Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, but with a shopping twist

Dear Robin,
Today I've been thinking about money and I've been feeling guilty about wasting it. I don't mean that I throw money out the window of my car when I'm driving, but maybe metaphorically that's what I'm talking about. When given the choice, I spend over save. And even more disappointing to me today is the realization that I buy stuff over experience.

It was another cloudy and cold day in Chicagoland (of course!) and maybe that is part of what had me pacing around the house, finding faulty with everything and beating myself up over as many things as I could think up. Or maybe it was the five trash bags heaped in a pile in the middle of my bedroom floor.

A few days ago I cleaned out my closet. When I was done, I had this HUGE pile of shirts/tops/sweaters I never wear, purses that have lost their gusto and jeans that no longer fit. There were belts and scarves, shoes and dresses, coats and bathing suits, yoga pants, and even underwear and bras. TOO MUCH STUFF!!

When most people clean out their closets or their homes, it seems reasonable that their stuff would be old or overly used, breaking down, perhaps. However, my pile only contained a small percentage of items that could be classified as old or overly used. Most of my stuff is still in good condition.
A small portion of the pile is not my size right now. My little booty is a little bigger, which for the most part, is a good thing, but has left me with a pile of expensive designer jeans that I can't do anything with but feel guilty about getting rid of. In short fits of mania I look at those expensive jeans and feel happy that some other 4'11" person might be out there shopping at Goodwill and feel more than elated at finding 15 pairs of jeans all in a size 25 and all hemmed to the perfect 4'11" person length, but then feeling guilty again that I could have bought my family a trip to Mexico with that kind of investment.

I just feel as if my priorities are out of whack. It was fine when I was 25 years old, single, and working crazy hours to own outfits for all occasions. But now in my forties, with kids and a very limited social calendar, I just can’t justify 15 pairs of jeans and 9 “special occasion” sparkly tops.

I was going to write that I’m not wreckless about shopping but after reading this I wonder if I am.

I should add this to my bucket list. What should I call it? “Stop the Madness”? “Curb the fabric consumption”? Or “Right the Wrongs of my Spending Ways”? Maybe the tried and true “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”?

Whatever I call it, it needs to start soon because this is one of those things that creeps into my dreams at night and giving me a headache during the day. I’d say there’s no bigger sign from the universe than invading anxiety to make one recognize an “issue.” OK—I get it. I need to cut back on the Seven jeans and the trips to Nordstrom. No more shoes, no more dresses, just because.

What I need is a good spanking from Suze Orman or a good talking to by a financial guru. I’d much rather have experiences than a new pair of shoes. And so today it begins…

Fall Out

Dear Robin,
After our phone conversation, I feel like I should start over and write something different. Just talking to you made me feel good and so over this stuff, but I did spend the better part of my evening putting this down, so…

I wasn’t going to write about this, but I don’t think I can move on from my own feelings if I don’t vent them out to someone. So, here goes:

Adrienne came home from school on Monday in a mood.

She walked in and slammed the door then approached me with tear-filled eyes. I asked her what was wrong and she exploded, “What did you and Daddy do to make everyone hate us?”

Wow. Loaded question. What in the world was she talking about?

After a few questions, I figure it out.

She was referring to communion and more specifically to communion parties.
Earlier in the day, the first day back to school after communion, Adrienne’s teacher set aside time for a “show and tell” (if you will) of after-communion activities. Each student got to “brag” about how many relatives came in to visit, what kind of food or cake was served, what special message your God Parents gave you, what kinds of gifts you received, and etc. The process of communion is part of their religion grade and family tradition related to communion is part of the curriculum. In the teacher’s defense, I can see how such an activity would be totally relevant and possibly a good way to “close” the event.

One thing you should know about Adrienne is that she does not like to be upstaged or out done. I don’t mean this in an arrogant or mean way, nor do I imply that Adrienne is competitive. I just mean that she, in the least, likes to be like everyone else. She absolutely DOES NOT want to be the one person that didn’t have a big after-communion gathering or that didn’t have God Parents present.

So, in school, in front of her whole class, she cried when one of her classmates told of her party that was too big for her house—a party that had to be held at the country club with a cake that looked like a wedding cake, and with God Parents that flew in from California.

This same classmate acquired 62 gifts which in addition to traditional plaques, rosaries, and bibles, also included cash--$832 (according to this classmate).

When Adrienne was telling me about this country club party, through sobs I might add, my imagination got the best of me. I pictured some over-the-top MTV style communion where Ozzy and Sharon Osborne are the God Parents and the first communicant gets a scooter that looks like a motorcycle as a gift from the celebs. Or better yet, it’s Courtney Cox and David Arquette and David gets drunk on the cheap country club champagne and smears the communion cake that looks like wedding cake all over another guest and so not to ruin it anymore, they start throwing cash.

At one point, lost in my own rendition of this little girl’s event, I laughed out loud.

