Kel

It's been a tumultuous time in these last years. It’s not really what I expected when I set out to have my adult life. I was a very ambitious college student. Academic. Really Type-A and driven. I was going to take on the world and felt completely unhindered in what I could achieve. It just seemed like everything was possible.

I ran into several walls along the way, mainly with issues around my gender identity as the main kind of blockade that I smacked into lots of times. I remember in grad school, when I still identified and presented as female, being told I should not continue my education and get a PhD if I wanted to become a parent. Later on, I was sidelined in conversations, spoken over, and treated like a glorified secretary—expected to answer the phones and get the mail—and was overlooked for promotion. So I began being intentional about the way I dressed and looked at work, pushing myself to be more gender-neutral presenting in order to be given the same credit as my male peers. I changed my hairstyle. I changed my clothing. I toned down my makeup. I needed to edit myself to be taken seriously as an equal contributor in the work environment.

Doing that actually helped lead me to the realization that I am intergender. I knew I was bisexual from late adolescence. But I didn’t realize I was intergender until my early 40s. Having to force myself into a more masculine role, I realized that it actually felt pretty good. It also helped having kids who are trans. Learning alongside them helped me learn about myself. I eventually became CEO of that company. So, I don’t know if the approach worked or if I just wore them down over time.

Now, I don’t feel I need to do that. I’m much more comfortable being fluid in the way I dress and present. I don’t shy away from presenting as female or more androgynously.

But as I think over the last few years, within the context of my marriage, having that just completely taken out from under my feet was the biggest shock of my life, and that has had the largest impact on my ability to stay afloat for my kids and to help them navigate through all of those major changes and really scary times.

And then having the pandemic thrown on top of it, it's just like, “Okay, this is a lot of shaky ground.” It's not been the life that I envisioned as a high achieving, pretty privileged young person, just feeling like I had no real limits and then having real life slap me down lots of times.

There are aspects of my own mental health and of my kids’ that have made it really hard for me to work full time. So I have had to navigate that. And then there have been times with the small company that I've been with for 20+ years where we've not had the income, the revenue to support a full salary—partly because of the pandemic and things happening in the whole country, in the whole world.

So we tried to figure out where we could put our resources to support who needed it most in our little business. And I was able to scrape by with a partial salary until I actually had no salary at all by February of 2023. Before that, having a partial salary meant that I was able to be much more flexible with my hours and be up all night with my kids when they needed me because they often did. I've had kids who have been suicidal multiple times in the last five years and really dealing with deep trauma and really hard stuff from the abuse we endured. Sometimes, I'm up all night with them or with issues with myself. Things have settled a lot more, but I can't imagine trying to hold down a full-time job on top of everything else and keeping the kids safe during those years. So, it's meant that I've had to have a really scant salary.

Not having reliable income makes it so you have a series of tough choices to make each day. And the exhaustion emotionally of having to do that, and having to worry so much means I don’t have the energy to make a nice home-cooked meal. It's so much easier to buy fast food or get something from a restaurant. And that is so expensive and unhealthy. It's just this cycle. It’s been hard, hard, hard.

When a couple reached out to me about surrogacy in 2022, I said, “This is actually really great.” It could dovetail really nicely with the fact that I could foresee my salary going away. And it would allow me to have some grace period—that I’d have time and wouldn’t have to go into immediate panic about not having income. So it sort of worked itself out. I know there's a lot of presumption about surrogacy being something that is taking advantage of people in poverty. I don't feel like I was taken advantage of at all. It was something I was glad to be able to give, and it gave back to me so much. It was an honor.

It was a really interesting experience to be pregnant and not identify as a woman with the last surrogacy. Really weird. I refer to myself as “Parent,” not as “Mom.” Because my kids grew up with me a certain way and set the pattern, they do sometimes still call me “Mom.” But they do make an effort to call me “Parent.” They do it in this pseudo-formal way, “Dearest Parent,” which is really sweet and funny. We celebrate both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. I do fill both of those roles, and I feel those days recognize the two different sides of myself. I’m nurturing, and I’m also going to help you with cars, the taxes, and building things.

Still, I didn't realize how much shame was involved in struggling financially. I don't know why that didn't occur to me as something that would be so painful. There's this need for dignity, you know? And there's a lot of hiding that I do to try to pretend like we're all okay. And embarrassment—I feel I need to hide from people that we were at one point living in this house with inadequate heating and, that the kids often have clothes with holes in them, and that we shop in thrift stores. I don't want people to see that. I drive a super old car. I want them to think that I'm doing okay and I'm a normal person. There’s all this social shaming that comes with not having enough money. And this pressure to be accepted and not treated as someone who’s less than or in need of pity. There was a real tangible fear of having my children taken away at multiple points, that someone could call Child Protective Services.

Medicaid, as Difficult as It Is to Apply for, Has Been Crucial for the Family’s Physical and Mental Health

Mental health continues to be a struggle. Several of the kids are going through transitions in their own gender identity. My oldest child began taking testosterone at 16, and once he turned 18, had top and bottom surgeries. One at 18 and one at 20. One child began taking puberty blockers at 12 and estrogen at 13. So having access to healthcare has been a major, major thing—both for their needs in terms of supporting their gender identities and transitions for getting prescriptions, getting surgeries, and then also for mental health. Making sure that they have access to therapy and the kinds of things that they've really needed over the years has been really important.

It's been such a struggle to access those systems. I'm grateful that they're there. I'd never experienced Medicaid before, but once I landed on it, I felt like, “Oh, this is fantastic because it's very low cost for the kids, and everything they need is fully covered.” Any copay for prescriptions, their hormone replacement therapy, the mental health care, their prescriptions, their appointments are always covered. The surgeries have all been covered. I just felt, “Okay, this is good.”

So we’re in a great place now with Medicaid, knowing that we can be taken care of. But it was so difficult to get on. So many phone calls. So many emails. In-person meetings with our local county person to try to help me navigate: how do I get the kids into the system to begin with?

The websites were not working. It's so difficult to even submit an insurance premium payment on time. You can't pay online. You can't pay with a credit card. It's just so archaic. You have to send an actual physical check with a stamp in an envelope. Why is this so hard to do, and why is this so backwards? One of my kids had the wrong gender marker in his medical records. So we went to the courts and got his name changed legally—the birth record is a simple form to update that. But then I couldn't get the health insurance to update his information. And you call the phone number and there's no real person to talk to you. It has been so painful. And I am always getting confusing letters in the mail. As the kids turn 16, we’ve been able to easily get their Driver’s License and state IDs and select the gender marker they identify with. That is state law. But it’s much more difficult to change that in the medical system. My second oldest is much more sensitive about being misgendered. Knowing her medical records are tied to her gender at birth is especially tough for her.

Still, during the pandemic, the process of Medicaid renewal was really nice because they suspended needing to do an annual renewal. That was so helpful. When [renewals] came back, it was a nightmare to deal with, to submit all of these different things. And they had to be faxed. Oh my gosh. What? Fax machine? And they wanted you to fax your entire tax return—fax 30 pages of documents. If I had to go somewhere and pay per page to fax it, I couldn’t do it. I ended up signing up for what I thought was a free fax service that sneakily signed me up for a premium service. Then, it took me a couple of months to get myself out of that. So, I was paying a monthly fee to be able to fax one thing. Then, I had no way to confirm they received it. I’m on the phone with the fax company. It was such a fiasco—hours and hours of my time trying to get a renewal and then not even knowing if I submitted the paperwork properly or if they needed anything else. They provide zero follow-up or confirmation. You end up feeling like you’re not even a person through something like that.

