April 6, 2017

Widening the Lens

Many years ago, before I had children, I joined the staff of a large nonprofit organization as what I thought would be a relatively insignificant cog in a mighty machine. Instead, I was surprised when my new boss put me in charge of a committee to plan a big redesign of the organization’s enormous web site. I’d never sat on a committee or even attended a committee meeting before, but my boss said it wasn’t hard. I trusted her.

What followed were were months of meetings and planning sessions. We interviewed vendors, discussed budgets, and were deliberate in our choices. We began the nearly inconceivable task of moving tens of thousands of pages of content from one system into another, page by page, which took hundreds and hundreds of hours. For the unappreciated staff members who were responsible for their departments’ pages, I threw “parties” in our training room and fed them cookies while answering their technical questions. During that time, I went home each night to my first baby, who was born in the early stages of the project’s conception and who turned one just before the new site launched.

The launch was an unmitigated disaster.

The staff was thrilled to have it complete, but we had missed a major consideration. Though we had been thorough amongst ourselves, the organization for which we dozens of staff members worked was a professional association. Our members used this web site for their work — for reference, for activism and advocacy, and for their own teaching tools. They were our most important stakeholders — and we hadn’t asked them a thing about the site before it launched, a fact which they — appropriately — did not take well. After an onslaught of angry emails, the director of the organization flew several board members and a dozen other influential general members to our office on a Saturday. I kissed my baby girl and my husband goodbye and went into the office.

I was 28 years old. I had never met a member of this organization before. I had never been to a board meeting. Continue Reading…

March 10, 2017

The Phones Our Insurance Saved Us

Our family, unlike the majority of Americans, has spectacularly good health insurance. It’s provided by an employer, and because of my husband’s combination of high-demand skills, excellent work ethic, and good luck, we’ve had the same coverage for more than a decade. Here’s how it works:

Every two weeks, my husband’s employer deducts $196 from his paycheck for our medical insurance.

Despite that, beginning on January 1 each year, we pay for 100% of the cost of every doctor’s visit, every prescription, every blood test, and every other medical cost until we have spent either $1,500 per person or $3,000 total for our family of four. That means that, until we have reached into our own pockets and paid $3,000, our insurance has not even begun to kick in.

After we’ve spent $196 every two weeks and $3,000 for medical costs, our insurance begins to pay 80% of every bill that comes in. We pay for the next 20% of each bill — a welcome change from the 100% we’d been paying before that.

As a family, once we have spent $7,000 on medical costs, our insurance begins to cover 100% of whatever medical expenses come next. Let’s review, then, the cost of medical care for our family in a year when someone gets really sick:

March 3, 2017

The Deep Dig for Impact

Every second of every day, life changes profoundly for someone on earth. A death, a crime, a lottery win, an election, a new job, a lost job, a child born or adopted, coffee spilled on the stranger who will become the life partner, a car accident that cripples, a letter, a diagnosis: the world shifts and reveals itself transformed.

Sometimes, the change is immediate; a woman gets the call about a baby being born and races off to the airport to meet her new child in a faraway hospital. On the flight, she feels the difference and labels it: that call made me a mother.

Other times, the change has to be carefully traced back to its root. The beat-up old car that college student drove made him the likely grocery-store connection for a group of giggling women, who introduced him to the woman he eventually married. Was his grandfather — the car’s original owner — the reason he met his wife? Where did that story begin?

Truth be told, this is a question of consequences. How do we know when we had a part in change? Also, how long should we wait to let go of a moment and its potential to alter the world? Is there an expiration date on an event’s power to reshape the future? Continue Reading…

February 9, 2017

Nevertheless, We Persisted

February is American Heart Month. My social media feed is currently split between political postings and photographs of babies and children with scars I recognize all too well — across the shoulder blade in back or right down the middle in front. Parents and grandparents I’ve met online through our shared journey are posting information about their children’s experiences, their families’ grief or triumph, and ways that their communities can contribute toward better outcomes for anyone born with a congenital heart defect, like my vibrant, finally-healthy daughter Sammi.

These images are unrelenting. They drag me back, every time, away from the image of the grinning, singing girl I kissed goodbye this morning and closer to the sick baby covered in wires and tubes. I negotiate the difference in leaps, then think back on what to say to the parents still in the thick of it. How will they make it to my present-day?

Of course, the other half of my social media feeds are the political posts — assaults on freedom and confusing conflicts everywhere I turn. Truth is under attack there just as it was when I fought for Sammi’s care. Out of the mess tangling over and over itself in the news, however, came a surprise rallying cry intended to shut down a woman’s resolute message. To anyone who has followed US politics, the censure of Senator Elizabeth Warren by Senator Mitch McConnell is likely memorized by now, but for emphasis and clarity, it’s worth repeating:

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

It’s easy to turn this into a rallying cry for women, in general. So often, this is our only path to success, whether we’re discussing the fight for suffrage, land ownership, birth control, or just a seat at the board room table. What many women don’t know, however, is that infuriating as those indignities are, when what is at stake is our children’s lives, persisting is not a choice. It is an instinct. Continue Reading…

February 2, 2017

When Being Right Doesn’t Matter, or Does

Something was wrong with my baby daughter.

I said it to her pediatrician when she was just a few weeks old. He laughed at me, told me she was fine.

I said it in the emergency room when her chest and throat were retracting with her rapid breath. They gave her meds, watched her for a few days, sent her home with me.

I said it to her new pediatrician. She looked more closely, waited, told me to sleep-train her.

I said it again when everything failed, when she wouldn’t eat solid food, wouldn’t sleep through the night, couldn’t make it through a cold without hospitalization. And finally, finally, someone found the something. When they did, nobody said, “oops.” They fixed her congenital heart defect, the source of every problem.

I was right, but it didn’t matter.