I'm mostly stuck on the couch sick today, so I don't have anything better to do than blog, and I just read a letter in an advice column that struck me. Here's a link:
http://www.creators.com/advice/annies-mailbox/help-rarely-comes-uninvited.html
In case you don't want to spend time reading, it's about a divorced woman with three children who works full-time, is looking for a second job, lives just above the poverty line, gets no government or any other kind of assistance, and doesn't have enough to eat.
There are a lot of people like her. I don't know her, but I feel for her because my family also hovers right around the poverty line, and we almost never qualify for any kind of assistance, often because of my disabilities.
One day a few years ago, a doctor decided that I was cured (which would be ground-breaking--I would be the very first with CVID to spontaneously recuperate). That was it. Right through the cracks I went, dragging my family down with me. We haven't managed to climb back out yet, because the way you prove your disability is by seeing a doctor frequently, when you're sick. It also helps to get a lot of expensive tests. If you can't afford the visits and the tests, too bad. You are not officially sick. Blood tests and x-rays and hospitalizations and a diagnosis from the past don't count, even if your disease has no cure.
I felt for the stranger in the letter because if it weren't for the help of extended family, we also wouldn't have enough to eat. Utilities would eventually get shut off. One day we'd most likely find ourselves homeless.
You see, at the end of the month, after the mortgage (on a decrepit house--an apartment would cost more), the used-minivan payment, gasoline, the heat and electricity, health insurance we can't use because we can't afford the copays and deductibles, term life insurance (we don't expect government assistance if the unthinkable happens), and the cell phone/internet service, there isn't anything left.
We are damn lucky to have extended family helping us. Without them, after that last paragraph we'd have a decision to make. Here are the options:
1. We could drop the cell phones and internet. Some people think it's a luxury, and in a crisis it would have to go. But it's important for my husband's work and schooling, and for homeschooling, and it's often my only link to the outside world. There are also two people in the family with severe asthma, and no close neighbors here. Being without phones would be scary.
2. We could skip a van payment. Done that before. Of course, there isn't going to be money next month to make two van payments. Same goes for heat and electricity.
3. We could cancel the health insurance, or the term life--odds are we won't use it. Maybe we could move in with that extended family if the worst happened. Once again, if we were starving, it would have to go. Without health insurance we'd be back to being those free-loaders I've read about, getting our health care in the emergency room and never paying our bill.
4. My husband could work harder. He works full-time and he's in the National Guard, but he could always quit school and get a night job, right?
Oh, wait, we haven't bought groceries yet....
About this time, the car insurance bill comes, or somebody gets sick, or something breaks.
We are so lucky. It's warm here, and there's plenty of food in the kitchen, and there will even be a few presents under the tree. And it's wonderful to have the internet to distract me when I'm too sick to do much else.
I don't want to find out what it's like to be that woman in the letter. I wish more people really understood her situation. I kinda wish I didn't. I wish she lived next-door, so I could take her a little food and some Christmas candy and some really cheap presents for the kids. Sounds like the kind of family where, if the kids could ask, they might ask for socks or toothpaste for Christmas. Or a little food.
It's just that I so badly wanted to write that woman a check today.
* Jeff Foxworthy--one of the people who 'gets it'
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