And to All, a Good Night

"Is it finally over?"
"It's over, Momma. Now it's straight."
"Well, thank goodness!"

So let me back up. If you read my last blog, then you saw that we were having a bit of a problem with the gub'ment. Seems they accidentally showed Momma's Medicare as being terminated effective 01/01/2014. Seems like a fairly easy problem to fix. Just confirm that the cancellation form is not on file, that her premiums have been paid on time, and correct it.

Yeah - cause Santa Claus is bringing me that Mercedes with the gull-wing doors I always wanted....stuff always works out the way you want it...uh-huh.

But I am thrilled to follow up, and say, IT IS FIXED. It only took from November 6th until yesterday, December 17th, and contacting the following agencies:
Medicare
Medicare Advanced Resolution
Social Security Administration
Railroad Retirement Bureau
Social Security Administration - two different local offices
Her former employer she retired from
Her former employer's benefits administration group
The insurance carrier
The state insurance commissioner's office
Her congressman
Her senator
Her senator-elect

And don't think each of these was limited to only one phone call apiece. Formal complaints were filed through four different agencies (I think - may be more.)

In fact when the congressman's office got involved, I faxed them TWENTY-SIX pages of documentation I had already accumulated.

But yesterday, Momma got the call we had been working towards. She has been retroactively reinstated. She will be reimbursed for the out of pocket expenses incurred while this went on. And the following part of the call cracked us up - "We are so sorry you went through this. Would you mind calling your daughter, and tell her that it is fixed, and that we apologized?"

Or as my hubby interpreted it - 'Hey, call that bulldog you gave birth to, and tell her to back off of us, please.' (On a side note - he appreciates that I do not use that character trait on him - normally.)

Shakespeare had it wrong. The line should read - Hell hath no fury like a woman whose loved one has done been wronged.

Because I believe in giving credit - huge kudos to her local office of Social Security Administration, to my contact in her benefits administration group, to United Health Care Social Media who took the ball, to the person in Medicare's Advanced Resolution area, and to her congressman. 

To anyone going through this, my best advice is this:
1) Don't believe anyone until you get the same answer multiple times
2) Feel free to go on a multi-pronged attack
3) Document, document, document - date, time, length of call, a name if possible
4) Pray

Now, I'm off to research the cost of a Mercedes with gull-wing doors. After all, we weren't sure I could ever get this fixed, much less an apology so obviously I'm on a roll.

Good night!

Friendship for the Aged...I Mean AGES

Mommy, I want a sister!!!!!!!!! If I said that once, I said it a thousand times to my poor Momma!! Sandwiched between two brothers, I saw other girls as my version of Mecca - somebody to play dolls with, borrow clothes, whisper about boys, anything other than hearing again about how I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life. Of course I was too young to understand what I understand now. When adults say no, it's not just to be mean. Often there are underlying reasons. Like most children, I wanted what I wanted and I just wanted a sister. But I do have a sister, actually a couple of sisters. Both of them celebrate their birthdays this month and both have known me forever...or it might seem that way to them. We've had our ups and downs just like sisters do, but we also know each other’s secrets – the good, the bad, the sad, and the joyous.  We know things that only we can share like how it was growing up and we know where we hid things in our bedrooms. We know how it felt to be madly in love with xxx, and how dang grateful we are that God didn’t make him reciprocate the love. Heartaches and triumphs have been shared along the way and I would never trade either for a blood sister.

True friendship should and does have an acceptance - the quirks, the faults, the kindnesses all go hand in hand with who we are as people. They have made me a better person, and the laughter has been most excellent.

Count on me to end with a quote by an author who wrote about Pirates:

"A friend is a present you give yourself." Robert Louis Stevenson

Oh, and maybe a cartoon:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! I pray my children are blessed with such friends.

Beauty is a Beast

I can handle the fact that my body is changing and gravity is having its way with me. There is a freedom in acknowledging “The ole grey mare just ain’t what she used to be.” I can go grey and thumb my nose at the exorbitant cost of hair color. I can laugh away the Lyrca on my hips and tummy while shouting, “No more!” No more straining to pretend I have a perfect body in an imperfect world. I especially don’t want to look like a similar version of other women my age because of Botox and fillers. If it makes you feel better, if it floats your boat, go with it. Me? I’ve been tempted and I’d be a liar if I said I haven’t thought about it. In the long run, I think I’m sailing away just fine in spite of the wrinkles in the sails and the extra cargo I’m carrying along.

