When Sarah was born I had fought with everyone who even mentioned the word adoption to me. My parents had suggested I give up the baby as had my older brother, but I just could get myself to even imagine the situation. I knew I was not financially very sound but I was not in the streets either. And it is not that people less fortunate never raised a child. All of these arguments of mine went flying out of the window once the baby did arrive. I saw my funds dwindle in no time.
I had hoped that I would be able to get back to work within a few weeks of giving birth, but then Sarah developed pneumonia and I was too afraid to leave her and go back to work. In any case the hotel manager had made it clear that since I was a temporary employee, I will not have a job waiting for me but he will consider taking me back once I was ready. So by the time Sarah was a month old, I had no job and my savings were already halved. This meant big trouble and to top it all Sarah had a weak lung which meant she would need a lot of medical care in her initial year.
The first thing I started out with was looking for a medical support for Sarah. I was amazed at how expensive things were in this area. Apparently infants are high risk and so their medical insurance is also really high. Now while I was not really broke and on the streets, there was no way that I could afford to pay that much in medical insurance. My calculations drove me so crazy that I began to wonder if I should consider giving up my baby for adoption. If things continued this way there was no way I was going to be able to feed the baby leave alone raise her properly.
With Sarah falling sick almost every other week, I was not able to rest and this meant that I did not have enough time on my hands to look for a job or even sort out the finances for that matter. Sarah’s condition required her to take some serious antibiotics from time to time and these were rather expensive. Plus her vitamins and other strength boosters were taking up a lot of money too. To make matters worse Sarah had to go through a lot of labs frequently and this again meant large expenses. I was so hassled by all of this that I spoke to my dad about planning to give up Sarah for adoption since there was no way I was going to be able to look after her. Dad was taken aback. He knew how difficult this was for me. He looked into my account, my savings and all of it and agreed that I had hit a wall here.
My dad advised me that I should begin by first trying to find some work and since there is a lot of work to be found online these days, he suggested I look up a few sites. While nothing on the net actually converted to a job for me, I did find some very good information on the support for child medical plans. http://www.singlemom.com/insurekidsnow-gov/ was a link that proved really useful and it had popped up as an affiliate advert when I was looking for some single mom advice on the career front.
Interestingly, this option allowed me to opt for child medical insurance at no cost also. Since I was out of a job, things were getting to difficult for me. So I decided to go all out and inquire about this aspect of my expenses. Any parent knows that when it comes to infants, the medicals can drive you nuts and in my case with a weak lung and all, things were getting even more difficult.
The paper work was extensive no doubt. The authorities check everything under the sun. In my case it was well worth the effort. I was having to rush to the doctor almost every second week since Sarah would end up with some infection or the other and it would immediately translate to her lungs. The plan that I did manage to get covered everything right from her vaccinations to her visits to even her prescription drugs. This was a huge relief for me.
With medical insurance in place, I was able to save a large chunk of money and this did put my mind at ease. I began to search for jobs with a vengeance and found one at a local dairy farm. While the job was not one where I got a lot of money but yes it did allow me to meet my day to day expenses without having to dig into my savings. I was able to cover her other necessities with comparatively greater ease.
Raising a child alone is very difficult, but if you have to raise the baby alone and you have no money to support the child either, then this is recipe for disaster. I shudder to think that there was a time in my life where I was considering giving up my baby girl for adoption, but it’s true. Had a solution not come up, that was the only path open to me and I know that it would have broken me as a person. As a single mom it is important that we consider carefully if we will be able to give the child proper care, both financially and emotionally. I made the mistake of presuming only one aspect is important, sadly this is not true and I almost lost my baby because of this.
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