When Impulse Buys Make You Feel Safe |
 | | