For the most part, this is a positive blog. We try to focus on the best aspects of our family life. And the way that it’s presented here, it seems perfect… but we all know nothing is perfect. No matter how hard we try to have the perfect life, we all have to face challenges. And lately, challenges have been creeping up on us in guttural fashion, threatening to eat us up.
It started with Riona getting bit by Elizabeth’s dog and having to rush her to the emergency room in Aspen while we were visiting Glenwood Springs for the weekend with my family. It’s amazing how quickly a happy, relaxed weekend, filled with bike rides along the Colorado River and Glenwood Canyon, dips in the one-of-a-kind hot springs pool that is a block long, and hikes where the girls never complained and climbed rocks to their hearts’ delight, can turn sour and stressful. A shadow will always hang over that trip in my mind, darkening the happy memories, as Riona and I both couldn’t stop our sobbing when we wrapped her up in the blanket, held her down, and had four stitches tied into her lip. It’s not just the pain that she felt that hurt me so much, but the awkwardness of knowing my sister’s dog had done this to her, the worry that Riona would forever be afraid of dogs, and the nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that somehow I had brought this on. And as if all of that mess wasn’t painful enough, as I was standing there with tears pouring out of my eyes and snot running out of my nose, the nurse practitioner turned to me and said, “When is your baby due?” Ouch. Times ten.
When it rains, it pours. For more than three years now, we have been receiving strange bills from the hospital where Riona was born, and have been calling the hospital and the insurance companies to try to figure out what went askew. It began with incorrectly billing us, then led to them sending the claim to two incorrect insurance companies, to the latest event of, despite the multiple calls I’ve made and the many attempts to resolve the issue, the hospital sending the bill to a collection agency. Now, some people might not think it’s a big deal and just move on with their lives. But to people like Bruce and I, who are so careful with our credit that we rarely have any debt, always pay every bill on time, and are 45 points below having a perfect credit score, this is a real blow. Especially when, apparently, Riona was supposed to be covered by an insurance company that we didn’t even know about, and the last hospital billing specialist who I spoke to had to make rude remarks to me like, “Well I just had a baby, don’t you know how it works? You have to call your insurance company to let them know you’re having a baby.” Could she add more insult to my injury?
In the midst of this, my car broke down. I should have started this paragraph with, I love my car. I’ve had it for nine years, it’s twelve years old, and other than regular maintenance and gas, I have spent exactly $350 fixing it. It’s one of the cheapest cars money can by, it has a million dents, the bumper is held on by zip ties, the front headlight is attached with packaging tape, and the internal lights don’t work, but damnit, that car gets me where I need to go. So when it first began having issues starting up, and then just died on the road one day, I was only a little miffed at it. And since I’m already trying to ride 400 miles on my bike this month anyway, I just rode to work every day instead of four days a week. But inevitably we had to take it to the shop, where it sat for two days mystifying the mechanics who could find nothing wrong with it. After a week of wind and constant rain, and one 12-hour day of sitting through school, then parent-teacher conferences, then riding home in the dark and rain, I decided to try driving it again. It promptly died on the street right in front of my school. Needless to say, after a stunted attempt that evening, we eventually made it to the shop, and they were able to figure it out this time.
But three things just aren’t enough. Now my poor bike needs a tune-up. Will probably cost more than $100. But I can’t just garage it for the winter, it’s not even October yet! So I have to suck it up.
It’s not the money that stresses me out. It’s what I wanted to use the money for. I taught a University of Phoenix class over the summer–my first–and am in the midst of teaching two more right in a row. I already ordered about twenty books from the library to plan what I hoped would be a Disney vacation for spring break… and, stupidly, already told the girls about it. And when everything happens in a row like this, I think about those scenes from that movie Up, where they have a giant jar of money saved up for their dream trip to South America, and then the tire goes flat, a tree crashes down… one thing after another. I know it’s not the end of the world, that things could be a million times worse… but it still hurts. It’s still a reminder of how hard it is to get ahead, no matter how careful we are.
So even though this blog is a celebration of our family life, I think challenges still fit in. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? And we will get through this, we will still have beautiful pictures to post, beautiful stories to tell, and in so, so many ways, we still have the perfect family.
