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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
"Laidback, with my mind on my money, and my money on my mind." - Snoop DoggI'm with Snoop. Money has been on my mind lately. Especially while vacationing in the land of conspicuous wealth, a.k.a the Hamptons, but since then even. I've been investing in myself this summer because I'm really on a roll with honing my personal style. It's something I've plunged myself into to distract myself from the disappointment we've experienced with infertility. A small part of me worries I'm subconsciously attempting to fill a hole that can't be filled, but most of me is absolutely empowered by the heavily calculated changes and additions I've made to my closet (I'll go into how I'm doing this in more depth in different post). I honestly believe I'm self actualizing through the power of clothing, but there's always a side of the usual female guilt that comes with doing anything for yourself that might be perceived as extravagant. Or something like that. Insert your favorite triggering word here.There's always something that wants to hold you back (and it's usually ourselves.) So I've been inner battling this entire summer, torn between my own desire for a happier, whole self and disgust with my own consumption.This convenient, cheap, disposable culture we live and participate in only compounds it all. To mainstream shop and consume is all the things: alluring, horrifying, and unsustainable. Which on one hand, has only solidified my resolve to nail down my personal style and mostly excuse myself from the wasteful fashion cycle, and on the other hand is inspiring me to use and treasure what I already have, treat it well, and repair and maintain those things. Now that I love every single article in my closet, I'm more inspired to do it. I've been to the tailor three times this season. I have a pile of shoes for my favorite cobbler. I got a shoe shine kit last week and I've already polished a pair of boots. I will have to keep buying shirts with some regularity, due to some sharp elbows of mine, but instead of going directly to new retailers, I've been looking at second hand first and making far more pre-loved purchases these days. Which, I have to point out, really makes money go farther when you're on said mission to make your "new you" wardrobe fully operational.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
I wasn't always a fan of second hand. Certainly not as a kid. I was such a little snot-nosed brat. I'd often complain that I had nothing to wear when I was growing up, in the hopes that my mother would take me shopping. Especially at this store called Clothes Time! which had some really zany and on trend 80's print jumpsuits with padded shoulders. It was thrilling for me when my mother treated me to something brand new. My pleas for having nothing to wear often worked when we lived in California. Growing children grow out of clothes at an alarming rate after all.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
When my family moved to Seattle in 1989, things changed. My father was starting a freelance Industrial Design business and my mother, a registered nurse, was often the only paycheck (judging by my father's daily habit of looking at the Want-Ads.)Then one day my mother was helping a patient into bed and herniated a disc. My mother became the patient. She was bed-ridden for six months which meant zero paychecks. We were plunged into poverty. As a 10 year old, I didn't have to do much about it, other than watch the worry creases deepen on my parent's faces.They made sure we were fed and had a roof over our heads, but I'll never forget one thing they asked of me, get the free lunch at school. I said I would, but that was before I knew what that entailed. There was a special line to stand in, it got to go after all the paying hot lunches were served. There was often only one or two kids in it, or none. The free lunch line was absolutely an 11th finger; it stood out. If the cafeteria ran out of hot lunch, you'd get called into the kitchen and one cook would grab the 5 gallon vat of generic peanut butter off the shelf while the other would lay a piece of white bread directly on her meaty hand and scrape some peanut butter and concord grape jelly onto it. Then you were given a box of milk and sent on your way. So I'd sheepishly stand in the free lunch line, waiting for my turn at a hot lunch, (maybe.) But sometimes I couldn't bear the stigma and the stares from my classmates. So later on, it was quite often that I'd skip lunch, especially once I learned that the churlish lunch lady really liked to rub my face in it.
"Heh?" she'd say, holding a hand to her ear (an ear which had all sorts of thick, white hairs sticking out of it like pin cushion, her chin too) when I'd squeakily mutter, "free lunch please."
"What's that MISSY? What kind of lunch?" she'd demand with a malicious grin, forcing me to bellow, "FREE LUNCH PLEASE!"The kids I was trying to become friends with would ask me why I would wait in a different line and yell "free lunch" once we made it back to the classroom. I'd shrug my shoulders and hang my head in shame, and push my tray away uneaten. I think I had my first panic attack at age 10. They started at school. Then they started following me whenever we went to church for some reason. I lost weight that year, so my clothes lasted longer than usual (width wise), but length wise, not so much.There's a picture of me at some kind of car museum around that time, waving to the camera. I'm tiny and my limbs are gangly. I'm positively swimming in a hand-me-down red hoodie, but my ankles and calves are exposed because my legs were too long for my green sweatpants, but those were also very baggy. My scuffed white sneakers are definitely more brown than they are white.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
In revisiting these memories as an adult who has worked in the non-profit world for nearly seven years now, I believe we became recipients of some kind of "Adopt-a-Family" program for Christmas that year, but as a ten year old, I didn't know about any of that. I just knew there was no way my parents could afford to buy my sister and me American Girl Dolls, but still they came on Christmas morning. In wrapping paper I'd never seen before. With gift labels that didn't have Santa's regular handwriting. My belief in Santa Claus was starting to wane by 1990, but in receiving an American Girl doll when we couldn't even afford a Christmas tree that year, well, that bought Santa Claus a few more years of belief. I'm not proud to say I believed in Santa til age 12, but hey that's what poverty, even just a prolonged taste of it, will do to you.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
