I awkwardly buckle Maya and Oliver into their car seats, hiding my pained expression from them. This is how my every day starts. Living with rheumatoid arthritis means daily pain, but it's a challenge I have chosen to face head on.

Just over two years ago, when my second child, Maya, was born, I found myself suffering from joint pain in my hands. Assuming it was just from fatigue from all-night feedings, I initially ignored it. When I found my fingers unbendable and swollen like hotdogs, I realized something was going on. After many months of doctors' appointments and blood work, a rheumatologist at Hospital of Special Surgery in New York City (where I was living at the time) finally diagnosed me with rheumatoid arthritis.

Learning to live with a chronic illness at 33 was the greatest challenge I have ever faced. At the beginning, I was scared, angry and overwhelmed. I had big, important questions: "Would I live to see my children grow into adulthood?" "Would I always be in pain?" "Would I be a cripple?" Would my body become deformed?" "What would the side effects be of the various medications?" And smaller but equally frightening questions: "Would I still be able to change my Oliver and Maya's diapers? "Would I have the strength to lift my children?" "Would the steroids I was taking taint my breast milk that Maya was ingesting?" "Could I continue to do the typing essential to my writing-intensive job?" "Would I still be able to do my 20-minute daily walk to and from work?"

While many of these questions and worries still enter my mind from time to time, I have learned to face my illness with strength, courage and conviction. I receive excellent medical care, voraciously keep up with arthritis literature and discoveries, have an unyieldingly supportive family, and swim for exercise, which is easy on my joints but still great exercise for my body and soul. I take a cocktail of drugs, one of which includes a weekly self-injection, which my devoted husband administers for me. The medications help, but do not fully eliminate the pain, which I still have in my hands, feet, jaw and Achilles tendon.

Despite all of this, I have found a lifeline through the Arthritis Foundation. My involvement with the foundation has provided a support network and been truly life affirming. For the second year in a row I am on the planning committee of the Foundation's Triangle Arthritis Walk, which this coming year will be on April 18, 2009. I have met friends who are also fighting arthritis, whose stories and experiences have inspired me. Through the Walk, I have the opportunity to raise money to fund research to fight this disease. Forty-six million men, women and children have arthritis, which is the number one cause of disability in the United States. Taking action to find new treatments and an eventual cure for arthritis gives me hope and makes waking up each day to my stiff, achy body a little less painful. With your help, it is possible my illness will be cured in my lifetime, and that would be the greatest gift I could ever receive.

I no longer focus on my physical challenges and fear about my future. Instead, I choose to live in the moment, and appreciate everything that I can do. While there might be physical pain when I pick up Maya, climb the stairs one more time to sooth Oliver's nighttime cries, sit down to type this story, bake my husband his favorite meal, or play tag in the park with Oliver and Maya, it's pleasurable pain that I choose to ignore.

Perhaps because arthritis is not life-threatening, people do not always realize the seriousness and difficulty of this illness. While I have learned simple solutions to some of my daily challenges, such as trying to teach Oliver, 4, and Maya, 2, how to get in and out of their car seats all by themselves, I still have hope that a cure for arthritis is in sight. Please consider joining this cause, with your help routine tasks will one day cause me and the millions others like me no pain.

Alyse Levine can be contacted at adlevine1@gmail.com