Who says we must be wrinkle free? Photos are airbrushed in every single magazine. Makeup conceals, breasts are lifted or enhanced, tummies are tucked and we’re still going to grow old. I’m not saying go for the dumpy look and let it all hang out. Heaven forbid! I’d start a stampede of people running away from me if I did that. I mean, beauty is a real four legged beast. We preen, we pluck, and we spend mega bucks on simply keeping up appearances. I enjoy a pedicure and manicure and having my hair styled. I enjoy buying new lotions and eye gels, hoping they’ll turn back the clock, but it’s the extremes that I see others go through that make me shake my head.

Twenty and thirty-year-old women are altering their faces and bodies at such an alarming rate that I wonder if they’ll recognize themselves when they hit forty. I am concerned for the younger women around me. It almost appears as if people are starting to prefer beauty over intelligence. In the UK, a new survey was recently completed and the results are, that given the choice, women would rather be more attractive than be smart. Isn’t that just swell?

I Googled the key words, aging naturally, to see what was out there on the almighty internet. After the first page, everything was about how to reverse aging naturally. Gracious! There is so much natural beauty in each and every one of us. I think we’ve been brainwashed by advertising, designers who pick stick thin models, super stars with trainers who take them through three hour daily workouts,and the aging ultra-rich who've had so many cosmetic procedures that when they cross their legs, their mouths hang open. Have we forgotten to look at the “real” beauty in each and every one of us? I worry about this stuff because I have a daughter. I worry because I see so many going too far and actually putting their health in harm’s way to have yet another procedure. I worry because I thought our minds were just as beautiful as our outward skin. If we’re not careful, I worry we’ll forget that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and what a wonder real beauty is.

Road to Happiness

Happiness – how would you describe it?  Emotive to its core, essential to every single person on this earth, and yet sometimes so elusive that you would think it never existed. In my essay “My Crime or Yours? A Wife’s Debate”, I was very honest about my current situation as a stay-at-home mom. My emotions, as I wrote the piece, were running high enough to practically send me into orbit.  I am lost, to say the least, but this morning after listening (at my husband’s work convention) to one of the most inspiring, yet down-to-earth speakers I have ever heard, I finally felt the power grow within me to start making the difference in my life that I had wrote about.

Beth Thomas, the speaker, has just released a book called “Powered by Happy.” Essentially this book is about making employees happy at work in order to increase productivity and bottom-line profit.  Happy campers make for happy bosses and even happier CEOs. The simple correlation between these two is not so new in its concept, and you could easily say it is downright obvious, but the facts and statistics confirm that this is a real problem for corporate America.  Now, I once was corporate, I once was in business, and I once was the one who wore the name identification badge without the word ‘spouse’ plastered all over it, but now my corporate world is at my home.  So as I listened, I realized that the same principles should apply to our family lives. Happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids, and a fulfilling relationship with my husband is the key to my 'company's' success. My return on efforts is not financial profit -- it is my own personal happiness and satisfaction.

Beth Thomas herself reinforced this message during her talk, pointing out that working too many hours or too hard does not make you any more successful; in fact it can be detrimental. Funny, that is exactly how I described my life. The more I do around the house, the more hours I work to keep my family functioning has become a mountain so high to climb that I can never reach the summit. Running around like a headless chicken is not doing me or my nerves any good. I seem to always have a to-do list as long as my arm with no time to do any of it well and it makes me negative – it wears me out. My scales are tipped to one side and I need to regain balance.

So, it’s time for change, time for taking hold of the negative and kicking it out the door. Negative breeds negative, yet simple laughter can take over the world; it is contagious in all the right ways. Apparently there are Laughter Conferences that are held over all over America. People go and just laugh constantly for the time they are there. I am not sure that I will be attending one of those, but it does make you think. If people are selling laughter as a concept to improve your life, then surely we can interject more ourselves, and the best is it is free!

The message this morning was clear. In order to be happy you have to know what makes you happy. The first lesson in the book is to create your own definition of happiness. It is not as easy to do as you think, but I am going to do it. I am going to work through the book and see where it gets me.