1990 was not a good year for any of us, especially my mother. She was in a new city, no friends, in bad health and unable to work, her father dying was the cherry on top of it all. Only she was able to fly back to California for the funeral, probably on her mother's dime. I noticed that when she came back there was an old, unfamiliar suitcase with her and inside it was a daisy printed vinyl bag full of old clothes that were hopelessly out of style. These were intended for me. She'd pillaged her mother's closets for clothing to put on her growing daughter, but her daughter wasn't interested. There was simply no way I was going to wear a pair of rust brown corduroy overalls with massive bell bottoms. There was simply no way I was going to wear a blouse with a Peter Pan collar the size of a Rubenesque woman's bra. I eventually stopped complaining about having nothing to wear so she'd stop dragging the vinyl bag out from under her bed. But eventually it became dire and I agreed to *try* some things on from the vinyl bag. But deep down, all I wanted was to look like a Fly Girl and wear neon scrunchies and shiny spandex bike shorts. The bag didn't have anything neon or spandex. I picked the only non-rust colored things out: a blue and white striped shirt. It was a stretchy v-neck, 3/4 sleeves, and almost form-fitting. Michelle Pfeiffer or Linda Carter probably wore something like it in the 70's with a pair of high-waisted flares. I paired it with a white skort with a paper bag waist and shuffled out of my bedroom to show my parents. My Dad pointed at my twiggy legs in the voluminous skort and laughed. Something about toothpicks in a barrel was mentioned. My mother clasped her hands together and said, "I think she looks great. She looks like a rich person in that striped shirt!" I think I scream-cried at them, "We're poor and I'm wearing a barrel like poor people do in cartoons! I hate that we're poor!" I then ran away, slammed my door, and proceeded to throw myself on my bed in a dramatic sobbing emotional maelstrom.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
After the barrel skort meltdown, my father took me to a thrift store to pick out some things better suited to my tastes than the stuff my mother dragged home, but I wasn't having it. Thrift stores were for poor people and I was clinging to some batty Frances Hodgson Burnett fantasy that I was really a princess in disguise. I wasn't really a poor people. (My poor Dad.) I semi-remember seeing the twinkle of a gold lame floral dress amongst a river of jewel toned silk gowns that in my head now, vividly look vintage and designer and like they were rolled directly out of Talitha Getty's closet. But all I would stubbornly have anything to do with was a pair of Nike baseball cleats because my Dad said I had to pick out something I needed and most of the kids on the softball team I'd joined were making fun of me for being the only one without baseball cleats. Listen, if I could get back in a time machine and hit up that untapped Seattle thrift shop, I would. I would. i would. I would, I WOULD. I'd make it rain in there, then I'd start my own vintage shop. Those were the days when AMAZING vintage stuff could still be found in thrift stores. I eventually learned my Greatest Generation mentality, "a penny saved is a penny earned" or its sister statement, "waste not, want not" from being poor. It was a slowly dawning realization once my over-imaginative (delusional?) little girl ego shook free of it's naive husk.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
While I am not poor, I also know from hanging out in the Hamptons and in driving by the homes on "Billionaire's Row" in East Hampton, I am also certainly not rich. But even if I were to magically become one of the 1%. I'd still have this niggling pessimistic insecurity in the back of my brain that everything could change in the blink of an eye. By 1991 my Dad accepted a job that took us out of Washington state, and lifted us out of poverty. The only problem was he was a creative at a major company that was constantly being bought and sold. Creatives are the first to get the axe when new management rolls in, so the threat of joblessness and poverty was always in the back of my mind, giving me anxiety, killing my pleasure in the present.
I heard something crazy on NPR once. The scars of childhood poverty show up on adult brain scans. “Early experiences of poverty become embedded in the brain. Exposure to chronic stress in early childhood – when the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are rapidly developing – produces lasting neurological changes,” says Cornell’s Gary W. Evans, the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Ecology on the results of his 15 year study. Even if the adults are no longer impoverished, the scar of poverty often comes back to haunt the individual in the form of depression, anxiety disorders, and other post traumatic stress disorders. I'm an anxious person. Is this a scar on my brain, or a learned behavior double safety? Are you sure? You're sure? For sure, sure? On a scale of one to sure, how sure? There is always something to wring my hands over. Am I living life to the fullest? Will I ever get to England or Paris? Will there be enough food for our dinner party? Will there be enough time to get everything done? Since we won't have children to care for us, will there be enough retirement to keep us out of one of those deplorable state geriatric homes?
Am I enough?
I never ever forgot that my mother said stripes made me look like a rich person that day. And to this day, I can't shake it. Stripes still look moneyed to me. From a classic black and white striped cabana tent on the beach to a seersucker anything, I can feel my pupils dilating whenever I spot them. I'd probably wear some form of a Breton stripe shirt every single day if I could get away with it. I don't know what this says about me, maybe it's like a talisman against future poverty, but don't judge me to harshly. My brain's scarred. You wouldn't hit a gal with brain scars would you?
How do you balance the YOLO sprints and the marathon of life? How do you manage female guilt? Asking for a friend.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
What I Wore:
Swimsuit: past season J.Crew. Similar from Amazon, here.
Scarf: Alexander McQueen, here.
Sunnies: past season Chanel. There are some $9.99 tortoise knock-offs on Amazon, here.
Bag: French Market Bag from Amazon, here. Great for beach and the farmer's market.
SPF: Supergoop! Sun-Defying Sunscreen Oil with Meadowfoam SPF50, on Amazon, here. Learned about this from a blogger friend, Terra of Love Nothing More, when I admired the pretty sheen of her skin in one of her photos. Turns out you can have pretty, dewy, sheeny skin AND protect yourself from the sun. Also, have been putting this, Supergoop! Unseen Sunscreen stuff on my face this summer and it doesn't make my hyper sensitive eyes water.
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| photo: Joshua Franzos |
Your Bosom Friend in Pittsburgh,
