Category Archives: Anxiety

September 22, 2011 · 12:01 am

Raising (the Cash for) My Debt Ceiling

This blog is reprinted from from my original Patch blog on July 15, 2011: http://patch.com/B-lGC

When giving someone directions to my house, I’d specify by saying, “It’s the house with the big blue tarp.” Strapped on by hefty ropes and a variety of bungee cords, the 50 by 30 foot tarp enabled us to use our mixing bowls for cooking rather than collecting rain water indoors. On stormy nights, it sounded like we were raging choppy seas on a medieval sailing ship, and on windy days we raced from the car to the front door, maneuvering an obstacle course of flying tiles and cement.

After getting multiple quotes from roofers, it was apparent that the tarp was here to stay. At the bare minimum, a new roof was going to cost ten grand. They might as well have told us ten million. We just didn’t have the money.

Then tragedy struck. Specifically, that tragedy struck my left breast. On a clear, calm day, a large Mexican tile hurled itself from the roof, took aim and collided with my not-so-endowed chest. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) I don’t have implants, or I may have needed a quick silicone patch.

The debris could have hit one of my three kids in the head – or the head of one of their 30 regular playdates. Our 81-year old roof was no longer the brunt of my poor white trash jokes. It was now a life or death issue. At the very least, it was a costly lawsuit waiting to happen.

My husband and I bought our home in 2005, just as the height of the market was starting to peak. We’re not necessarily underwater, but we’re like a young toddler wildly treading that water, barely staying afloat. We’ve been trying to refinance, and I had hoped we could get some equity out of the house to pay for a new roof, but it turns out my hopes were higher than our collapsing roof.

We cleaned out our two $1000 Rainy Day Funds. After all, there’s nothing like a leaky roof to realize that Rainy Day Funds should literally be spent before that Rainy Day wrecks havoc on your indoor furniture. We tapped out the last of our home equity line of credit (AKA the Monsoon Day Fund) that enables us to pay our bills while I’m on hiatus. We juggled bills, cancelled services, and postponed debts that wouldn’t hurt our credit score.

I awkwardly mentioned to friends I’ve loaned money to that now would be a really good time to consider paying me back. Unfortunately, they were all in the same financial dire straits they were in when they hit me up in the first place, and as they say, you can’t get blood from a turnip.

A relative of mine has a few bucks, so stuttered through a humiliating plea, only to get immediately turned down. I crawled with my tail between my legs and asked my ex-husband for an advance in child support for our two daughters, and he actually came through for me – even graciously. Now I have to be really really nice to him for a very very long time. On the other hand, it’s a pretty small price to pay for the safety of his little princesses’ noggins.

We were now completely tapped out, and still had $5000 to go. I was losing sleep, wondering how much money I could make if I sold oranges and lemons from my backyard trees. Could I take in laundry or clean houses? Sell blood? Plasma? Did we have anything of value we could sell on ebay? The only jewelry worth more than 50 bucks is my wedding ring, and that would just be sad – pawning off the symbol of my (current) husband’s love to literally pay for the roof over my head. Even if I was desperate enough to search for a little Mafia money, how in the world would you find a loan shark in Valley Village?

The answer came to me not in a vision, but in an audible message called NPR:

On August 2, the federal government will reach its debt ceiling limit of $14.3 trillion.

This was my answer.

I had reached my own debt ceiling, and mine was nowhere near $14.3 trillion. And like the US government’s AAA rating, my credit score is good, and I’d like to keep it that way. So I just did what any other worthy Democrat would do.

I raised my debt ceiling and got a cash advance.

It’s actually a great deal. Just a 3% fee and no interest until July 2012.

Now my ceiling is in debt, but at least it no longer leaks.

5 Comments

Filed under Anxiety, Debt, Humor

Tagged as debt ceiling, financial insecurity, money, roof

September 20, 2011 · 12:01 am

I Can See Clearly Now (as long as it’s further than two feet away)

This blog is reprinted from my Patch blog from August 9, 2011: http://patch.com/B-nQf

I vividly remember the day: 3rd grade, when an optometrist came to my school and gave me my first eye exam. She covered my left eye and I read the first two or three lines of random letters and numbers. After that it was blurry. Then she covered my right eye and I uttered the words that would change my life forever:

“Wasn’t that first thing an E?”

It turns out my left eye was legally blind, and suddenly I was subjected to glasses as thick as hockey pucks. I also wore a flesh-colored patch over my good eye, trying to train the nearly blind one (AKA lazy eye) to see. The only result that little exercise succeeded in accomplishing was my being branded as a nerd for life.

Glasses corrected my right eye to nearly 20/20, but my left eye was just good enough that I wouldn’t bump into large obstacles. As the years passed, both my eyes worsened. Uncorrected, I had a sweet spot of about four inches in front of my face in which I could focus clearly. Beyond that, it was like looking through the bottom of a murky pool.

Flash forward to four decades later. Last January, after wearing glasses for five years and painful gas permeable contact lenses for another 35 years (the more comfortable soft lenses weren’t strong enough to correct my stigmatism) I applied for a zero interest Credit Care card and like millions of other four-eyes, I got LASIK.

What everyone failed to tell me was how scary it was. My eyes were pried open with mini forceps while a laser sliced a flap out of my eye. I was trapped like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, but instead of watching the freak show, I was the freak show.

