Let's Toast Those Missing Brain Cells

Mike: Mom, Gavin was eating the glue at school today!

Me: Eeeewwww...I hope you weren't eating any glue.

Mike: No, mom. I was only sniffing my glue.

Nine Lives

Probably everyone has heard about the poor old person who lives in a hovel, wears their winter coat to bed, and dines on Purina every night so they can afford their prescription drugs. I have certainly heard of these folks, and always considered them a cautionary tale – the kind of fate you can expect if you don’t work hard and don’t go to college.

But I certainly never thought that I’d have to choose between medical care and feeding my family Fancy Feast.

It seems like an innocuous problem. My nearly two year-old son cannot talk. Lots of two year-olds don’t talk, right? What’s the big deal?

But his not-talking is different from a kid who is just quiet by nature – definitely not a problem my son has.

After seven documented double ear infections last winter, we had tubes put in Peter’s ears in June. The morning after his surgery, he stood at our front window and stared in wonder at the birds, the sound the wind made, and the planes overhead. It was the first inkling I had that his hearing might have been temporarily affected by his many ear infections.

Now nearly six months have passed and Peter still does not talk. I’ve been told by numerous people not to worry – he’ll talk when he’s ready; he’ll talk when he gets a chance if his older brother is ever quiet; he’ll talk when he has something to say. But I’ve spent a lot of time with the two and under set over the last few years, and in my gut, I just felt that something was wrong.

I took him to the pediatrician who referred us to have his hearing tested. After waiting a good month for our appointment, we found out his hearing was normal. That report was then sent back to our pediatrician, who then referred us to a speech therapist. After waiting a few more months for an appointment, Peter was finally evaluated and we were given a diagnosis: his many ear infections caused the expressive language part of his brain to stop working. If you cannot hear, apparently that part of your brain calls it quits. And Peter’s brain called it quits at exactly the same time he should have been developing speech.

While it sounds like a terrible problem, there is a solution – speech therapy, of course, and lots of it. We simply have to jump-start that expressive language part of his brain and get it going again.

So we’re back on a waiting list – in fact, we’re on waiting lists all over town, trying to get in to see a speech therapist on a regular basis. While this is annoying and frightening since I see every day without speech therapy as one more day my little guy doesn’t function normally, it is also a good thing. Because the big question is, even bigger than whether or not Peter will ever talk, is how are we ever going to pay for speech therapy?

When I called to inquire as to whether our insurance company covered speech therapy, they told me they would cover the evaluation but they typically did not cover the therapy itself. Of course we make just enough money not to qualify for any kind of aid, like Medicaid or CHIP, and Peter is advanced in enough other areas that he doesn’t qualify as being delayed enough for the state to pay for therapy.

Speech therapy, like all doctor’s visits, is prohibitively expensive. I’ve been told that the costs will run several hundred dollars every month for the next few years. This puts me in an uncomfortable position: I am literally going to have to choose between helping my son talk and feeding my family.

I certainly never thought we would end up here. I thought cat food for dinner in order to pay for health care was for poor and uneducated people who had spent their lives clinging to the bottom rung. But my husband and I are both educated. We have a not-great, but livable, income. We have health insurance; it just doesn’t cover anything. And here we are – having to decide between dinner on the table and a normal future for our youngest son.

I wish I could tell you that if we cut a little from our budget, stretched things a little tighter, we could swing it. But I honestly do not know how to cut anything else from our monthly expenses. We do not live extravagantly with our one very old and paid-for car, our extremely small house with the thermostat set at a brisk 64, and the shoes my husband and I wear that are literally worn through and, as I discovered this past rainy Friday, leaky. How do we spend less? What do we give up? Food? Heat?

What kinds of choices are these? They are unfair and the very fact that parents who work and have insurance coverage have to make choices like these every day in this country strikes me as completely absurd.

I don’t want much. I’m not asking for trips to Disney World or a giant house where we’re not tripping over one another. I’m not asking for designer clothes or cosmetic surgery or a fancy car that goes from zero to sixty in seconds. I want my son to talk, which at this point, would seem like a miracle, an incredible and amazing gift. He is such a smart child and he’s so funny, and it’s all trapped inside his little brain, just waiting to get out, which is so frustrating to him and to us. I want so desperately to help him.

And I also want my health insurance to cover his care so I don’t have to make terrible choices where somebody, like either one of my children, loses big. So in addition to helping Peter talk, I also want to be able to feed my family. And if someone decided to throw in a new pair of shoes that didn’t leak, that would be nice too.

Is that really so much to ask?

Always Picked Last

My husband has a weekly date. Every Thursday night, he bounds out the door for his “night out with the boys,” which just happens to involve playing chess at a coffee shop. In the seven years that we have lived in Helena, Brent has missed chess night only a handful of times – and two of those times involved me being in labor and/or giving birth to our children.

