One of the things I am BEGRUDGINGLY LEARNING while I'm trying to recover from spine surgery and still be a parent (can't really take a break from the children for 8 weeks to heal—has anyone figured out how to do this? please advise?) — is the sheer amount that I try to manage and do when I'm in a solid state.
I have babysitters over, helping, and I've asked them all to help my family with all the things: to pitch in and do dishes, pickup, laundry, anything that needs extra doing. One day, I had a high schooler over and I had them do four tasks, play with the kids, put the kids to bed, load the dishwasher, and finish up what I would normally do in a night. HE WAS SO TIRED BY THE TIME HE LEFT. The thing that was wild is that I don't normally externalize how much I do. And watching him get exhausted by the sheer load of work — and to recognize that this is what I do EVERY NIGHT from 5pm until 10pm, the fourth workday of the day — it was really ... validating. It was a reminder that the amount of work that goes into parenting, child-raising, house-management, and all of the pieces, is an enormous amount of labor and work that is largely invisible and/or taken for granted because "you decided to become parents, so deal with it," by the way American society currently acts.
This list exhausts me just READING it and yet if I zoom in on any one thing, I'm nodding along, thinking, "yup, I do that... a lot of that," and then I don't know if I'm just a dysfunctional human being who can't manage basic stuff, or if it's too much, or if I need a better system ... and THEN I realize that me being exhausted and tired and slightly delusional IS SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE CAN SELL TO. Like, I'm the perfect candidate to impulse buy something to help me keep my home organized because I cannot figure out how to do it "all" — which is the problem. No one person can do all of this.
A major category I would add to the 2022 list--as a parent of 2 kids with disabilities/significant health issues:
-Medical admin (calling to schedule appointments, which often takes 3-4 separate calls for specialists; getting required medical records lined up; communicating info between providers; HIPAA forms and other authorizations; transferring health info to school and vice versa; paying bills)
-Insurance-related admin (submitting out-of-network claims; appealing incorrectly adjudicated claims; preauthorizations; ensuring referrals and orders are done correctly with respect to insurance requirements; figuring out what will be covered which is a HELLISH GUESSING GAME)
-Substantive medical stuff (researching conditions, researching treatment options, figuring out what points to raise with providers and which are worth advocating hard and which are worth deferring to providers on, understanding the interactions between different conditions and treatments which no one provider takes ownership of thinking about, researching providers which has nationwide scope when you are dealing with rare diseases, learning all the lingo and how to appear knowledgeable without getting demeaned as "Dr. Google," learning and performing at-home care, training other adults on how to provide at-home care)
-Going to all the appointments which is incredibly time consuming, difficult to manage around all other work and scheduling considerations, multiplies the challenges of being a parent in the workplace, and requires lots of logistical considerations (packing snacks and supplies for the undetermined amount of time we'll have to wait for appointments, transportation, etc.) and takes a significant emotional toll (it is massively hard to force your kid to go through a painful/stressful experience that is for their own good, but they have no understanding of or meaningful ability to consent to; it's super hard to go back to work like normal after an appointment like that or when receiving some kind of bad/unexpected news)
-Dealing with the constant judgment and BS from medical providers for being a working mom, instead of quitting my job to dedicate 100% of my time to managing my kids' health
-Medical implications for normal parenting tasks (ensuring kid food fulfills medical dietary requirements, getting squirming toddlers to take medications on a regular basis, integrating home therapies into other scheduling considerations, finding adaptive clothes in preferred styles and sizes, shopping for adaptive everything (toys, bikes, art supplies, strollers, sippy cups, you name it))
-Disability parenting: Teaching self-advocacy skills, teaching kids about their diagnoses and building self-management skills, adapting parenting for different developmental stages to kid-specific needs, navigating social issues/bullying/stigma, finding other disabled kids for them to build community with, disability pride
-Everything school related: IEP process (which involves tons of substantive research on education and legal stuff), supplemental needs like tutoring, emotional labor around supporting kids going through difficult school environments, emotional labor in interacting with the school and special ed office, engaging with third-party advocates
-Advocating for kid needs in social spaces (seeking accommodations in extracurricular events, informal social events etc.)
-Navigating all this with extended family who often don't understand/are judgmental/won't make any efforts to learn about things
-Difficulty in finding childcare/babysitting so multiply the normal challenges/expense of that process x62
In addition to this, my partner and I both have significant chronic health conditions of our own, so I'm managing all this for 2 adults as well.
