Entries from November 2007 ↓

by Tracee Sioux

Be kind to your children. They will pick your nursing home.

When my mentoring group was looking for a service project and the idea to visit a nursing home came up, I took the group to see my children’s great-grandfather. There is a sign on Grandpapa’s wall that says Be kind to your children, They will pick your nursing home.

Children record everything we do, it’s vital to teach them how to treat those older than them and those more vulnerable. If you can show the more vulnerable they have the power to cure loneliness in the elderly. . . well, that’s two birds.

I don’t just want my children to want to help people. I want them to feel powerful enough to do something to improve things.

As faith without action is dead, empathy and compassion without action is both painful and useless.

It does no one any good to feel bad about the situations girls face if we’re not going to do anything about it. It’s little help to feel sad for the elderly if you’re not going to do visit them.

I want my children to feel compassion and empathy. But, not if it’s only futile pain in their hearts. I want them to know and understand that the power to change the world rests in their hands.

by Tracee Sioux

Our friends Jen and Aaron are in a health insurance nightmare. It’s a predicament millions of American’s face. They are middle-class. They work hard, they live within their means and are very frugal. Their situation merits attention because they are doing everything right, yet they find themselves in an impossible situation.

One of their twins has cerebral palsy and a seizure disorder. On Jlogged Jen talks about the nightmare she’s been living in as a mother trying to advocate for her son. For a while they have benefited from SCHIPS, but now they make too much money to qualify for any programs. They’ve been being bounced back and forth between public programs due to clerical errors.

Too much to qualify doesn’t equal ability to pay for the excessively high costs of health care. That’s the rub.

My son is uninsurable. No insurance company will touch him with a ten foot pole. We make too much to get help, but not enough to cover catastrophic costs of health care. We aren’t poor enough. If my husband can find a job with group health insurance it will help, but it is still far from a perfect solution. Until then we are stuck. Our options are limited and all of them suck: a) get a divorce, b) lie, c) put my son in a state nursing home facility d.) go without insurance risking bankruptcy, and going without care that will effect my son for the rest of his life. None of these are acceptable, and this is what the richest country in the world has to offer the disabled children of America. It. Is. Sick.

There is a disconnect in this country about health care. I think those who are against universal care haven’t received a true medical bill in quite some time. They are under the illusion that healthcare has remained reasonably affordable.

That, or they are insulated from the astronomical costs of healthcare. They are insulated either by good health or unusually high incomes.

If you think any American family could afford to carry the costs of a medical needs child on $50,000 ($12,000 higher than the median income) a year try this: Get out your budget. Add in $300 a month in maintenance medications. Add in $125 every week each for speech therapy and physical therapy. (Lucas is 5 and isn’t speaking yet, whether or not he gets speech therapy now has a big impact on whether he will ever speak.) Then add in one life flight and hospital visit at $150,000.

The costs of medical care have exceeded the means of American families if they carry the burden alone. Yet, there is enough resources and wealth as a whole to provide care.

Go over to Jlogged to read more about her family’s predicament.

Our daughters have a right to see women in the picture too. I think they deserve to have all opportunities open to them, including that of President of the United States. Women have yet to be represented.

To ignore the white maleness of power is to deny daughters the reality of their gender.

by Tracee Sioux

Mommy, can I have that Kid’s Washer & Dryer by Little Colorado for Christmas?

No way. You don’t need to pretend to do laundry. If you want to do laundry, you can do it for real. I promise there will be plenty of opportunities for laundry when you grow up.

I don’t know if I’m right about this or not. It’s just gut instinct, but these toys piss me off.

On one hand, I can’t get over how much my life looks exactly like my mother’s life did. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I absurdly expected feminism to do away with the drudgery of housework. Now I realize it’s not feminism that will banish housework from my life – it’s money to pay the housekeeper. Duh.

Sometimes – usually while I’m doing the perpetually defeating job of cleaning the house – I come to the realization that housekeeping really was a full time job in the first place. It was a falacy that housewives did nothing all day. All the feminist revolution got me was more work. Too much work. More work than I can do.

I’m pissed off about these toys and the expectation that my daughter will grow up to be a housewife or a housekeeper. But, why shouldn’t she?

I do want motherhood for her. I don’t necessarily want her to miss out on being home with her children for several years.

There’s also a big part of me that believes these toys should be marketed to BOYS for a few decades to see if we can even out the housework load still being heavily born by women. To be fair, several of the commercials and ads are inclusive of boys this Christmas season.

I realize that my life might have been easier, better organized and cleaner, had I accepted that keeping house was going to be an inevitable part of it. Especially while raising young children.

But, still my gut instinct is to ignore requests for these kinds of toys and steer her in less stereotypical “housewife” direction.

Why does she want cleaning supplies as toys anyway?

What is your stance on housekeeping paraphernalia as play?

I read this blog about a mother’s struggle to insure her special needs children – the real kind – in our current insurance system. Her child is being dropped because the insurance company isn’t making any money off insuring her.

Basically once they are in the high risk pool, normal insurance will never cover them again, even if they “outgrow” their issues. They are a health risk, and insurance companies can’t really make money off of those kids.

Did you know that our state provides an SCHIP program through the very company that KayTar currently has insurance through? With identical benefits? Did you know that we are eligible for this program if you use our net income, but if you go by our gross income we are just over the line? Just over the line! We don’t even receive any of that money! Do you know where it goes? Taxes. We are paying the government to provide services like this for people in need and the TINY bit of money that we give is what keeps us from not being eligible for the programs ourselves. How can that be right?

The bill President Bush recently vetoed would have provided insurance for my kids. Not some faceless huddled masses. These kids. MY kids.

Read the full HealthCare is a Bitch.

But for the grace of God, there go I.

We’ve always been about $60 gross over the income limit for the Pre-K, free lunch and SCHIPS. The only major difference is our children are healthy and we have corporate health insurance.

My prayers are with you Kyla.