Brent’s “date night” has often been a sore point between us because both children could be sick with the flu, our house could have been on fire an hour earlier, and I could have lost an arm in a cooking accident and Brent would still merrily head off to chess. There are very few things that stop him from going. He even complained about missing chess while I was in labor.

The biggest point of contention about chess night was that I didn’t have chess night. For years, Brent and I switched off our work schedules so that one of us was home with the kids, which meant that we had two evenings a week during which Brent was home before midnight. Brent had his Thursday night date, which meant the other night was our family night to do something together.

I couldn’t imagine forsaking family night to do something just for me, and so if I was going to do something for myself and by myself, I got up at 5:20 a.m. to do it. As you might imagine, you can’t exactly meet friends for cocktails at that time of day, but I did meet up with other moms, who were often in the same boat as me as far as getting out of the house unaccompanied by the preschool and toddler set, for walks and for trips to the gym and an early morning yoga class.

Week after week, Brent would flee the house for three hours of uninterrupted adult conversation, coffee, and chess, with nary a guilty thought or feeling, giving not a second thought to the idea that I was alone, by myself, six nights a week with the children.

And week after week, I would curse Brent’s good name and seethe with anger about being home with our kids by myself on yet another Thursday night. It’s not that I minded so much that he was out and about. I just minded that I wasn’t.

I know my marriage isn’t the only one in which the husband heads out to do his own thing while the wife and mother stays home on childcare duty. Recently, two of my male friends left for a weeklong hunting expedition. One of them is childless; the other is a stay-at-home dad.

As my childless friend packed up his truck and got ready to head out for the week, he said to me, “I think John just needs a week with adult conversation and no diapers. I think he needs a break – some time to himself without kids where he can just drink some beer, hang out, and be a man.”

“I want to go on your hunting trip,” I said to him. “I want to go out and have adult conversation and not change diapers. I don’t necessarily want to do the be-a-man part, but the rest of that sounds pretty great!”
My friend just laughed, like I was kidding.

But I wasn’t kidding. Hanging out and drinking beer with adults, and not having to worry about going home and dealing with the kids, sounds like nirvana. I’m sure it also sounded like nirvana to the stay-at-home dad’s wife, who juggles the stress of a full-time job and supporting her family with trying to be there for her kids whenever she can. But as far as I know, nobody told her she needs a break. And, in all of my years of mothering, I’ve never had one of my female friends say to me, “You need a break from the kids. You deserve better than changing diapers day in and day out! Let’s go on a weeklong trip and drink wine and eat good food!”

And if someone actually said that to me, would I go?

Men seem to implicitly understand the value of time to themselves, and perhaps more importantly, they seem to be hard-wired not to feel guilty about it. I’ve always known that a few hours a week doing something I want to do by myself would probably do me a world of good. But I felt guilty about leaving my kids with a sitter and for spending money on a sitter and for taking time away from our very limited time together as a family.

It’s not so much that I worried about leaving my kids; that wasn’t it at all, really. I trust our sitters and I really and truly couldn’t ask for a better father to our kids than Brent; he’s great and careful and fun and even cooks them healthy food on occasion. It’s just that it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to so I could do something by myself. And, as I said earlier, I really couldn’t imagine taking our one night a week as a family and saying, “Nuts to that! I need some alone time!” But I have no doubt that Brent would have said that as he flew out the front door.

Our work schedules finally changed a couple of months ago and Brent is now home early every night of the week. As a result, we were able to work out a more equitable “night on the town” deal. One night a week, I go to a yoga class and Brent still heads off to chess on Thursday nights. He has also started staying home to help with dinner and going a little later to chess, which makes things significantly more manageable. Now that I have my own “night out,” I understand how reluctant Brent was to give up his time for all of those years. Because one of the kids could have skidded face first down the large hill we live on, Brent could have broken his leg chasing after the kid, and our house could have exploded and I’m pretty sure I would still be rushing out the door to my yoga class, saying, “I’ll see you in a little bit!”

I can’t say I’m totally “cured” because I still feel guilty for taking time to myself. Last Saturday, for example, the kids and Brent were both driving me crazy, but when Brent said he’d take the kids out for the morning, I insisted on coming along. I’m not sure what made me give up an hour or two to myself so I could go to Costco and to a park (and regular readers know just how much I love the park), but I did. Was I worried that I would miss something? Or that my kids would be devastated if I wasn’t there to watch them on the slides at the park? What is it, exactly, that compels mothers especially to constantly put themselves second or third or even further down the list? Why is it that I have such a hard time putting myself at the top of my priority list?