One of the things I am BEGRUDGINGLY LEARNING while I'm trying to recover from spine surgery and still be a parent (can't really take a break from the children for 8 weeks to heal—has anyone figured out how to do this? please advise?) — is the sheer amount that I try to manage and do when I'm in a solid state.
I have babysitters over, helping, and I've asked them all to help my family with all the things: to pitch in and do dishes, pickup, laundry, anything that needs extra doing. One day, I had a high schooler over and I had them do four tasks, play with the kids, put the kids to bed, load the dishwasher, and finish up what I would normally do in a night. HE WAS SO TIRED BY THE TIME HE LEFT. The thing that was wild is that I don't normally externalize how much I do. And watching him get exhausted by the sheer load of work — and to recognize that this is what I do EVERY NIGHT from 5pm until 10pm, the fourth workday of the day — it was really ... validating. It was a reminder that the amount of work that goes into parenting, child-raising, house-management, and all of the pieces, is an enormous amount of labor and work that is largely invisible and/or taken for granted because "you decided to become parents, so deal with it," by the way American society currently acts.
This list exhausts me just READING it and yet if I zoom in on any one thing, I'm nodding along, thinking, "yup, I do that... a lot of that," and then I don't know if I'm just a dysfunctional human being who can't manage basic stuff, or if it's too much, or if I need a better system ... and THEN I realize that me being exhausted and tired and slightly delusional IS SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE CAN SELL TO. Like, I'm the perfect candidate to impulse buy something to help me keep my home organized because I cannot figure out how to do it "all" — which is the problem. No one person can do all of this.
A major category I would add to the 2022 list--as a parent of 2 kids with disabilities/significant health issues:
-Medical admin (calling to schedule appointments, which often takes 3-4 separate calls for specialists; getting required medical records lined up; communicating info between providers; HIPAA forms and other authorizations; transferring health info to school and vice versa; paying bills)
-Insurance-related admin (submitting out-of-network claims; appealing incorrectly adjudicated claims; preauthorizations; ensuring referrals and orders are done correctly with respect to insurance requirements; figuring out what will be covered which is a HELLISH GUESSING GAME)
-Substantive medical stuff (researching conditions, researching treatment options, figuring out what points to raise with providers and which are worth advocating hard and which are worth deferring to providers on, understanding the interactions between different conditions and treatments which no one provider takes ownership of thinking about, researching providers which has nationwide scope when you are dealing with rare diseases, learning all the lingo and how to appear knowledgeable without getting demeaned as "Dr. Google," learning and performing at-home care, training other adults on how to provide at-home care)
-Going to all the appointments which is incredibly time consuming, difficult to manage around all other work and scheduling considerations, multiplies the challenges of being a parent in the workplace, and requires lots of logistical considerations (packing snacks and supplies for the undetermined amount of time we'll have to wait for appointments, transportation, etc.) and takes a significant emotional toll (it is massively hard to force your kid to go through a painful/stressful experience that is for their own good, but they have no understanding of or meaningful ability to consent to; it's super hard to go back to work like normal after an appointment like that or when receiving some kind of bad/unexpected news)
-Dealing with the constant judgment and BS from medical providers for being a working mom, instead of quitting my job to dedicate 100% of my time to managing my kids' health
-Medical implications for normal parenting tasks (ensuring kid food fulfills medical dietary requirements, getting squirming toddlers to take medications on a regular basis, integrating home therapies into other scheduling considerations, finding adaptive clothes in preferred styles and sizes, shopping for adaptive everything (toys, bikes, art supplies, strollers, sippy cups, you name it))
-Disability parenting: Teaching self-advocacy skills, teaching kids about their diagnoses and building self-management skills, adapting parenting for different developmental stages to kid-specific needs, navigating social issues/bullying/stigma, finding other disabled kids for them to build community with, disability pride
-Everything school related: IEP process (which involves tons of substantive research on education and legal stuff), supplemental needs like tutoring, emotional labor around supporting kids going through difficult school environments, emotional labor in interacting with the school and special ed office, engaging with third-party advocates
-Advocating for kid needs in social spaces (seeking accommodations in extracurricular events, informal social events etc.)
-Navigating all this with extended family who often don't understand/are judgmental/won't make any efforts to learn about things
-Difficulty in finding childcare/babysitting so multiply the normal challenges/expense of that process x62
In addition to this, my partner and I both have significant chronic health conditions of our own, so I'm managing all this for 2 adults as well.