Big mistake. Adrienne stomped off to her bedroom (and slammed that door, too)yelling that I don’t understand how she feels, that I don’t care how she feels and then, “Everybody had a better party than me!”

Instead of going after Adrienne, I stayed seated in the living room for a few minutes, thinking.

To an outsider, it might seem as if Adrienne was jealous of the gifts and the cake or jealous of the country club or jealous of something else. I was tempted to think the same thing. But after a bit of reflection, I thought otherwise.

Here’s the thing: Adrienne, as the second child, is always on the lookout for what Andrew got that she isn’t getting. That does make her a scorekeeper about a lot of things. But in addition to that, just by her sheer nature, she is perceptive. She sees and hears, notices and processes all things going on around her. She can sniff out authenticity as easily as she can detect insincerity.

Now, I am not implying that my in-laws were insincere in their visit, but I have mentioned that our relationship is superficial. And I think for the first time, Adrienne noticed it too. So, when they came and left in a whirlwind, Adrienne got her feathers ruffled—her feelings hurt.

Despite her sharp perceptions and her outgoing personality, she is not one to point out when she is feeling hurt. She glosses over it, “puts on a good face,” and focuses on something else (like the cute little cakes we had) until something happens that makes it hard to hold in her disappointment anymore.

The country club party wasn’t the only thing that did it. It was everyone in class who shared a story of a laughing, loving visitor—an adult who sat at the table and told stories about their own first communion or kicked a soccer ball around the yard with the cousins, of flew in from California because that’s what God Parents do. This is what they taught in school about communion. Attached to the ceremony is a family full of tradition and full of excitement for you to make this holy sacrament.

Her emotions came from the fact that in class, for the first time, she was faced with the reality of her family compared to her perceived notions of everyone else.

She wanted Eric’s mom to not be sick or to suspend her grieving of her sister in law for a few hours. She wanted all the other relatives on the invitation list to send some kind of acknowledgement, she wanted Eric’s partner’s wife (her God mother) to find the time to come to see her in her dress. She wanted my mom or dad to tell some kind of story about her when she was little or about me when I was little. She wanted someone to make her experience like what her textbook and the teachers told her it would be like—what her friends in class confirmed.

Everyone gave Adrienne money and gifts, which was so nice. But Adrienne is a tough cookie. That stuff is only good enough if you bring your best self along with it. She was disappointed, not jealous.

I opened the door to her room and found her wrapped up in a white fluffy blanket, communion dress still laid out flat on the floor from the night before.

After a few minutes I was finally able to talk to her about how we don’t control other people in whether or not they can come to a communion party and we certainly can’t control the way people act when they come to our house, but we do have control over ourselves and we can choose to look our life situations in ways that make us happy and not ways that make us sad.

I said this more for my own benefit than for hers. Practice what you preach? Yea…I’ll work on it.

Enough already! Part II

Dear Robin,
Here I sit, looking out to another crappy day in Chicagoland--high 42, rainy, windy, and gray.

An interesting tidbit of information that may shed light (for a Southerner like you) on the severity of this nasty, awful, persistent weather is that our outside cat, who LOVES the outside, won’t even go outside. She paces around the front door, but when I open it for her, she sniffs the air then turns around, slinking (low to the ground in disgust, I might add) in the other direction, in favor of spending the afternoon in a comfortable chair in my closet ( get it? INSIDE the house, NOT OUTSIDE where she loves and belongs). Good grief…

A few weeks ago, when the local news predicted warmer, dryer temps, but Mother Nature remained stubbornly cold and rainy, I consoled myself with a double whammy “spring” shopping spree, thinking the rush of endorphins would last until the weather broke.

I started on-line with two pairs of wedge sandals, two dresses (decidedly shorter and more “spring-like” in both fabric and design) and a few short-sleeved cardigans from Nordstrom.

After a brief workout and a lunch that undid the workout, I went to a local boutique and bought two pairs of jeans and a half dozen short sleeved shirts.

It made me happy for a day or two, until the weather persisted and everything just hung in my closet lifelessly with the tags weighing it all down, making it feel like an incredible waste of effort and money--a quick fix that didn’t bridge the gap to anything.

Ultimately, I rationalized the whole thing with the idea that it had to get warmer AND when it did, I would wear these cute things to class, making me a very professional-looking professor, even in the spring. So on the days when I’m feeling less than scholarly and less than qualified to do my job, I would at least look the part. My dad always taught me that looking like you know what you’re doing is sometimes just as good as actually knowing. This idea has saved me more than a handful of times from various predicaments—scholarly and otherwise.

But you know where this is going—I haven’t had the chance to wear any of it AND MY SEMESTER ENDS NEXT WEEK!! And after my semester, where in the heck will I wear these “professional” looking items? Once I’m done with class, I spend my mornings at the gym and my afternoons taxi-ing my kids around—most days in the same yoga pants and tank top I started out in. It gives me a headache to even think about it. And so to Mother Nature, in my loudest outside voice, I say, yet again, Enough Already!!