The Cure

Here's what I know.

Betsy was born with hip dysplasia that left her with medical bills so long and impossible to pay that my parents, who had three other kids, just started wrapping her up in them and taking her picture. There she is, in a body cast on the couch, and a bill no less than 12 feet long swirls around her. My dad worked full time, and when he got home my mom went to work until 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he had two jobs. Sometimes after Betsy's surgeries, my dad couldn't stay at the hospital with my mom because he had to get back to those jobs.

Jennifer was diagnosed with CLL in 2005 after having surgery to have her adenoids removed. Fortunately she was employed at a fabulously supportive accounting firm, one that helped her relocate closer to home to pursue chemotherapy and one that gave her time off during her treatments. It was also one that came with incredible health insurance. And it is exactly that health insurance and the chronic nature of her disease that keeps her in that job. She knows her disease will flair up again at some point, she knows that she will need treatment, and she knows that the only way she can get the treatment she needs is to have health insurance. Which means that even though she wants to try a new career, wants to stay home with her future babies, wants to have the life she chooses rather than the one the health insurance industry forces on her, she can't.

Heather has two sons. The older son has a sensory issue of some kind. He has been to therapy to learn how tricks for how to deal with it. Because of this issue, he was traumatized while trying to pottytrain and had to be admitted to the emergency room. Heather is a stay-at-home mom who has worked as a nurse and an insurance assessor. She told me once that when you put bandaids on a patient in the hospital, the patient is billed for the entire box of bandaids even if they only use two. Same thing for gauze. Some thing for fluids. And the sticker price of these drugstore items are hugely inflated because, hey, it's not the person we're charging, it's the insurance... In trying to get her son the intervention that he needs, she has had to hound insurance companies for thousands of dollars. Normally a financial genius with a safety net that makes me jealous, Heather and her family have gone into debt trying to bridge the gap between paying for the therapy and being reimbursed by the insurance company, which sometimes doesn't happen.

Charles and Shannon were living in England one year and they came home for the holidays. Normally they buy traveler's insurance, but this time they forgot. This was the time that Charles would get appendicitis and spend Christmas Day in the hospital. He came home after one day, back to his old self, except now his old self had a $20,000 bill attached to it. With no way to pay it, they went back to their country, where if I was visiting I could have surgery for free, and hoped for the best.

I have lived without insurance at several points in my life, as has Mack, and fortunately my politics allowed me to take advantage of Planned Parenthood and the services they offer, which come with fees based on your most recent pay stubs, my health allowed me to stay alive, and my luck kept me from drowning in debt. I eat pretty healthily, I exercise at least once a week, I maintain my weight within 10 pounds, I do regular breast exams, I take vitamins, but I am not invincible to disease or illness.

Thanks to the representatives who stepped outside of politics and looked at what Americans need, I may not have to be. The United States may just catch up to other first world countries in providing this basic service to our citizens. We may just be able to stop worrying about how we're going to take care of our parents and how we're going to afford having children. We may just start taking responsibility for our own health, which is something that, like it or not, insurance companies do not let us do.

It's going to be collectively expensive if we get it, one of the biggest barriers to the public health option, but it's no more expensive than paying the overinflated costs we're personally paying now. (Insurance for me and Mack was $400+ per month at my last job... imagine if I donated that money instead to universal health care and it didn't matter how sick I or anyone else got!)

This really isn't about politics. It's about people... Betsy, Jen, Heather, Charles, me, Mack, our parents, the babies we love, you. It's completely doable, it's long overdue, it's anti-American to let people die.

Click here to find out how to nudge your congresspeople to be brave and forward-thinking. And here to educate yourself on what's really at stake.

The Dollhouse Saga... also Why I Was Accused of Being a Hoarder

Back in July, in the throes of unemployment and with entirely too much time on my hands, I started thinking about Halloween. And then I started thinking about my party. And then I started thinking about a dollhouse theme. And then I went on Ebay, bought a dollhouse, and officially bit off more than I could chew.

I thought, oh I'll just glue it all together and it'll be easy. Nope.
I started gluing door adornments together. Then I glued windows together. Then I realized I should be painting all these things before I assemble them because painting them once assembled would be impossible... unless I was miniature. So I went to buy stain and paint and proceeded to step 2.
Which is when I realized, holy crap, building a dollhouse is H.A.R.D. First I had to give myself a crash course in dollhouse building language, which is a lot of RPs and Gs and numbers on wood pieces that fall apart and make you wonder if it was a 4 or an 8. Then I had to look at these strange drawings and squeeze my brain into knowing what partition 1 is and how exactly is should line up with slat 97.
After I got the thing mostly built, or at least built enough that I could tell what was going on, I was just about to burn out on the Dollhouse Saga of 2009. I wanted to get to the fun part of decorating it with cute miniature things, but no. Instead it was time to decide if I wanted lighting. And if I wanted lighting, I had to know where I wanted it so that I could then make sure that my flooring or wall covering would cover it... if I lived long enough to get to the part of putting in flooring and wall covering.

