Bleed Red

This morning I spent on the phone trying to figure out how to get Bastian's one year doctor's appointment covered by our insurance company.

As it turns out, the insurance we get through the Beard's work only covers 9 general wellness appointments for the first two years the baby is alive.
This seems fine, but they don't tell you this when you have a baby.
There's no Welcome to the Fiscal Responsibilities of Your Child's Health packet that arrives in the mail. There are a lot of things that nobody tells you, but that's a whole different post.

The pediatrician of course wants the baby to be cared for to the best of her and her office's abilities.
When we brought the babe home from the hospital, he had jaundice, and she insisted we get a sample of his blood every day until his bilirubin levels came down to a percentage she thought was healthy.
She signed us up for general wellness visits once a month until he was 12 weeks old, and then every three months after.
If you're playing along at home, that means we've used up our nine visits now.
And she wants to see him again in March, June, and September before his second birthday.
Each visit, without insurance, costs a little over $350 dollars. That's a month's worth of groceries for us. It's not a small amount to us. It's not an amount we have to spare.

This means, that like many many many other people in this country, we have to take a risk and skip some of those appointments. We have to trust that the baby's development is going along as it should be, and that he can go until June before having another appointment. We can afford to pay for one, out of pocket, and I can't just wait a whole year to find out if he's doing as well as he should be. Besides, there are vaccinations he will need, and I am not naive enough to think we could get by without them.

Our situation is not dire by a long shot.

There are people out there who have no insurance, or who depend solely on the Affordable Care Act for their children's well being, and for whom, if the ACA is repealed, the health of their children will become a luxury they can't afford, to say nothing of their own health. The rift between the truly rich and the truly poor of this country will grow larger and more dramatic. The powers that be will be responsible for people without coverage going without antibiotics or preventative care for conditions that might kill them if left untreated long enough. Colds will develop into pneumonia. Wounds will become infected. Children will be unvaccinated against common childhood diseases which will then wreak havoc on their populations.

All for what?
A tax break?
The simple fact is we live in a society where "I don't want to share mine," is more important than "I have enough, why don't you have the extra?"

The fact of the matter is, I'm fantastically lucky.

I live in a liberal state.
I'm a caucasian woman in a heterosexual marriage with a caucasian man and I have a baby.
My husband makes an income which puts us above the poverty line (though only by a bit) for a family of three, and we can afford for me to stay home and take care of the baby as long as we keep a pretty modest budget. We don't go on vacation. We eat out once a week as a treat. We have one car so that the Beard can go to and from work. We live in a very pretty area, in a very small apartment. We don't buy things we don't need, and when something we own breaks, we repair it until the cost of repairing it is more than the cost of buying a new one.
We do each own an iphone, but they are several models behind the newest, and we are probably ready for an upgrade, but we're waiting for our tax refunds to do so.

We are lucky.

We are so very lucky.

Because of where we live and the trajectory of our privilege, we are safe in our apartment. I can walk places with the baby and I am not in danger of being jumped or assaulted. I can afford vegetables and healthy food for my child and myself. I can get exercise by walking next to the stunning beauty of the Atlantic ocean, and I can amuse my baby with the books we have, the netflix account we can afford, and the games I can play with him on our kitchen floor.
About ten minutes before i started writing this blog, he was tearing around the apartment with a rattle in his hand, terrorizing the dog and crowing with joy.

I am not going to be one of the people who is affected if the ACA is taken away, but I am all too aware of how conditional that status is.

Like so many people, we live paycheck to paycheck, but we are not suffering by a long shot. My student loans are in forbearance for the moment, and that's a big deal. We have a couple of credit cards with small(ish) balances to pay off, but we are not "drowning" in debt the way I have friends who are.

We do however still fear that "big bad thing" that everyone who lives frugally does.

I am all too aware that should the car need 1,000 of work or the dog need to go to the vet, should Bob lose his job, or when Bastian gets old enough to need his own room, we need to be making more money. Our situation is tenuous and I tell myself it's okay because it's temporary. I will be reentering the workforce at some point. There are options for us.

But it was not long ago that there were not.

When I was nine, my parents filed for bankruptcy.
We had to leave the country I was born in to live in rural Canada where my mother's relatives could help us get back on our feet. There was never a time that I was not being yelled at to save money.
I wore hand me down clothes that got me teased at school. The first bra I ever wore had belonged to a second cousin I never met, and it was made the year I had been born.
My parents never used the clothes dryer because it cost too much to run it, and so I had to hang my laundry outside, and in the winter, I hung it in the basement, which was damp, and so nothing ever fully dried and all my clothes smelled like mildew, which also got me teased at school.
We could not afford nice toiletries, so my mom bought three for a dollar men's speedstick deodorant for us to use and shampoo and conditioner which we cut with water to make it last longer.
We ate a lot of hot dogs, stringy meat cooked for hours to make it chewable, minestrone soup from a powdered mix kept in a huge old can. We fried potatoes in oil and then when the oil was cool we poured it into an empty pickle jar to reuse the next week. We didn't throw out the oil until it was clouded and brown, studded with burnt potato bits.

In my twenties I was poor too, but it was different. It was starving artist poor (at least that's what i told myself). I had worked so hard in school only to graduate, with the rest of my generation, into a world with no jobs for us.
I worked retail and coffee shops to get by. I ate frozen burritos and saved up my tips to buy clothes and bottles of cheap wine.
When I got married, it was using a tax refund. My dress was $150 dollars, and I felt like a queen in it. I know money doesn't matter.

Until it does.

Until you have the bad month or the shitty year that lands you in the hole you spent your whole life clawing your way out of.

This is why I am writing this, because I know what a big deal it is to be broke, to not go to the doctor when you are sick, to not get stitches even though you need them because the cost of the ER is too much.

I am not there now, but I have been there, and I know there is very little margin between being where I am and being there, and it has nothing to do with how good a person you are.
It has nothing to do with being "smarter" "better with money" "harder working" or anything else that the truly elite like to claim it does.

The truth is it has everything to do with privilege.

It is up to us, the people who have things, including voices, to stand up for the people who do not.
It is up to us to use the little platform we have to stop motions that will genuinely kill people just because they do not have enough money.

We are not living in 1700's France, but we need some of the fire of Mme DeFarge.

As I wrote down the claim numbers and redid my budget and figured out that my kid is going to see the doctor less than he should this year because I can't afford for him to go more than that instead of feeling sorry for my situation, I thought about all the people who are in one much worse.

We need to do more of that.

And we need to to share more.

Remember:
If you have enough, then you have more than most, and if you have more than enough, even just a little more, it only serves you better to share it, to help others with your extra. You are never as far from being the one who needs help yourself, and there is nothing between you versus them.

We all bleed red.