Baby care update: an occupational therapist called, which is great news. Amelia can have her first body therapy session next Tuesday (I find myself supplying an adjective to the word therapy--it sounds too bizarrely weird to say in plain speech, the baby needs therapy). The catch: the only available time is 5.30 pm, and the little babe calls it a day by six. Amelia's an early sleeper. The OT, who will be known here as T, to protect her privacy, said she'll be flexible, try to get here by 5.15, and that the last fifteen minutes are paperwork anyway. We'll make it work. My fantasy of participating in a public health system that works helps me be more cooperative, I tell you. Hooray, especially as my route into privately paid baby body therapists was leading me toward having to drive 40 minutes each way to the Theraplay office. I do want to believe that the public health system for babies can work.

In other news, we are becoming a minivan family. Replacing our totalled station wagon with an even larger vehicle. The jump feels great (the room, the carpool possibilities, drink holders for twelve lattes) and harsh. We borrowed my father-in-law's car for a few days. It's a Sebring convertible, and he's the 80-something year old man who drives it (good for him! )

My visceral response to my husband: you take the minivan, I'll take the convertible. I still want to be the one driving into the sunset with the wind in my hair.

I suppose we can always borrow it when the urge hits.

Ah for my loveletter two weeks ago to the excellent service we were getting for Amelia's movement delays. I wrote so generously of the utopian world it called up, where every child, person and family gets the treatment they need, and quickly, too. Where a phonecall to the right city agency yielded a caring case worker and two smart people traipsing to my home to do an evaluation of the baby's needs.

Alas, the process has bogged down. There are not enough physical therapists in the city, it turns out. Despite all the promises the two weeks hence, Amelia would be starting her therapies, week three begins now, and we are still waiting.

Our service coordinator took a bad fall last week and is out sick. Till Friday.

The agency he recommended and hoped would take our referral has a long waiting list. Believe me, I did make some calls, and they really do go by the wait list. Or at least, I didn't know the right people to call, which is, I've learned the way medical fields work.

We are back in the muck of health care in America. And while I will wait to hear from our service coordinator, I just placed a call to my doctor's office, to get a referral to a private infant physical therapist. I did love that feeling, imagined perhaps, of being in a system where access and money didn't matter. It was imaginary, though because the wake up has me in a poor city where there's not enough to go around. And a child with movement delays and can't clap or push up on her arms, who needs some physical therapy now, about whom everyone says it's best to catch these things early, and who has parents who can pay for it, and will, and thus won't have to bear the interminable wait.

I truly believed their promises. I'd rather they have told me the truth: that it's our real world, and filled with scarcity. So I could fiercely protect my baby from day one.

Last night I was tooling through the blogosphere, you know, one of those late night, start with a link from an email, and before you know it you find yourself reading something like Shari Strong MacDonald's essay "Love-40"--the must-read of this post's title.

I am 42. One of the pleasures of turning into my forties, and there are many, is that writers of my generation have come of age. I can thumb through any number of pages, on and off line, and find 40 and almost-40 something writers who are really good, essayists and authors who have sat with our generation's decades, its icons, its memories, its promises, disappointments and failures, and have resurfaced with glorious sentences and rhythmic paragraphs, with metaphor and image and detail that greets my eyes and takes me home. I'm especially proud of some of the early forty-something writers like Claire Messud, and A.M. Homes, and a writer whose about to be published manuscript I just read for MotherTalk--Joshua Henkin's Matrimony, which I swear was written about two guys I knew in college, even as I know it wasn't, it's just that he's captured a somewhat universal ennui and ambition among a certain well-educated, writerly, 1980's set. 

So settle in with Shari's essay and send more 40-something literature my way.

I introduced us several week's ago to Equally Shared Parenting, a new blog by Marc and Amy Vachon, "a cyber-home for fathers and mothers who have made (or wish to make) a conscious decision to share equally in the raising of their children, household chores, breadwinning, and time for recreation." I like their willingness to talk about the details of their lives, and to remind us of good priorities in their tagline, Half the Work....All the Fun. Yes, it's supposed to be about fun. Fun sounds frivolous, I know, but the demand for political and social change is so we, all of us, in the end, can have better lives and more fun. Call me postmodern, call me thirdwave, but fun is not frivolous.

Yesterday, Amy and Marc were guest bloggers at the Washington Post's On Balance blog.  Great entry, and the responses were great; the usual On Balance reader vitriol was spewn at other readers, not at the guest bloggers. One reader even called for the Post to give them their own blog, called "On Equality."

Wouldn't that be nice.