I had to splice electrical wires together to make them longer and magically keep everything from short circuiting. I learned about transformers and power strips and found some very adorable blogs by people who have made several dollhouses and are still not institutionalized!
Finding my fellow miniaturists gave me a good little push, but rather than work on finishing the inside of the house, painting and wallpapering and carpeting, I decided to do some siding work. Mainly because I realized I had none of the supplies necessary to do the flooring or wallpapering work I needed to do -- except painting. I could have painted but painting meant laying on the floor with my face mashed into the ground and getting hand cramps from trying to paint miniature inside spaces.

So, instead of heading to Hobby Lobby, which I discovered is a social destination for Pentecostals, I started gluing down some creep siding. It was colorful and came with an instant gratification factor that was necessary at that point.
You see that? You see that workspace up there. Well, it just so happens that the corner of our living room started looking like this right when the A&E show Hoarders debuted. Mack and I would watch Hoarders and look over at that corner and I had to swear to him that it was a craft project for Halloween and NOT a compulsion that would take over our lives. At least not for forever.

After the siding, I got to build the porch, and the porch was fun... once I consulted to dollhouse translation dictionary to discover what a porch roof was called.
The last major hurdle to building the house was putting on the third floor walls and dormer windows. That required a magic trick using wet paper towels and finger muscles I didn't know I had. But once that was all done, it was finally finished!
Almost. (Look, I warned you this was a saga.)

With the outside finished, it was time to look inside. I had to furnish my house. Which meant I had to go back on Ebay and look for beds and chairs and tables and couches and art and books and a Ouija board and a crystal ball and a microscope and tarot cards and plants and magical money to fall out of the sky to pay for all of this crap that I got addicted to because it was miniature and cute.

While I waited for the furniture to arrive, I set to work hiding electrical cables underneath door moldings and carpet and wallpaper. Good miniaturists take care to cut out little channels to recess their wires. I just put electrical tape over mine to create a ramp up and down from the bump they cause.

And then, when the goodies arrived, it was time to finish my vision. To make the dollhouse I'd dreamed of come to life. To see the fruits of my labor. To finally make tiny dolls commit suicide.
And with that, the saga comes to an end... until next year.

Pumpkining

Renee and Ben came to Auntie Am's scary house to carve pumpkins last week.

Like all good babies, they abandoned the carving process and left that to their aunt, but when it was time to blow out the candles, we couldn't lure them away, even with M&M bribes. We must've relit the candles a dozen times, and they'd count and blow them out again and again. Renee would count to 3 most of the time but sometimes she'd go to 8, huffing and puffing all the way.

Pretty much, it was adorable. And just one more thing to make me love Halloween.

It's getting scary in here...

I am not blogging because, in case you haven't noticed, IT'S FREAKING HALLOWEEN!!!

Also, we went to the lake house last weekend. And I had a test today. And tonight I'm carving pumpkins with two of the best babies in the entire world. And I've been very busy putting spider webs on everything with a sharp corner. And it's horror movie month on SyFy. And something happened to Billy Bell and he isn't on So You Think You Can Dance and I want to know what illness he got exactly...

To tide you over until next time, ponder this.

Changing Perspective

Several years ago my mom got a print of the painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth and gave it to Shannon for her apartment. I really liked it, and in a yard-sale gift from the universe, my mom found another framed print of it and gave it to me. I'm not sure exactly how, but Leiah also ended up with the print.
Christina's World is like an artwork thread that keeps us all connected. I can't help but think of my mom and my sisters when I look at it, but I also like it because it reminds me of being at my Grandma Scott's house growing up, looking back at her farmhouse from the distance, a tether to safety. In the suburbs you couldn't get too far away without losing sight of your home base, but in the country, especially the flat fields that make up the country in Indiana, you can wander far away and still feel like you're in the front yard. Leiah said it reminds her of the times we used spend afternoons laying in corn fields trying to trick the buzzards into circling us, being out in the middle of nowhere, trying to maintain the same stillness that Christina mastered for the painting.

Turns out, we're both clueless.

Dr. Mack came home the other day and schooled me on the painting. Apparently, as his teacher told it and as I later confirmed on Wikipedia, Christina is not looking back on her home in quiet reflection. She has not tried to run away and is lurking on the perimeter to see if anyone notices. She is not trying to trick the buzzards.

She is paralyzed on the lower half of her body due to an undiagnosed muscular deterioration and she is dragging herself across the field to get home. Because that's how she gets around. By dragging herself.

Wyeth, whose summer home was across the field from the house you see in the painting, was friendly with the real life Christina and her brother and used them as inspiration for many paintings.

