But at least troops will listen to their general; they’re trained to listen. A four-year-old? Forgetaboutit. And wrangling a four-year-old with Type 1 Diabetes is like the invasion of Normandy. Every damn day. A bad start to my day is finding Julia in the kitchen, just as we need to leave the house, chortling, “Look at me Mommy, look at me!” standing buck naked. (Yes, it happened last week.) A’s bad day has her kid sneaking a piece of candy, or a carb and A discovering this news when she tests her blood sugar, or when her daughter starts to go pale, or body’s wild ride of natural insulin that still thinks it can drive the car, shooting out wild spikes. Mayhem. Then A and her husband must bolt from their home and dash to the hospital in the middle of the night. (It’s happened three times since August.) An even worse day on the heartbreak scale, an epic four-year-old melt down on the kitchen floor crests with, “Mommy I don’t want to have diabetes anymore.”

“Type 1 Diabetes typically affects young people and only represents about 5 to 10% of the population,” says Ron Rosedale, MD, author of The Rosedale Diet, and co-founder of the Colorado and Carolina Centers for Metabolic Medicine. With Type 1, the pancreas is unable to produce insulin.” So just as a young body starts to grow, a break occurs. And lasts throughout life. First A must get her daughter an insulin pump, and then to respect the pump then living with the pump, working it into her teenagehood into adulthood, into both of them feeling confident enough that her child won’t experiment in the ways most of us did. Typical teenage hubris could take her daughter’s life.

So, I up my prayer game. I remember that God is always at work whether I can see God or not, kind of like electricity, or the subway or Kevin Bacon. I recall that my job is to be there for A through our gangster mommy lives in the Big Apple.

“Life is tough,” Pastor Paul constantly reminds his New York Flock  “and if you’re going through hell don’t build condo there.” But there are times when you, whether you want to or not will have a motel stay, suffering long-term durations in hell.

“I understand how this can strain a marriage,” A says.

“But you guys are strong,” I say.

I know that A and her husband cling to God as much as one another. I love that about her. When their nerves fray, she’s the first to say sorry, no matter who launched he first stone.

So far, I’ve never married. Never taken the vow. But I know the promise of friendship. Real connection. And more than through bad dates and broken relationships, and random layoffs I know what I friendship needs. I know how to be a good friend through a bad medical report, and cheating husband, alcohol rehab, and the murder of a child.

So I come a sit with my friend in hothouse of illness and motherhood in the crying booth and offer up cool drink of water by listening with my full on heart.