March 16, 2015
Food and fun in Italy: Part 2
By special request, more pictures from Italy! In no particular order ….
family
Farewell to the best boy in the world
About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Read MoreMarch 13, 2015
Trusting yourself and invisible diseases
There’s a scene in West Wing when President Bartlet comes to the Oval Office, hopped up on narcotics that always cracks me up. I’m only like that on painkillers the first 1 time I take them, they just don’t seem to take after that, but I’ve definitely been at work on one of those woozy days.
All sorts of fun, lemme tell ya.
But that was me for a lot of years – I insisted that I knew myself, that I can do more. Sometimes I can. Evidenced by the times I powered through some pretty rough times. But for some reason, this led me to the conclusion that I’m just being lazy when I don’t want to do something, I didn’t trust that despite my track record, I would get back up again if I just let myself sit and be still.
Rest? What the heck is that?
I was certain as anything that because I wanted to sleep for a week or lay down forever, I couldn’t rest. If I let myself have a break, I’d never stop being on break.
Talk about underestimating and being totally out of touch with myself.
“Here’s what I think we ought to do… [long pause] Was I just saying
something?”
That distrust got even worse with pregnancy. What do you mean I need to rest? What do you mean I shouldn’t be lifting all those heavy things? What do you … oooooff. Oh. Oh that’s what you mean.
I’d thought that I’d accepted my limitations years ago, but really, I hadn’t. Or at least, I wasn’t at peace with it so routinely pushed myself too much, and crashed and burned.
It took being pregnant to finally respect my limitations at any level – there were days I simply absolutely could not do more than the bare minimum. It took the whole length of pregnancy for me to understand why things seemed to be different.
I was still living with the so-called invisible diseases: chronic pain and fatigue.
Meanwhile the pregnancy was a tangible and visible thing that also brought with it pain and fatigue. The key difference here was that visibility and subsequent familiarity.
People weren’t confused by pregnancy. This is a known quantity for the most part and the right questions were obvious.
The considerate ones paid attention to how long I could be on my feet, were conscious of the fact that I shouldn’t be lifting things, etc. These are same considerations that I’d need for my pain and fatigue but could never ask for because it’s simply not clear why I’d need them. Rather than explain and face skepticism and loads of unwanted medical advice from the uninformed nonmedical professional, I always just stiff upper-lipped it and figured out my own accommodations as best I could. Accepting help when pregnant was foreign and uncomfortable but I had to and the experience was so different from asking for help solely because of the usual culprits.
Having figured this out, I don’t exactly know what to do with the information. Maybe I will one of these days but, for now, I’ll settle for not being so hard on myself. Life has already got that angle covered, thanks.
March 11, 2015
Parenthood: week 1
As might be expected, the first week post-birth was a blur of sleep deprivation, oddly defined shifts of baby coverage where at least one of us would be found asleep with a happy sleeping baby snoozing away on top of us, and really strange conversations.
Bonus points if you catch all the references.
Precarious Road to Recovery
How’s your new pillow? Is it big enough? I’m not calling you fat!!
Uh. It’s fine? I think… ?
My body is broken.
Dirty diapers
Here, let me help you with that.
Jayne, this is something the Captain has to do for himself.
No, no it’s not!
No, it’s not.
[trying to fend off a screaming fit] You look SO relaxed, baby, you look SOOO relaxed.
BATGIRL!
[Me, waking from a dead sleep with baby on lap] MASSIVE POO WE HAVE A MASSIVE POO INCOMING
Crying Infants
It’s like Defcon 5. I’m not even sure if that’s how it works. The more serious Defcon.
Oh just set her down. With any luck…
Our luck? You notice anything particular about our luck these past few days? Any kind of pattern?
[frustrated] I wish I had breasts!
Oh honey, you sound like your heart is breaking. Did you pee?
Seamus, we didn’t break the baby.
Seamus, the chair isn’t ALWAYS the answer to LB’s crying.
Seamus, stop herding more responsible adults to the room to fix it. This cannot be fixed.
Nursing
You have TWO choices. Right or left. There is no other option.
Hey is the Milk Bar open yet?
The Milk Bar is open.
Child, there is no sustenance to be had from your hand. Stop eating it.
Child, Auntie isn’t lactating. You’ll get no satisfaction there.
Recordkeeping
I’m seeing a lot of poo here.
Well, you’re not wrong.
Family Integration
Mmmm… I love the smell of fresh baby in the morning.
Seamus, your sibling is fine. (Did you read the letters? READ THE LETTERS)
Seamus: *sniffs the baby’s head.*points at the rocker*
Seamus, LB doesn’t need the –
Seamus: *points at the rocker emphatically*
March 9, 2015
How close to the edge can you get?
I think about homelessness a lot more than your average middle-class partnered person might.
We’re living my financial high point right now, why can I still taste tomatoey canned sardines and rice porridge thinned with water to stretch? True, the flip side might be that it’s all downhill from here but it’s also true that I’ve not been a slim paycheck away from Final Warning-stamped bills, rent going overdue, and making just the interest on the credit card bills for almost a decade now. Prosperity, not poverty, should be the reflex.