It's kind of cool to know the truth behind the painting, the one that hangs in our bedroom, but it's also kind of a bummer. I mean, the fact that it has a twisted secret matches our artwork tendencies pretty well -- I was recently told some of my favorite pieces are "morose" and "bleak" -- but I actually liked that it wasn't as cryptic as my other stuff.

For instance, Christina's World does not have a single stick figure in it, something Mack claims is in most of the artwork I buy. And it's of a girl who has clothes on. And there's no blood or obvious anguish. And there is a natural space just waiting to be planted with thoughts. And it, technically, could qualify as a landscape, and I actually don't like landscapes in art all that much (I much prefer the real things).

But I guess it's just not meant to be. If something really was all sunshine and rainbows, I probably wouldn't like it. Unless it was an UMBRELLA.

The Bright Side

I had to walk to school today because riding my bike in the rain leaves me more soaked than just walking, and since I don't have a big gay umbrella, I was in a bad mood from the minute I walked out the door.

There was just too much cold paired with too much wet. Which is also the definition of miserable.

Halfway through the walk, my toes were frozen, my nose was running and my middle finger kept shooting out of my pocket in a blind rage. Then I realized I was below a canopy of the most beautiful color orange I'd ever seen, something the color of pumpkin mixed with the electricity of wet grass and dusted with yellows of sunshine from a couple days ago. I felt myself soften with appreciation.
And after class, Mack picked me up and we bought a Wii. Take that, rain.

Homecoming

Five years ago, Shannon decided, in the span of about two months, to get married and move to England.

We were living together at the time, and by we, I mean me, Shannon, Mack and Charles, all of us in a 2-bedroom house with one bathroom and a shotgun kitchen. Outside of our childhood, when we shared a room until she was 14 and I was 12, I have lived with Shan twice in my life -- once in 1997 for a couple of months and then again in 2003 when she came back from her first experience in Cuba . That time when she came back to Cuba made me fall in love with her as a person, not just as my sister.

She would leave little bits of half-noshed snacks laying on an end table or on the counter. And she would go into marathon baking sessions and whip up 5-6 blackberry cobblers. I would leave to go to work, and when I'd come home, the surface of every wall would be covered with Charles' artwork, like I had my own private art gallery.

Shannon dives headfirst into things I'd like to do but that my Taurus need for control doesn't allow. Also, I am a fraidy cat and don't have the courage.

She is as fearless about living abroad as she is about plastering walls with paintings, and for our entire lives, she has blazed paths for me that she has no idea about. When she was 14-17, she had a best friend named Krista... and I had a Krista's little sister Erica as a best friend. When we moved to Kentucky, Shan worked at the dollar movies... my first job (which I kept for nearly 2 years) was at the dollar movies. Then Shannon worked at Billy's BBQ... and so did I, and she worked at Atomic Cafe... and so did I.

Her global pursuits, living in Spain and France and England and Cuba, made me more comfortable with the world we live in, comfortable enough to travel to places that are "scary." Those experiences have shaped me more dramatically than all the years I've lived the suburban American dream in this country.

When Shannon left, with her new husband who I also love, and went to England, I got her out the door, waved good-bye, went into our kitchen, and fell apart on the floor. I physically collapsed, broke down, broke apart. The pieces of her that I needed, the bright spot in my daily life was gone, and I would never get it back. I was never going to discover an abandoned snack or come home to any dramatic surprises like an enormous garden in the middle of the yard. I was never going to wake up to an enormous hand-made banner of encouragement when confronted with a professional challenge. I was never going to watch her pull up in her rinky dink car after a long bike ride with a 40oz. in a paper sack. There would be no more Summers of Abandon or arguments about who has the tightest ass.

She was married and gone, and the bond that allowed us to simultaneously and intensely love and hate each other, reinforced by constant physical proximity, was uncertain. We'd never been through long distance, like the kind where an ocean separates you, for a long time, and I just didn't know what would happen. I mean, I knew I would love her fiercely and miss her every single day, but I didn't know how hard it would be to call each other, how easily our conversations would go. Without her lead, I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

So I followed her. I decided to grab life by the horns and move to Los Angeles... and I loved it. I missed my family, but I had Mack's family to bridge the gap between trips home. And I missed out on birthday parties and little weekend events, but I was always home for the big stuff... the stuff Shannon and her clan come home for. We were both missing links in the tangled chain that is the Hensley family, but it seemed easier to miss out when you knew someone else was missing out too.

Well, in less than 12 hours and for at least the next 4 years, none of us will be missing out. Shannon and Charles are coming home, bringing their sweet English rose Renee back to her kindred spirit Auntie Am, and putting roots down where the rest of their family tree is. I can't wrap my head around how happy I am, how full I feel, how perfect this is, how grateful I am to be in Kentucky right now, how much I love my family, how special I feel to be one of us.