Let Me Eat Cake
I can't spend money and that hurts my feelings.
If there’s one tradition my fledgling family has embraced since almost the beginning of our time together, it’s getting drunk on Fridays. You want to judge me? Fair enough, I judge me too. BUT ALSO… judge the tens, perhaps hundreds of families we run into every week at a bar that shall remain nameless because bringing a bunch of kids there has already done enough damage to its reputation. (Apparently, young LA hipsters don’t like sipping their high ABVs next to a swarm of 3-year-olds trying to shiv each other with Magnatiles.) The point is, it’s become such a regular part of our routine that every Friday morning, my eldest checks to make sure we will, in fact, be attending “Baby Happy Hour.” And until recently, I have been able to tell him “Yes! A thousand times yes! TGIF my dear sweet angel baby!” But a few Fridays ago, when I tried to initiate the pro forma should-we-go-to-baby-happy-hour dance my husband and I always do, I was met with an anything-but-pro-forma response. He said, “Maybe we should skip it, since we’re trying to watch our spending. It can get a little expensive.” That hurt my feelings.
I find it fascinating that, at least within my small social bubble, there is so little talk about how we spend our money. In fact, I think it would be less taboo to unload the gory details of what happens in my bedroom — and trust me guys, they are GORY — than what happens in my bank account. And I think part of the reason so many of us mishandle money is that we don’t know what to do with it, because we don’t know what anyone else does with it. I don’t know how to combat this problem except to overshare what I do with my money and hope I’m not cast out of society, so here goes. What do I do with my money? Very little, because my asshole husband won’t let me.
I’m kidding about the asshole part! My husband is the best person I know! But we are two writers who have been on strike for almost four months, with two small children who shit their way through an obscene amount of diapers, and a cat with cancer whose medical bills are higher than both my pregnancies combined. Plus mortgage, childcare etc etc. So yeah, I guess spending money on fancy beer, simply because it’s nice to be in the dead-eyed company of parents who have also enlisted in the war of raising kids, could be considered “an indulgence.”
I have always been somewhat neurotic about saving money. Even as a child, I squirreled away my allowance like I was planning to fake my own death and start over, which has a lot of hidden costs, y’all. My “stash” (I called it) was flush enough that now and then, certain siblings would grab a $20 without asking because they assumed that, given my abundance of bills and limited math skills, I simply wouldn’t notice. Guess what, bitches? I NOTICED. I don’t think of saving money as particularly virtuous — maybe I did as a kid, I don’t remember. I just always had this doomed sense that completely destabilizing events were in my future, and if I could do anything to protect myself against them, it would be foolish not to.
Welp, it only took thirty years to prove me right. Savings have helped us weather an abrupt cross-country move, a pandemic, two pregnancies, a strike. But I guess I didn’t expect so many destabilizing events to happen all at once. And we’re fine. Forgoing Baby Happy Hour is obviously a long way from living out of our car, though some people might wish it upon us. But slowly running out of money has inspired a new and unexpected feeling in me: I want to blow whatever we have on stupid shit.
I want to buy the same pair of stupid expensive pants in several different colors. I want to buy a peloton. I want to buy a children’s dining set so that my kids can eat dinner far away from me. I want to buy whatever you have to buy to turn a garage into an ADU. I want to buy underwater earbuds so I can listen to podcasts while I’m swimming in our pool. (Am I seriously pleading poverty when I have a fucking pool?! Yes! Welcome to the petty, oblivious corridors of my brain!) There’s something about looming catastrophe that makes me want to be decadent. I guess that’s the definition of decadence, right? The inextricability of indulgence and decay, right? I’m saying something like, really deep, right?
A few years ago, I listened to a series from On The Media about dispelling poverty myths. Somewhere within it, Brooke Gladstone elaborated on the truism of how expensive it is to be poor, ie when you can’t pay your bills in full they accrue interest, when you live in a food desert you’re forced to buy marked up essentials like toilet paper from the corner store, when banks won’t open in your neighborhood, you’re constantly racking up ATM fees. And yet so many of us advise, from the comfort of our pool rafts, “Open a savings account! Get a Vanguard! Budget better!” It’s a crushing, ever-compounding burden to be poor, so inescapable it can make you want to throw up your hands and say ‘fuck it, if I’m always going to be poor, let me spend what I have on something that makes me feel good.’ Don’t trust my shitty paraphrasing, listen to the series. Am I poor? No. Am I out-of-touch? I think so. Am I making a fool of myself for conflating my champagne problems with coal miners in Appalachia? Absolutely. The only thing I am trying to say is that recently, things feel more dire, more desperate, than I have the great fortune of being used to. And that makes me want to overpay for beer.