Possibly one of the bigger downsides to home birth, is that paperwork that hospital moms take for granted, can be quite cumbersome for those birthing outside the hospital. One issue is that although a representative from the Vital Statistics Office apparently has an office at the hospital, no such representative exists in my home. In order to get a birth certificate for Connor, I think we had to fill out and send in the form 5 different times. I learned that the good people at Vital Statistics care a lot about the color of ink, whether information is crossed out and written in again, and other random issues that were completely unknown to me. Eventually, we did get a birth certificate for Connor, and then his Social Security card arrived in the mail not long after that.
Determined to only have to fill out the form once for Helen, Ed and I were very careful. But some worker in Richmond decided that I must have made a mistake writing Helen's name as "Helen Carlin MyLastName", because s/he changed it to "Helen Carlin Ed'sLastName" before issuing the birth certificate. It was fixed easily enough, and a new birth certificate - identical to the first except it had the correct last name, arrived.
But I learned the hard way, that sometime a big bureaucracy can move at lightning speed. On the heels of the second birth certificate, a Social Security card with the wrong name showed up. I was all set for this to be fixed as easily as the birth certificate, but that was insane.
Because Helen was born in October, by the time the birth certificate got sorted out, it was the beginning of the year. Ed and I decided not to correct the SS card, because we didn't want to get our taxes returned to us on account of a name mismatch. You see, if we indicated Helen's name was one thing, and her SS card indicated it was another, we'd have mess on our hands, which would now involve the IRS.
And thus began what turned out to be a 3 year process to get a corrected SS card. Basically, every time I became even semi-motivated to deal with this, I would instantly lose motivation as someone at Social Security crushed all my hopes of this being an easy process. Ultimately, they needed me to pay them to officially change Helen's name, which is just offensive since I am not the one who changed her name. It's some office worker in Richmond. Make her pay!
Then a friend of mine, who is a bureaucrat, gave me the sage advice "You can't out-bureaucrat a bureaucrat." In other words, stop trying to be logical and explain why I shouldn't have to pay to get Helen's name changed, when I'm not the one who changed it, and just pay the fee.
Egged on by the idea that I would like to travel to a warm island over Thanksgiving this year - I finally made it to the Social Security office to present my ridiculous amount of paperwork - including the coveted name change document. And now, Helen finally has been granted a Social Security card and birth certificate with the correct name on it.
In other words, you win, Social Security. Now I really need a tropical vacation!
Elaine
:) After Alex was born at home, we were successfully able to get a birth certificate for him by trading in our original midwife birth document at the county office downtown. However, when we went to the Social Security office, we still only had one proof of identity and they didn't seem to care for the copy of the midwife birth document since it wasn't an original. So, we solved the problem by going and getting a passport. Because all you need are both parents and one original document. We swore he was our kid and that he was born in the place listed on his birth certificate, and bingo, Passport to bring over to Social Security to get that piece of documentation.
ReplyDelete