May 27, 2002

I've been playing music for Zeke ever since he was born, and lately I've been playing him "Beautiful Boy" by John Lennon a lot. Keith sings it to him sometimes, too.

Here's some of the lyrics:

Today I was playing it for Zeke and singing along, and I got to the part about "I can hardly wait to see you come of age" and realized I didn't know how old Sean Lennon was in 1980, when John was shot. I looked it up on the Web. He was five.

Money. As I guess I should have expected, that throwaway line about money at the end of my latest journal entry got more comments than my entire last few weeks of updates put together. What most people have to say about it amounts to, "Well, you wouldn't say that if you actually HAD some money."

Yeah, probably. What's your point?

I'll sum up my feelings about money as briefly as possible. You have to have some, because not having enough to get by really sucks. However, spending your life fretting about how to get more is only going to give you ulcers and keep you up at night. So you might as well just be happy with what you've got. As an example, we just got notification from our insurance company that because some of Zeke's doctors in the infant ICU were out-of-contract providers (long story and not particularly interesting) they will not be paying the full amount for their care, thus leaving us with an unexpected bill for $5000. Or maybe $3000; we're still not clear on that right now. We're in the process of disputing it, but we've already been disputing it for a month, and it looks like the dispute is not going to go anywhere. So we're going to have to pay 3 or 5K to these people. We don't have 3K. We don't even have 1K.

We could deal with this in a couple of different ways. We could choose to get worried, stressed out, and gnaw our fingernails to the bone, cursing to the heavens about how we have this massive bill that we can't afford. Or we could shrug our shoulders and send the hospital a little money every month until it's paid off. I choose the latter, because it allows me to actually enjoy my life, rather than continually tearing my hair out about where the money's going to come from.

Let me put this another way. I would rather spend my days playing with Zeke, making good dinners, reading books, going on walks, and enjoying the sunshine, than sitting here with my stomach all knotted up about all of our bills. That's no way to live your life. We have income, and we have bills. Most of our income goes to pay those bills right now, because Zeke was terribly sick for awhile. That's OK. And that's why I say that money is the least important thing.

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