A few examples include my driver's license (expired one year as of my birthday), a tuition reimbursement I need to petition for (which would amount to $600), a class in which I have an "incomplete" (which, if I don't complete by May will preclude my graduation), the cars whose expired registrations only come to my awareness when, annually, they are ticketed in front of my home, and...
Ryan and I are pretty much uninsured. I have catastrophic insurance that will pay to sew my leg back on if it falls off, but only after they have collected all of our assets, including our firstborn. Ryan has a preexisting condition that makes him ineligible. I have been able to ride the cognitive discomfort of knowing that if anything bad happens we are screwed because everyone involved who has the potential to get screwed is an adult who should know better. However, having taken on the task of creating a separate-yet-dependent human being, I feel keenly my sense of responsibility for making sure that he, and his incompetent parents, don't die needlessly.
Which brings me to this moment in time. This moment, where I sit where I have been sitting for TWO! hours on hold with the Utah Medicaid office from whom I have been disconnected TWO! times. I am ready to kill someone but, as is so often the case with bureaucracy, my only hindrance is that I don't know who to kill. What a pickle!
I am practicing my deep breathing.
I know that this step isn't optional; there is no other forseeable way to insure the kid I decided to conceive. His existence wasn't his idea. I took him on, and now I will sit on hold until I am eighty five, entertaining homicidal fantasies and considering the possibility that it might actually be better to die than to complete this process. Paperwork makes my brain melt. This is not a maternally advantageous trait.
I think I have the potential to be a fun mom. I'm pretty sure I can cook food that will sustain life and I can teach my progeny appropriate table manners and grammar. Pumpkinfest alone should earn me some mom-points. What I foresee is being the mom who spends weeks planning the most fun, elaborate field trips ever devised but then forgetting to sign the permission slip so the kids stay home and watch Dora.
I can see how parenting is a refiner's fire. I'm not even a full-blown parent and already, my weaknesses! How much more difficult they are to deny!
5 comments:
Girlfriend. I am so sorry. Good luck with the ridiculous process of obtaining a birth certificate and social security card after the child is born... although I remember that process being easier in Utah than it is in Indiana.
The key to the medicaid office - ask for a supervisor. Seriously. It will save you gobs of time.
Good luck with that. Have you looked into Chip? I don't know when their enrollment is. We never qualify because my dad has my name on some of his business, so on paper I have more "income" than I actually have for reals.
My sister just got WIC because of having to formula feed ($15 a can? Extortion) and the people at the office told her to come in as close to 7 am on a thursday as she could. Apparently that is the magic slow time. I wonder if Medicaid ever has such a time?
PS. It is a government conspiracy to take all of our money and never give any back. I feel it is immoral that a person with a BA in English finds the tax code unreadable to the point that it is almost impossible to decipher and do my own income taxes and understand what I am doing at the same time.
SO frustrating. Fortunately, I think kids with fun/good-cooking moms turn out WAY better than kids with moms who are good at paperwork :)
Perhaps you can outsource.
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