My son told me yesterday, after I got home from work, that he had a pain and an ache in his mouth; he thought it might be his wisdom teeth coming in, and the people he’d asked in our EQ2 guild had told him it might well be. Ah, the new millennium, where actual family is thousands of miles away, and we use strangers in their place through the magical medium of the internet.
He didn’t actually tell me all this right off. Andy asked me how much it cost to get wisdom teeth pulled. He doesn’t have health insurance, and my constant worries what would happen to my kids if either got seriously ill in those years none of us were insured kept me awake nights. Last spring when Andy was seriously ill with pneumonia… I had no idea how I would pay for it. The hospital never billed us for his care…
I gave him two ibuprofen, told him that wisdom teeth, like all teeth, hurt coming in but didn’t necessarily need to be removed unless they didn’t have room and were crushing other teeth (as mine did). His toothache was gone this morning.
I wish his concerns didn’t always revolve around how much stuff cost. He told me he wouldn’t be continuing his art classes because he couldn’t afford the art supplies.
I’d love to add Andy to my health insurance, but it would take an extra hundred dollars from each paycheck, and I just don’t have that money to spare; he also wouldn’t be eligible past his birthday in April.
I hate being poor and not being able to provide my kids with their basic needs, though of course if he does end up needing his wisdom teeth removed, we’ll figure it out how to pay for it somehow. Free clinics got us through those years with no income.
Gov. Schwarzenegger wants to require all employers aside from the very smallest to offer health insurance to their employees by next summer, so if Andy gets his hoped-for job at Taco Bell next month, maybe I can finally breathe a deep sigh of relief that my son will be covered should something bad happen.
Civilized countries know the return from a healthy workforce more than pays for its cost. Someday the US will invest in its citizens and everyone will get the care they need.
Yesterday was also his meeting with his counselor at Palomar about his courses for the next semester. They included basic English and basic math, slightly more advanced than this semester but still well below the skills he should have had when he graduated high school. Because my son was classified emotionally disturbed, his teachers were more concerned that he learn to cope with stress than seeing that he learned anything. And he did learn how to cope with stress is better ways, but now he has to make up for the educational system’s failure to require academic success in college.
The good part to this is that he is doing it. He doesn’t have to go to college, but I strongly feel a college degree is still the best training to achieve financial success that there is, and I need to know my kids will survive and thrive after I am gone. I didn’t graduate from college and look at me now… poor and unable to afford health care for my son.
His counselor asked him to list two four-year universities he might transfer to; he listed the University of California, San Diego and my old school, the University of New Hampshire. I wonder if things would be any better if we moved back to New Hampshire.
But how could I leave my daughter and my soon-to-be-born grandson behind? ARGH! I should have taken that job with Sony in New York City back when they offered it, back when things were good. I thought the project they wanted to hire me for was stupid (and it really was), but I would have been in an excellent situation with plenty of opportunity; there was this New Jersey company that even wanted to hire me to work on some portable device for monitoring power plants. And given the whole Eastern seaboard to choose from, almost wherever my kids ended up on their own, from Washington DC to Maine, would not have been too far.
I’d be closer to my family (my sister Jenn lives in NYC!) so I wouldn’t have to be always trying to choose between being close to my kids in California or my parents and sisters on the East Coast.
Lesson here is, look at where you are now, and really, take a serious look where you want to be in ten years, twenty years, and make sure there’s a path between now and then. I had this sense that everything would just work itself out in a way acceptable to everyone, but that was naive.