When I was on book tour in the Spring of 2005, and I spent some time in Seattle and Vancouver, I got to meet and talk with Canadian mothers, and Canadian mothers who were living in the United States. The later would often be in a state of shell-shock. Used to Canada's health system, they were horrified at how difficult and expensive it is to access good health care in the United States. I would nod. I know how hard it is: to find good doctors, to make sure your health plan covers them, to get different doctors and specialists and hospitals talking with each other when there's a problem. And I'm middle class and my husband has a decent health plan from a major health insurance company. I know that because we pay very large sums from his paycheck to have this policy (and yes, that large sum is in addition to his employer's "benefit") I can walk in almost anywhere, pay a reasonable co-pay, and see a doctor. Our family's concerns are usually with making sure we see the best physicians and specialists. We are very aware of our privilege here, very sensitive to the issue of what-the-hell-do-you-do in this nation if you don't have the cultural privilege and networks and connections to know who the good doctors are and where they practice. That's why our experience with the city's Early Evaluation team, here, called Childlink, has been so mindboggling. Here's what it looks, and feels, like.

• Mother makes telephone call to city agency, Childlink. No one answers, she leaves a voicemail. One hour later, the receptionist calls back. Issues twenty-minute over-the-phone questionnaire. Says that a Service Coordinator will call within two weeks.
• Four days later, Service Coordinator, a Nigerian immigrant nicknamed Ola, calls. He asks more questions, and sets a date to come visit.
• Ola shows up on said day. Asks more questions, fills out lots of paperwork. Hands some off to me, and keeps the rest. Sets a date to return with an Occupational therapist and a Physical therapist to do a full evaluation of the baby's development. In the comfort of our home, so the baby would feel comfortable.
  

• Ola, the OT, and the PT show up at said time. They spend two hours at our home playing with the baby, watching her eat, and asking us questions. They listen as her older sister shows them some things, like that the baby can walk if you hold her hands and arms. They fill out lots of paperwork, and decide that the baby needs two hours a week of therapy. Hands are shaken, smiles exchanged, they leave. I fill out more paperwork, because the state and federal governments cover the costs of early intervention, and that coverage is need-based, the need being the child's health need, and not the parents' financial needs.

In short, all this has happened, and no copays were handed out. No one spent hours on the phone waiting for a health insurance representative to answer the phone, and then wrangling with that person to expand the usualy paltry coverage for physical therapy. There was no anxiety about how to pay for the services, no calculus about how to budget when the insurance runs out. Front and center was a child who needs health care services, and everyone involved was focused on how to make that happen. And the best thing: this would have been the case whether we were poor, or middle class, or very affluent.

I've never before experienced a health system that worked this way. Never experienced that kind of shared, social safety net, and a net that operates at a high standard.

A shame that this isn't the ordinary, but only kicks in under extraordinary circumstances, I thought, after everyone left. The baby was napping, and I made myself a sandwich, and well, just savored the feeling of actually being taken care of by health care professionals. Without any fuss or worry.

I can only imagine, friends, that this is what national health care would look and feel like.

In The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars I wrote about how the US is one of five nations world-wide that do not supply paid family leave to parents of new babies. We're in the doghouse, it turns out, with Leshotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.  Here's a nice link to a recent article in USA Today, with thanks to my boss at Hylands (Thanks, Thao) for sending it my way. It's based on a recent Harvard report, and has a link to the report itself.

In New Jersey, the Labor Committee of the State Senate has voted 3-1 on a new bill on Paid Family Leave. There's still a long way from here to there. At our house, we've been delving into the School House Rock DVD, and singing along with It's a Bill ("I used to be just an idea, but now I'm a bill, and maybe, maybe one day I'll be a law....), so I know that passing Committee is only one stage, and an early one at that, but according to the article, in the ten years (say that five, no, fifty time.... TEN YEARS) since they bill was introduced, this is the farthest the bill has gone. An interesting piece of the bill is that it is the opponents are small business owners--this is not a surprise, and in a way, understandable--but that the small business owners who are quoted are all women. Talk about the complexities of being female in our society, and the ways that women are pitted against each other, and how sometimes, our interested can honestly conflict.
Another interesting piece here, and it was true when I researched the current state of paid family leave bills in my home state of Pennsylvania, is that although paid FMLA bills will help both new parents and older children taking care of their parents, it's usually pressure from the second group, as well as the emotional and symbolic impact of taking care of our parents that seems more powerful. It's as if we still tell each other that raising our own children is a personal choice, but we've gotten around to feeling that our parents' care is foist upon us, is something we can't control, and thus, something our governments should help us with. Help for new parents, thus, is riding the tails of our concern with eldercare. Go figure!