Mom Got Medi-Cal (She Doesn’t Know Yet)
I found out by logging into a website. There was a confirmation number this time.
That’s it. That’s the whole ceremony.
The Anticlimactic Portal
No email. No letter with a seal. No phone call from a caseworker saying, “Mr. Hsiung, we’re pleased to inform you—” Nothing like that. After months of hold music and benefitscal.com throwing identity-verification errors like a bouncer who doesn’t like my face, the confirmation that my mom officially had Medi-Cal was a status change. On a government portal. With a reference number, I immediately took a screenshot and saved it to a folder called “Mom logistics,” which has 43 items and brings me a specific flavor of dread every time I open it.
I stared at it for a second. Maybe two. Then I opened my daily note and typed: “Mom officially got Medi-Cal today!”
Exclamation point. Then I wrote about something else.
Meanwhile, in Fremont
Here’s the other thing: my mom doesn’t know yet.
Unless benefitscal.com dispatched a mariachi band to her house — which, given the state of their UX, I would describe as unlikely — she has no idea this happened. I haven’t called her. Partly because calling my mom requires a specific kind of mental preparation, the same preparation you need before a work presentation or a dentist appointment, the kind where you have to psych yourself up and also accept that it will take longer than expected. But mostly because I’m not sure what I’d even say.
Hey Mom, you have Medi-Cal now.
And she’d say, “Oh, good,” in the tone she uses when I tell her traffic wasn’t bad. Mild. Satisfied. Moving on.
She doesn’t know what Medi-Cal is in any operational sense. She doesn’t know about the MC604IPS form with 17 attachment requirements that I filled out at my kitchen table at 11pm, cross-referencing documents as if I were Ace Attorney preparing to scream “OBJECTION!” at anyone who dares challenge its accuracy.
She doesn’t know about the 2FA verification codes that get texted to a phone that lives at her house, which means “quick two-factor authentication” becomes a logistical relay race involving me calling her, her finding the phone, her reading me six digits with the cadence of someone dictating a telegram.
She just knows her son handles things.
The invisible scoreboard — all those weeks of phone calls and portal sessions and drives to Fremont with a folder — exists entirely in my head. I’m the only one keeping score. There’s no ceremony for this. There’s a confirmation number and a screenshot in a folder, and a sentence in a daily note I almost didn’t write.
The Thing About Finish Lines
Here’s what I realized staring at that status change: this isn’t the finish line.
Of course it isn’t. Friends, Medi-Cal is the prerequisite.
The actual job — the thing I’ve been grinding toward this whole time — is IHSS. In-Home Supportive Services. The program that would actually get my mom paid help at home. Medi-Cal is what you need before you can apply for that. Which means that the lone sentence in my daily notes wasn’t the end of the arc. They were the loading screen. The checkpoint before the next zone opens up. The Princess is in another castle.
I think, on some level, I knew this. But I wrote the exclamation point anyway.
Maybe because I also know how government benefits actually work: they’re engineered, functionally, for someone with infinite time, no cognitive load, fluent English, and the patience of a Buddhist monk who also has broadband. They are not engineered for an 88-year-old immigrant woman who treats her cell phone like a suspicious package. The systems that are supposed to help the most vulnerable people are the ones most likely to exhaust them to the point of giving up around document number nine. The fact that I got through it isn’t a testament to the system. It’s a testament to the fact that I could absorb the friction my mom couldn’t.
These are the duties of an Asian son, I assume. I’m still sorting out how I feel about that.
What the Exclamation Point Was For
But I keep coming back to that sentence. Why did I write them down?
Because if I hadn’t, the win would have just dissolved into Tuesday. Into the noise. Into the next task in the queue, which there always is. I’ve been running this caregiving project in the background of my actual life for months — background process, always running, sometimes spiking to foreground, eating memory. The entry could have just said “status update: pending → approved” and been functionally identical.
Instead, I used an exclamation point. Which, for a Gen X person who came of age on the internet and deploys punctuation with surgical restraint, is the equivalent of a confetti cannon.
I think I needed to mark it. Even knowing the IHSS application is waiting. Even knowing my mom doesn’t know yet. Even knowing the scoreboard is invisible, and I’m the only one reading it. The date stamp matters. The sentence matters. You have to let yourself have the checkpoint before you can face the next zone.
The work isn’t done. Honestly, it’s barely started. But for one entry on one Tuesday, I gave it an exclamation point.
“Mom got Medi-Cal!” Progress.
”Mom got Medi-Cal.” Endless bureaucratic suffering.
Turns out that’s the only trophy in this sport. You make it yourself, in a notes app, and no one else sees it.
Probably fine.