One of the
best, albeit harshest rules I learned at a young age was that life’s not fair,
and you can’t have everything you want.
My mom was
young, uneducated, and single with no help, frankly I’m pretty amazed that she succeeded in
keeping us in basic necessities. There
was no money for things like video games, or even a VCR. There are a lot of things that people around
me take for granted that I never had, a washer and dryer in the house, a dishwasher,
or an air conditioner. My mom didn’t
have a car, we took the bus. There was
only one thing that she always found money for, and that was books. If I wanted a book, she found a way to get it
for me.
To this day
I still marvel at how convenient it is for me to just throw in a load of
laundry whenever I fell like it. No more
having to plan out an afternoon at the Laundromat. I still don’t have a dishwasher, or air
conditioning, or cable. My definition of
necessary is very different from other people.
I remember
one Christmas I got a TV, it wasn’t big, 15’’ I think, but I remember how happy
I was to have my very own TV for my room.
Now I think about how much my mom must have scrimped and saved to buy
it.
This may be
the reason that I have so much trouble dealing with other people’s expectations
of Christmas. This year the BF and I
have dealt with some pretty harsh backlash because we have said no to overspend
on gifts, and stuck to our guns. I think
we’ve gotten to the other side of the gauntlet, but it has been a pretty rough
ride the past couple of months dealing with everyone’s projected expectations.
The fact is
this has been a very expensive year for us, what with the move, and getting the
kids set up etc. And we just don’t have
the money to be spending hundreds of dollars per kid.
The ex told
us that she had decided to buy the boys Nintendo 3DS each and she wanted us to
go in on it with her. Of course she had
not asked our opinion. We said no,
absolutely not. My BF had bought the
boys a Nintendo DS each for the birthdays last year, and sent them to her house
with them, despite our usual rule about not sending things over there. Within a few months, they had lost one and
broken the other. We saw no reason that
we should help pay for new ones when we had already bought two. We told her that we were keeping Christmas
simple this year, no big gifts. She kept
bugging us until November. We didn’t
contribute, and she bought them anyways because that was what they wanted. No thought about what they needed, or the
consumerist message that there are no consequences for not taking care of
things, just buy new ones.
Then in October,
it was the eldest birthday. He told us
that he wanted the Skylander starter game.
We had already bought him a small gift, but we looked online to see how
much the game was. When we saw that it
was 75$ for the starter pack, but then there were about 50 other characters to
buy at 10$-20$ each, I said no way.
Especially for a video game. My
BF hesitated, wanting to make the kids happy, but quickly came to the same
conclusion as me. We had been working on
limiting screen time for months, and this would not help. We told him that no, we would not be buy the
game, and we told him why, it was too expensive. He wheeldled and cajolled and tried
everything in his eight year old’s toolbox to convince us, and finally
understood that it was no.
In the end
my father in law bought it for him, and you know what, he appreciated it
immensly. He started to understand the
concept that things cost money, and that things are not a right, or essential,
they are just things.
The kids
aren’t unhappy at our house without cable, or air conditioning. Kids adapt to what you teach them to expect
out of life, and while I wholeheartedly agree in teaching them to aspire to
greatness and reach for the stars, I also plan to teach them that aspiration is
not expectation. That while you should
strive for more, take time to apreciate what you have.
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