choose one consistent time each day to check in with yourself and notice what you need before moving into the rest of your responsibilities and before assisting others.
Positively Purging-I welcome your feedbacks in the comments and your likes and passing the real life wisdom on to others as I embark on this new venture of “positively purging“, as I know each of these pieces represents something…
This is in reference to the letter about giving gifts to adults from “Feeling Bah-humbug” who wrote: “My significant other and I are at the stage in life where we really do not need more ‘stuff’ and would rather not deal with gifts that are generic at best and usually are re-gifted promptly via donation or gift-economy communities.”
We had the same problem. Solved it! Instead of buying gifts, we determined a monetary amount we probably would spend on a gift. We picked $50. Could be any amount.
Every year one person was in charge of collecting the money from everyone. That person donated that amount to their favorite charity. Next year, the next person collected the money and donated it to their favorite charity. Worked great! – Regifting
Dear Regifting: What I love most about this solution, in addition to giving a meaningful pot of money to a charity, is that it gives your family the chance to learn about each other through what causes you care about.
That you were born
and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.
That you will lie
if only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.
That you will live
that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.
That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.
That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.
So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.
, by Pádraig Ó Tuama
What am I free from? Perhaps the deeper question is: What am I now free to become? What am I free to build? What am I free to receive? What am I free to stop apologizing for wanting?
Let this be part of what we seed forward: a freedom that makes room for wholeness, a freedom that includes material dignity, and a freedom spacious enough to include ourselves in what we build. –Gabrielle
Positively Purging-I welcome your feedbacks in the comments and your likes and passing the real life wisdom on to others as I embark on this new venture of “positively purging“, as I know each of these pieces represents something…
In a recent letter from “Angry DIL”, the letter writer was complaining about the cost of keeping her 90-year-old mother-in-law in a senior facility. She wrote ” During this time, I found that the normally excellent Medicare she has yearly been advised to sign up for has changed. Some slick salesperson sold her another plan, and she was cut off from rehab care.”
This illustrates a common confusion between Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. Medicare is a government program, and covers what it covers, for all participants, at any doctor or hospital or provider anywhere in the U.S. that accepts Medicare. There is only one Medicare.
Medicare Advantage is a program that takes the money that would have been spent on you by Medicare and gives it to a private insurance company that essentially gives you private insurance coverage, often HMO or PPO. These plans have different benefits and rates, and, like non-Medicare insurance plans, can require prior authorization or just flat-out deny you coverage. Medicare cannot.
The bottom line is that people need to be clear when they are on Medicare, a government run single-payer system, and when they have signed up for a Medicare Advantage plan, which is run by insurance companies.
Dear Plan: This is a helpful distinction. One additional thought on this letter: the letter writer may want to speak to an elder law attorney or advocate about options available to her mother-in-law. As the original letter noted, the daughter-in-law and son are paying quite a lot of money for the mother’s care because the mother doesn’t have the funds. But there are other options available for getting her the care she needs with consideration for her financial position.
Real Life of an MSW 