HEART OF MY HEART

Hi, my name is Kelly Seifer. I am a happily married mother of four and a grandparent raising a grandchild. While we have never been financially well off, we’ve been quite happy with our state of hard working middle class. My husband spent the better part of our thirty year marriage working hard, working overtime every week in a very physical job to take care of his family. He is the most devoted selfless man I know and others who know him would tell you he is the epitome of ‘salt of the earth’ type of guy. In 2006 our life changed when we had our first granddaughter. With no father to speak of and a mother who was not able to raise her, Tony and I decided to raise the little girl as our own. Her name is Laci and she is the light of our lives. We gave all we had and more to raising this beautiful little girl. We were happy, we shared many great memories. But tragedy struck our little family unit a few years ago. My husband suffered what the doctors referred to as a massive heart attack, there was so much damage done to his heart they didn’t know if he would make it through that first night. He did, and God love him within weeks he went back to work. In his mind a man always worked hard to take care of his family. However the permanent damage to his heart was too much and he soon was forced to quit working. The next few years saw us applying for disability and while waiting to get that approved we faced a major financial loss. Systematically one by one we lost all our future security, first was the family car which got us back and forth to all my husband’s medical appointments, then we lost our savings, 401k, and eventually the little home where we raised our three oldest children, buried the family pet, and began our new journey with raising another child. Within a few years it was all gone, but we had finally been approved for the disability-partially. Evidently raising a child since her birth, being the only person that child depends on, does not equate to that child meeting the criteria of a dependent on a disability case. We were asked if we had raised the child since birth than why we hadn’t adopted her. Here is the answer. She shares our name, there is no one to dispute our custody over her, and we have legal guardianship over her. Legally we could claim her on taxes, leave all our worldly belongings to her, make all decisions on her medical, education ect… the fact of the matter is she is our daughter, we have loved her and cared for her since there was a her, and she feels the same way about us, adoption is just a paper and would not change a thing as far as we were concerned. WE had no way to foresee that due to serious health issues we would end up on disability and that we would not be able to claim the child we are raising as our dependent. Ironically now that we are living on such a sad fixed income we can no longer afford to complete an adoption process. My husband has worked hard his entire life and he now lives in poverty. We all do. We are being denied benefits that we are entitled to because we didn’t adopt her. The same government that gladly pays $25 dollars a day to strangers to foster children, denies a loving grandparent who has gone through his life savings, who forgoes his own medically needed prescriptions, all in the name of raising his grandchild. It has all the appearance of some archaic law that in and of itself is oxymoronic, written no doubt a long time ago, therefore written for a different world than the one we live in now. Be that as it may it is still the law and one by which we must abide. We have now struggled for several years, we are at poverty level. More times than not we have to cancel medical appointments because the vehicle we have is at best a very unreliable sad excuse for transportation, my husband has gone without prescriptions many times in the name of paying the electric bill or putting food on the table. The absolute worst part is there is no end in sight. Until we can pay the attorney to get this adoption complete and thereby get the benefits we are entitled to, nothing changes. It’s just this revolving door of poverty. No one said life is fair; sometimes it is not even just. I am just one of a growing number of KY grandparents being denied help raising a child that our government would pay strangers to foster. However unjust that may be, I do not have time to wait around for the government to change these ridiculous laws. Tony’s health is not good, he now has several serious health conditions and takes over 23 prescription pills a day, Laci is getting older, it breaks my heart to see them living this way, when it can be changed. You can be a part of that change, donate to our cause, HEART OF MY HEART, and help us raise money for this adoption. We are middle class America fallen, please don’t let us be forgotten too.