Today is my first day on the road to being “Powered by Happy.” This afternoon I am going to sit down and allow myself time to think about my happiness. My list will probably be long, but that’s okay, because I have the drive to do it. I am taking back responsibility for my life and happiness. Who knows, maybe I will share my list with you in my next blog – we will see!

Down the Long and Lonely Highway

In just a few short hours, I will have our sons loaded up and hit the road. It's time for our monthly pilgrimage to my parents. I'm always vaguely amused when I return and run into acquaintances who ask if I enjoyed myself. When the boys were younger I was often asked if I got a break by heading there. Uh, no. I've written a couple of times about what we are facing. Daddy has dementia.

As is my way, I will try to find something amusing in the trip. Dark humor is my friend. Sarcasm is my constant accompanist. So I'll roll my eyes at some fifty something road warrior who is trying to text and drive on the interstate and come up with some something to say. I'll sit there and patiently pretend to have not heard the same story a gazillion times while in my mind, I do my checklist. "Has he said this yet? What about that story? Ah, there it is." Give him his Father's Day card early. He won't remember that he didn't get it on Father's Day. Shoot, that's because he won't remember he got it. The boys will stay up all night watching tv and I'll just ignore that. Hey, they're supposed to get to do what they want to at their grandparents, right? Does it matter that I'm there? Nope. This trip we're throwing in a side trip to the old hometown. So I get to visit with even more elderly relatives. But at my age, it's nice to be the young'un and I especially love how they all tell me how little I still am (keep in mind that all things are in relation to them). No trip is complete without the trip to the cemetery.  Good thing I got that Ancestry.com membership. We need someplace to load up the pictures to that will appreciate my skill at taking a picture of a gravestone.

Through all of this our teen sons will show a calmness and compassion that humbles me. They will take Daddy to the restroom and make sure he doesn't lose his way, while pretending that they were the ones who needed to go. They understand the need for dignity.

I ran into someone who told me that some people think she's cold but she had never really experienced helping the aged. Her parents were both dead by the time she was in her mid-twenties and her grandparents had long been gone before then. While it briefly flickered through me how much less complicated my life would be, what really stayed in my soul was the thought of how much less I would have been. I've developed a strength and compassion that I never knew I had in me. Not to mention the driving skills of a short haul trucker.

Someone else once told me that if it stressed me out so much then I just shouldn't go. But that smacks of a selfishness that I always knew I didn't have in me. And it does stress me out - before I go and after I return. But while I'm there, it doesn't stress me out at all. When I read essays such as the one our guest columnist, Jim Zisa wrote this month, "The Profundity of Moment" , when I consider how much my dear friend Mary would love to call her Mama and chat, but can't because she's gone, or think of how much another dear friend would have loved to share her beautiful girls college graduations with her parents, well, I'll climb right into that SUV and make my way on down the road. There is a grace to the time spent with love. So I'll come back a little worse for wear, but better for spirit. Shouldn't life be about doing what is hard? Doesn't love come with hardship?

Another F Word...

Lately I've been struck by an F word that I never really considered before the F word of fifty. My new F word is a single word mantra that I keep repeating - Freedom! If you read our guest column this month, "The F Word", by Maria Pramaggiore, then you got a glimpse of the realities of being 50 in today's universe. It's not always pretty to watch others dismiss you even more quickly than they will walk away from broccoli. Now all of us have been dismissed by others. But as we age, it seems to take on a new dimension. It is just expected that we aren't up on new music or technology or anything remotely cool. Add in the mix teenagers and now you know that you're stupid, too. But I'm slowly starting to realize that at fifty, maybe I don't care so much anymore. Hey, I'm 50. Like me, don't like me, whatevah. Hey, I'm 50. I don't need the world's validation so much anymore. My momma turns 80 in a few days. She flat doesn't care what you think of her (it's a Southern saying - "flat don't care"). She doesn't like it if you say something bad about her children and grandchildren, but if you say something about her - knock yourself out. She said that as you get older, you realize that the people who care about you show up at your funeral. The others, well, if you can't say something nice, just don't say anything, and walk away. Freedom! What do you think? Are you comfortable with aging? Are you starting to feel relaxed over the whole thing?