There were so many instances where, on the days when my mental health was not as good as it can be, I would throw up my hands and say, “I just can't even cope with this. This is so stressful and so impossible.” And I don't feel like there's anyone here to help me figure this out. Or cares to help me figure it out. I can't afford to have my kids get the care that they need as a single parent in the profession that I've been in. There's no health insurance for the company. So, I've been on Affordable Care Act programs for years and years. There’s just no way that a self-insured kind of setup would cover what their needs have been. So, I'm really glad that the [Medicaid] program has been there, but it's been a complete fiasco to navigate.

I'm really hoping that I can find [work] that's flexible and mainly remote. I need enough income to support us but not too much to make the kids lose their qualification for Medicaid because I would have to have three times my salary in order to afford the private insurance that would actually cover them. And that’s been like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Struggling with Isolation and Virtual Schooling During the Pandemic

There's a lot that happened in the pandemic with schooling, too—them being pushed back into the house. So instead of being out there in the world and how tricky that was to navigate and try to support their education—I feel like my life took a hard U-turn from what I imagined it would be. When they were young, I had this vision of how great homeschooling would be. I did all this research. I read at least a dozen books in preparation. I’m thinking, “I'm going to do everything exactly right.” There's ways that conventional school failed me. I did great academically, but I felt it wasn’t tailored enough; you had to follow the path laid out for you, so I didn’t excel in the areas I could have. And I want to do better than that for my kids—give them alternative paths, let them follow their interests and really thrive, interact with our local community, and have opportunities to excel and help them be more part of the world.

Because I was the one providing financially for the family, I handed the homeschooling off to my ex-husband. And there was a lot that I wasn't seeing because I was the one supporting us all financially. He just didn’t do it. The kids suffered educational neglect in addition to his abuse, anger, and rages. It became a mess. It was only later that I discovered that he’d punch holes in the wall then have the kids hang up one of their drawings to cover it up. Then, he turned his anger on me once I found out the truth about his behavior. All of the kids and myself had a lot of psychological damage and trauma from him. I ended up taking us to a safe house to get away from him.

After the divorce, I needed a safety net to catch us as we stumbled. The kids had just been put into conventional school and were still catching up academically from being behind as homeschoolers because of their father’s neglect. And then the pandemic hit. And they could not keep up. Everybody was struggling. The older two did graduate with high school diplomas by the skin of their teeth. There’s been a whole lot of resentment and social isolation and embarrassment and shame around the feeling, “We're not like other kids, and we've struggled.” We’re still sorting it through.

We don't have family support nearby. My closest family support is my parents in Ohio, and they’re medically fragile. My dad had lung cancer, which migrated to his brain and brain cancer. My mother had not only breast cancer but also had a heart condition and a lung condition. So, help from them was completely off the table because their risk for exposure to COVID was too great.

The Government Worked to Make People’s Lives Better During the Pandemic. Why Can’t It Now?

When the first check for pandemic relief came in, it coincided with a drastic drop in child support from my ex-husband. It was like, “Oh, thank goodness. You were about to be in so much trouble, but now this is going to save us.” I remember I was sitting down around that time, looking so carefully at every single expense and where I could shave things off. I changed cars during the pandemic for a lower car payment and to spend less on gas. The gas prices were so scary. And every time looking at my spreadsheet, everything always came up negative. Every time, in the negative. All of my side gigs were off the table because you can’t do any of that virtually.

The monthly [Child Tax Credit] payments were incredibly helpful. And when that went away, I thought, “Oh, this is definitely going to hurt.” That was a very big deal to have that extra influx. I didn’t know about food assistance. But when the kids started back in school, they did qualify for free lunch, and that was a huge help. There’s also a huge psychological benefit to that program, to not have to worry about feeding the kids.

The main thing [the cash assistance] did was it filled in the gap. We were already underwater because of the child support situation and my income being so low. So, it allowed me not to be in massive debt. And because I had that money to pay the regular household bills, and then over time, I was able to save to have a little cushion. That has been pretty rare. It was like, “Wow, we’re sort of able to be just a little bit above the waterline.”

