Social Security

Friends, let me share with you an adventure I recently had. I spent two hours yesterday at the social security office in East Houston trying to get Charlotte a new social security card since the one we applied for when she was born was never mailed to us ... or it was intercepted by some very greasy US Postal worker who sold it on the black market.

In Texas, you practically have to get strip-searched to get any kind of government documentation. For example, at the DMV (or the DPS, as they call it here) I had to show three original forms of I.D. on top of my North Carolina license and get my fingerprints taken and run through a digital database before they would give me a new driver's license. I thought they were going to throw me in the clink for not having my marriage certificate with me to prove that my maiden name on my passport was really me. Seriously, as I stood posing for my "mug shot" at the end of all that I wondered if they were going to march me down the hall into a holding cell while they printed the license out. (Nope, it turns out that Texas waits two weeks to mail you a license even after all the time you spent waiting in line there so they can check you out some more.)

Getting a social security card for my child wasn't a lot different. Because of my previous experience at the DPS, I took everything I could think of with me: my drivers license, passport, marriage certificate, social security card, birth certificate, all my college and high school I.D.s, and my report cards from ages eight on. To prove Charlotte was my kid, I took everything I had: Charlotte's birth certificate, her medical insurance card, pictures of my husband and I with Charlotte, Charlotte's umbilical cord stump, our hospital bracelets, hair and toenail clippings, congratulations cards from all three baby showers, and some blood samples from every member of our family.

Nope, still wasn't enough. They wanted her SHOT RECORD too. I guess some illegal immigrants in the 1980s were coming into Texas and using the birth certificates of babies who had died to get social security cards, so now you have to have the shot records of your kid to prove that the baby is still living and being vaccinated regularly. Well, this is the story they gave me at the social security office anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion that those government workers just really enjoy making you wait two hours in a stinky, crowded, dirty room looking at a hairy six inches of butt-crack on the woman in front of you and then telling you that you have to come back again another day and do it all over again. Those sick sadists ...

Anyway, after a lot of crying and begging, I convinced the social security woman to give me the card even though the suitcase of items I had brought was insufficient evidence. She bent the rules and gave it to me. I'm glad she did, but now I am suffering from another kind of crisis of conscience ... Did she bend the rules because I'm white, blonde, and green-eyed? Upper middle-class? Well-educated? If I was Latina, or African American, or even white with a darker complexion, or if my clothes were a little shabbier or my speech a little less refined, would she have insisted on more documentation? Hum. Welcome to Texas!