We weren’t always a nickel toss from disaster but we lived in the fire swamp, a wander into the lightning sandpit wasn’t inconceivable. In those days, due dates were more like suggestions. Good thing I didn’t apply that to homework or library books! My nine year old brain didn’t recognize the signs of juggling bills to avoid overdrafts, I just obediently post-dated the checks as instructed. Well trained not to ask questions, it was another 8 or 9 years before I grasped what that said about our finances.
Young adulthood was equally precarious. There’s a big gap in my memory of my college years because all I did was work, school, and take care of Mom. After hiding her diagnoses for years, she’d finally admitted she had serious health problems and when I was 17, it became my second job to look after her. (That had a lot to do with why I feel responsible for decisions made long before I was a competent adult.)
My parents faced incredible challenges immigrating to America and in some ways, there was absolutely nothing more that I could do for them.
I can’t help but feel for them. They struggled in a time where the kinds of debt reduction and financial information we now have access to simply didn’t exist. Before the internet? It truly seemed like the Information Dark Ages. If the internet and money blogs and forums were a thing when I was 13, rather than 17, I can’t help but think maybe I could have made a real difference.
But that is exactly why I am so fully aware of the consequences of failure.
Questions about homelessness and what we do about it, posed in SaverSpender’s recent post, haunt me. What more can I do?
It’s a seriously personal question as I do my level best to keep my immediate family off the streets. I am their last resort, the last one with any dignity or safety, that is. It’s neither an easy or a painless task, and I do get frustrated with failures to communicate or comply. But it still startles me when people feel it’s appropriate to respond, in the face of one frustration or another with my family, that they ought to learn their lesson, that Dad ought to be left to suffer the consequences of his actions.
Perhaps on the face of it, that is the most logical answer. But is that really so simple? Is it that cut and dried as a human being to say that another human, older and unable to get hired back into the workforce, should be taught that the lesson for irritating me is to lose basics like heat, water, and shelter? What lesson is that to to be teaching someone at this stage of life? And what kind of person does that make me if I’m willing to throw him out on the street? Not that I spend a lot of time mirror-gazing, but it would even more drastically reduce how much I could bear the sight of myself.
I’ve observed that not even my oldest friends, though incredibly conservative politically, have ever responded to my sighs over the situation that the “obvious” answer is to do anything but continue to treat my family with grace and take care of myself. Never have they suggested that I ought to abandon my family in some moral object lesson.
“There but for the grace of God go I” is always in my periphery. I’m chronically ill but cannot afford to rest on my laurels because I am their last line of defense. And my responsibility grows with each day.
I don’t know what the answer to homelessness is, other than making sure no one I care for has to endure it.
March 6, 2015
Net Worth & Money News: February 2015
Change from Jan 2015: 3.8% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
***
Since I’m down to half-salary, I’ve stopped my contributions to savings. Our cash flow is much tighter but we’re still sending some of PiC’s salary to savings so we haven’t lost all momentum.
***
My 2014 IRA contribution needs to come out of savings – boo.
***
It’s been challenging making the time to stay on top of the everyday stuff like our finances, writing, cooking. Short month, short notes!
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March 4, 2015
Women’s Money Week: Coming home with a baby
This post is part of Women’s Money Week.
I have countless birth announcement emails from friends. They’re all cuddling their freshly born babies, sleek hair framing a tired but smiling face (is that MAKEUP??), painted nails, even classy jewelry.
Me? If I wasn’t already flattened I’d have collapsed into a pile of jelly legged oh my GOD is that over, really? face haloed by a wild nest of hair that could substitute for Medusa’s wig. Hands clasping the new LB that had been too swollen to wear my rings for months. Elegant, not so much. But realistic.
~~~
Our whole experience was surreal. Normal people race to the hospital when they’re told to come in. Us? Panic-repack and take hours to leave the house. Our hospital bag was already 95% completed the week before but going into labor triggered a squirrel-like need to have everything. In the end we hauled enough stuff to camp for five days and barely touched any of it.
Our doctor was right, we only needed one change of clothes each. There was no time or brain or energy to shower or change daily, and no point. We weren’t getting visitors and I had nowhere to be presentable. My job was recovering/pain management and taking care of Little Bean. I lived in hospital gowns and PiC was in charge of everything I couldn’t do: making phone calls, walk-soothing LB, changing diapers, leaving the room ever.
We went in exhausted and hungry so the conditions were sub-optimal. We did have a birth plan but only stuck to maybe 10% of it. That wasn’t a bad thing, they warn that might happen, but it was a little unsettling.
I wanted to manage without an epidural because frankly a needle in the spine and holding still during contractions just sounds like a recipe for disaster but the progression of labor was 0 to 60 once things got started so that intention went out the window. Never mind, I live in enough pain daily not to need to justify myself taking any pain management as needed, so I did, and I think it’s what enabled us to make it to the end, safely.
