I grew up with everything I owned except basically my underwear second hand, holes in my clothes and nothing the right size. And calculated the cost of everything in how many books it would buy at the library sale and, although it's ridiculous, pounds of onions. I wore the same taken-in and re-hemmed $10 Goodwill dress to middle, high school, and college graduations and have 140 lbs of rice hidden in my closet.
It's a nice fantasy but in 30 years it can be your kid posting on an internet forum about the one time their dad said he got a raise and they could have a good new pair of shoes that didn't let the rain in, and as it turned out he lied because he was aggravated and wanted to get the feeling of control that yanking the rug out from under me and my mom gave. (Or rather, he said: it was a joke.) So now I don't ever trust it if he promises me anything, having of course been put in this position repeatedly when it came to basic material needs, where the idea of handling it was treated as stupid or funny or just not worthy of consideration, and I take care of myself. Oh, and we basically don't talk anymore.
As it should be? Probably.
Sometimes, you buy things that you technically don't need because it makes you feel like there's a foundation of your life that isn't just survival and struggle and providing for others, as seen in my father's (expensive for us) Grateful Dead posters and records collection.
Sometimes, you buy things to have a reserve, of extra shoes or dresses in slightly the wrong size or children's toys for an unborn child, because it was cheap at the right time and god knows what is going to happen with inflation later. Maybe you'll have to move to a colder climate.
Sometimes, somebody fucked with you one too many times and you're giving yourself the hazard pay that no one else is going to offer.
Sometimes, as a gift to convince someone, like a child, that they're in fact worth expending the only resource that anyone ever thinks about, because other love is already, clearly, not available.
Sometimes it's so that you can have status with your female friends and relatives whose husbands spend on them in the aforementioned manner, even with love in place. As when my mother finally got herself an engagement ring after being married twenty years.
I'm dead-tired. Enough people have beat me up emotionally and shoved me in my place this past week that, well, I don't know. I know it's the wrong thread, I felt the need to qualify the above statement.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 14550453 times)