Living Cheap in Yuppy Town

Hi alert readers. It's been awhile since my last entry, due in part to a minor and unnecessary meltdown. The good news is that this meltdown led to a highly profound revelation and plan that I will soon share (in about 5 paragraphs from now). That's right, put on your yoga pants and your Yanni CD, and prepare to be enlightened. Actually, since 2 of the 5 followers of this blog (can we say famous?) are male members of my family, please do not feel pressured to put on tight yoga pants. In fact, I specifically forbid you to do so.

Those of you who are members of my vague generation (X? Y? What are we again?) have probably heard stories from your parents/grandparents about how much simpler things were when you were born. You may have been told that as an infant, you or your siblings slept in a dresser drawer because there was no room in the tiny one bedroom apartment that your parents rented.

Charming as these drawer stories are, at some point in the past 30+ years the norm of American childrearing progressed, or digressed, from drawer-crib parenting to McMansion parenting. In our country, or at lest the northwest corner of it, there is an underlying expectation that in order to be ready for parenthood, a couple must first own a home with a enough square footage to cover an entire village in [insert 3rd world country of choice]. This home should be furnished by Pottery Barn (Ikea is for losers). In order to be able to afford such a purchase, both parents must first work their way up some type of impressive career ladder, even if they might feel like jumping off of this ladder and into a Barista position at Starbucks most days of the week. Another modern prerequisite to parenthood is that both parents meet a quota of rich (literally) life experiences prior to procreating. In order to truly appreciate changing a diaper, one more first know the pleasure of wine tasting in Napa, traveling abroad, and attending fancy yoga and meditation retreats, for which the registration fees could feed the aforementioned 3rd world village for a year.

These expectations may seem a bit extreme. Please recall that I live in Seattle: land of evergreens, slugs, hipsters, and family incomes that frequenty top 150k. Either way, my recent meltdown was due to the fact that I've let these expectations (or guilt surrouding our inability to meet them) create an unnecessarily large bubble of financial anxiety around parenthood. I desparately want to take a break from my own career ladder (a vaguely promising PhD program and research position that pays our mortgage) to be at home with the baby, at least during his first year of life. However, the thought of our family living on one income, even for 6 months, feels just plain scandalous. It may lead to (you may want to sit down for this) calamitous events such as renting an apartment, grocery shopping at stores than end in "mart" and do not have a gourmet organic cheese counter, and (here's where it just gets shocking) eating at home, even when there are amazing 3 for 30 specials at all the trendy Seattle restaurants.

So, getting to the point finally, here is the profound revelation: our baby won't care if we shop at Whole Paycheck or Walmart, if we own or rent, or if our combined income is half that of most of the families we know. But he WILL care if his parents are constantly freaking out about status and money. He will care because his parents (the female one in particular) will be annoying stresscases. In light of this, my husband and I have developed a plan that will likely change our day to day life quite a bit, for the better I think. I hope to expand on the details of this plan in subsequent blog entries (which will be read by elite publishers who will decide to make it into a book that will pay massive royalties...oh wait, I've gone and missed the point again). A few bullet points from this plan:

1) Eat leftovers for dinner, rather than look at them disdainfully and then go out to the neighborhood Indian restaurant instead, leaving the leftovers to wallow in dejection for yet another month before being thrown out in a cleaning flurry.
2) Make soup from the random concoction of dried lentils, veggies, and canned goods hibernating in our cabinets. See point 1 for instructions on soup leftovers.
3) Resist the urge to stop at Starbucks every day, and make our own combinations of coffee, milk, and corn syrup at home.
4) convince friends that potlucks are the new happy hour.
5) sell a car and introduce baby to the variety of intresting humanoids on this planet by taking him places on the bus. This should be an especially educational venture since Tent City has planted itself in the church parking lot across the street from our local bus stop.
6) attend free/homemade mommy & me music groups, rather than paying to talk about baby gear with strangers while a desparate kindermusic teacher flings herself around the room in hopes of getting a response (I say this because I used to BE the kindermusic teacher, and it was impossible to get the moms off the topic of baby clothing brands, even while shaking maracas in their faces and singing "Silly Sam the Sneaky Snake" at full opera volume).

And I'm spent. But I think this is a good start. Of course, as I write this, I am dreaming of a short soy mocha from Starbucks. Maybe I'll start #3 tomorrow. But we WILL have leftovers for dinner!