There were lots of times we felt like we were improvising throughout the long hours in an unfamiliar place and with only each other to lean on. In the end, I still think that was a good thing. I don’t like feeling crowded or too much unsolicited input, it often gets in the way of my best decisions and work. I needed everyone but PiC to just shut up with their “encouragement” during actual labor and I hurt one person’s feelings a bit asking her to not cheerlead because it was so distracting.
After many hours of pain and work, Little Bean joined us in the outside world, rather grumpily. Little did ze know that further indignities were to come: a bath, medications, ID bracelet, the works.
~~~
Hospital Costs: delivery, $150
We have an HMO which is considered either bottom or middle tier insurance from our employer, but I was really happy with it for prenatal and labor& delivery care. This isn’t the case for everyone, I’ve heard so many bad birth stories I was rather nervous, so we’re really grateful how it all turned out.
Our copay covered a three day stay in the hospital, all my meals, a celebratory meal for PiC, and all the medication and medical supplies I or Little Bean needed. Also diapers, wipes, a few other odds and ends.
I shared most meals with PiC as it was a pain for him to leave our room often. I ordered the maximum calories allowed and supplemented with our own snacks. Our nurses brought us extra food and drink as well because it seemed like I was always hungry or thirsty at odd hours even though I hadn’t begun breastfeeding in earnest.
The staff were pretty great. The residents mainly stayed out of the way and treated us like actual people, the nurses were on top of just about everything we needed. One nurse was kind of a jerk but that was at the end of her shift so we didn’t have time to care. Despite arriving at a hospital we’d never had time to tour, we felt it was the best stay we could have asked for.
Discharge costs: meds and supplies, ~$300
Our last nurse loaded us up with all the supplies we could ask for but the projected 4-6 weeks of recovery meant we still had to get refills of everything. Damn good thing I figured out the FSA thing.
Some of the stuff that was covered:
Prescription pain meds,
Maxi pads,
cold compresses,
A donut cushion for my traumatized underside,
Topical witch hazel spray and pads.
~~~
We came home exhausted and elated, with a month of leave planned together with our newest family member, and looking forward to introducing hir to our second “baby”.
March 2, 2015
Women’s Money Week: Maternity/parental leave in California
This post is part of Women’s Money Week.
SDI, FMLA, PFL, oh my!
PiC and I are eligible for protected leave in various forms after Little Bean’s birth, not all the same, and not all equal, so it was a bit of a maze figuring it all out.
PiC is entitled to six weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave under FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act), and qualifies under the birth of a child. This has to be taken within one year of birth.
His employer also pays for an amazing six weeks of parental leave to be taken during the year following the child’s birth.
I was not eligible for this but, as the child-bearer, I can take 6 weeks of partially paid, job-protected leave under CA’s SDI (state disability insurance) after birth. Pregnancy is considered a disability for this purpose and considering how you feel in the last few weeks, yeah, that’s justifiable. I could (should) also have taken off 4 weeks prior to our expected due date, and would have liked to, but I wasn’t willing to go to essentially half pay a month in advance. Chalk that up to my neuroses … if there was going to be a next time, I’d probably try to plan better so I could take that time.
Half pay was a hard pill to swallow as we stare down the barrel of childcare and various costs associated with a brand new human.
Quick Facts about FMLA
- FMLA is unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons
- You get 12 workweeks of leave in a 12-month period
- Your employer is only required to comply if they employ 50 or more employees.
Quick Facts about SDI
- You cannot apply for SDI until you have stopped earning wages. Therefore if you don’t go on leave until the last minute, you’ll have to wrangle paperwork when it’s least convenient: squalling baby, sleep fogged brain, fiddling with a state administered website. That’s one reason to go on leave earlier if you can afford it!
California now issues payments via an EDD Debit card instead of checks. I hated this until I realized this is really good for the unbanked – if you don’t have a bank account, getting a check from EDD would be another barrier to receiving much needed income.
Following his FMLA and my SDI leaves, taken concurrently, we are both eligible to take an additional six weeks of PFL (Paid Family Leave)
Quick Facts about PFL
- You can roll directly over from an SDI claim to a PFL claim.
- Covers individuals who take time off of work to care for a seriously ill child, spouse, parent, or registered domestic partner, or to bond with a new child.
- This is also partially paid at 55% for six weeks.
Because we don’t have a great plan for childcare (that is a whole other post/conversation) once our leaves are up and we don’t have much in the way of a support network, we have to be careful to take enough leave to recover from the whole ordeal of childbirth and bringing a new baby home but not so much that we’re out of luck later on if we have to deal with health problems.
We had a good first well baby visit, for which we are eternally thankful, but you never know what tomorrow may bring.
At the same time, these first weeks and months are precious. We don’t know if we’ll do this again so we are trying to be present for this experience, the good, bad, and poopy. Paid leave makes it possible to actually do that: support each other, get to know how best to care for our new family, establish new routines, and actually recover. There’s a darn good reason sleep deprivation is a torture tactic, most of us do not truly function well on the couple hours of sleep that a newborn allows!
Ultimately, I think it just makes so much more sense to have some kind of parental leave policy that gives new parents the space they need to regroup. For us, I would feel like we can return to work with a renewed sense of purpose.
For other states, have a look at Babygate.