It was surprising to me how quickly [the government was] able to move to do things like the monthly checks that they sent out. When I first heard about it, I was thinking, “That's never going to happen. They're never going to pull that off.” And I was just shocked that the government could function that efficiently. Then we were getting COVID tests in the mail, too. And the drive-through test program that you could schedule at no cost. I thought, “This is fantastic!” I was really pleasantly surprised to discover the government could be as helpful and as functional as it was able to be.

Once the aid was rolled back, it’s definitely been hard, especially with everything as expensive as it’s become. Groceries are so expensive. I look around and wonder, “How is anyone expected to survive this?” This makes no sense. The income level has not gone up at the same rate as the expenses have gone up. So it’s a scramble again. It’s so very daunting, and it does make me wish that things were so much different as a society and the way that we take care of people who are struggling. Especially safety nets for single parents who are victims of abuse because there are so many additional things that come as part of that. It’s such a huge loss for society—the snowballing effects on families’ lives, to have such shallow financial support.

[The end of aid] was bittersweet. I thought, “Well if you're able to do that, why haven't you? Why is everything so broken if this is actually possible?” There was a sense before [the pandemic] that [government support] is just not doable because the country is so big and we have so much divisiveness, and there's so many things in the checks and balances of the way our government works, that it creates this gridlock that we can't really do much of anything. So we're just going to limp along doing the very bare minimum to support families? [The pandemic] really opened my eyes to the fact that there is actually a way for this to happen.

That's why I’m paying tax dollars. I'm very much in favor of tax dollars going towards healthcare and supporting those who are living in poverty, or coming out of abuse, or who have major medical issues, or experiencing discrimination, or anything really that would be disruptive to their ability to earn income. And then we can get people back on their feet and they can pay back into that system. Otherwise, when we leave them to struggle, that can become generational. Then, we have a whole underbelly of people who are continually struggling. But if we lift them back up, then they'll be paying taxes. It just makes sense that that’s what we would do to leave no one behind.

It is pretty enraging. It says to me that we just don't value families as a society. We don't value the role of a parent in our society. The only people who are valued in our society, according to the way that the government is structured, are single, wealthy white men. That’s the message I get. Those are the ones who are getting the tax breaks—corporations owned by white men. It feels like everybody else is disposable.

What Families Really Need to Thrive

My wish list is long. Paid maternity leave. The importance of that foundation in those early months, up until at least a year, that is well established and firmly rooted is so important not only for the physical health but the psychological health of that child. Support for breastfeeding. High-quality, affordable child care. I really think it should be free, and we should be paying the people who provide care for our children really well and mandating incredible training because now they’re barely scraping by. Improving the education system to shift to having teachers who are well paid and considered to have prestigious roles culturally.

I was reflecting about the discrimination that I've come across at work. As someone who is part of the queer community, I have experienced marginalization without it even being conscious. I was bisexual in a straight-presenting marriage to a man. I present very feminine outwardly, but I consider myself intergender. I believe the way I operate in the world unsettles people because I don’t fit into a traditional feminine role. This has led to discrimination most of my life. So, I would like to see everyone’s identities honored and respected so that they don’t need to fit into this box or that box and diversity, equity, and inclusion to be more widely embraced. That could make a massive difference.

And my wishlist would include a society where healthcare is 100 percent free. It should be a human right.

You know what I want policymakers to know? I want them to know that lifting me and people like me up will have a cascading effect on so many lives in a positive way. Not just for me and for my four kids, but we will give back to our communities tenfold, a hundredfold. It's not that much that needs to be to invested to help me and others out of this trench. And it will come back in incredible ways. The dividends will pay back to society. But I can't contribute right now the way I would because I’m having to spend so much of my energy and my life in the struggle to survive. It’s worth that investment in us. We’re a really good investment.