They also didn’t tell me about the smell of burning when the laser actually vaporizes the eye tissue. And as much common sense as I thought I actually possessed, it didn’t really hit me that as soon as they’re done monkeying around with one eye, they move on to the next one.

With the help of the same little pill that probably knocked out Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, I slept all afternoon and all night, and woke up the next morning… unable to see. Distance wasn’t so bad, but my face in the mirror reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” when the audience realizes it’s not the plastic surgery patient, but everyone else who is deformed (check it out – the reveal is at 2:51). I couldn’t recognize my own children from across a room, and I got into many embarrassing situations confusing one person for another (especially bad when you mistake a man for a woman or vice versa).

Unfortunately, I was one of those really bad cases that had to go for a second round of LASIK. I’ve now spent the past seven months wearing one pair of glasses to read, another pair to see the computer, and distance vision that has been in the general category of “not bad.”

Last Wednesday I went back to get my eyes re-grinded. Easy peasy. Apparently my doctor just needed to lift the flap that had been created in January and give my eyes a remodel. Unfortunately, recuperation turned out to be more painful than the last one. I woke up after a couple of hours and cried in agony. Not childbirth agony, but enough pain that I couldn’t champ it out without tears.

The waterworks returned the next morning when the slightest bit of light made me feel like a pill bug being burned alive by a boy with a magnifying glass. Every shade in my house was drawn, every light dimmed, and I had visions of the rest of my life as a shut-in, waiting for food deliveries and befriending Jehovah’s Witnesses who wandered on my front porch.

It’s now been nearly a week since my surgery, and I can finally see clearly. I’m still a bit sensitive to light, and I can see my computer best when it’s about three feet away. I’m over 40, so I already knew that reading glasses would be here to stay whether or not I had LASIK. But I can actually wake up and see what time it is without putting on glasses. And for the first time in my life, I have a genuine card that says I am able to drive without corrective lenses.

I know that big thing at the top of the reading chart is an E. But it’s such a pleasure to now recognize rows of random letters and numbers below that big E. And the only Patch I use today is the one this blog is on.

Confessions of the Oldest Kindergarten Mom

Lots of kindergarten parents are anxious about the first week of school. Will their little post-preschooler make friends? Will he know his ABC’s? Will she be able to count to 20? Will he hold his pencil like a madman wielding a knife?

I have actually had some low-grade anxiety about kindergarten for exactly five years now. I gave birth to my son Jake the day after my 44th birthday, and almost from the moment the doctor clipped the umbilical cord, I’ve been worrying about being the school’s oldest kindergarten mom.

I remember as a child reading the Guinness Book of World Records and studying the photo of the world’s oldest mom, circa 1950. With her prune-like face, she looked more like the girl’s great-grandmother, and I imagined the mom teaching her daughter how to churn butter and scrub clothes with a washboard while the poor daughters’ friends were sampling new-fangled tv dinners and learning how to do the twist.

This Tuesday is my 49th birthday. My mom had me at 19, and by the time she was my age she already had seven grandchildren. My two younger sisters have three grandchildren between them, with another on the way. The norm of my upbringing taught me that mothering is a job for the young. Very young.

Since my nieces and nephew started having kids in their early 20’s, I was sure that I’d be joining young parents like them who hang out at Usher concerts and only write in lower case abbreviated text.

Fresh-faced 20-somethings are still blessed with a young metabolism, a chest that is naturally at attention, and strong bladder control. It’ll be at least two decades before they can relate to my menopause symptoms, perpetually gray roots or the fact that my right knee cracks every time I try to squat. They’re still paying for auto insurance up the wazu in the young driver category while I’m a year away from getting my AARP card. Would I have anything in common with these new parents besides our 5-year olds being placed in the same kindergarten class?

Last Wednesday my son started kindergarten at Colfax Charter Elementary School in Valley Village, and my fears were… totally unfounded. It’s true that I very well may be the oldest kindergarten mom at the school, but the other parents didn’t look like they recently attended their senior prom either. The class was filled with parents in their 30’s, some in their 40’s and one dad who might actually be in his 50’s. If there were 20-somethings in the room, they didn’t seem to be bothered by sea of fine lines. Instead of feeling like the freak of nature mom who got knocked up despite having eggs full of cobwebs, I felt like I was in a room with parents who might actually have been alive long enough to hear the original versions of the Glee remakes.

The other lesson that became immediately apparent: It’s not all about me. No one was looking at me – the ancient mom – and wondering why I crashed their party. The other parents were admiring their beautiful children. Some kids were excited. Some were scared. Some cried, hanging on to mom’s pant leg. One even threw up (the child – not the parent) she was so nervous.

I glanced across the room and wondered which of these moms might end up becoming my very best friends for the next six years. We might actually have some interests in common besides having five-year olds in the same kindergarten class.

Eventually they’ll all become as old as I am today and I’ll be able to share my experience, strength and hope about getting rid of gray roots. Many of them will give birth to more children. And some day one of them will enter their future child’s kindergarten class as a card-carrying member of the AARP.

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Filed under Anxiety, Humor, Parenting

Tagged as anxiety, children, elementary school, fears, feeling old, kindergarten, oldest mom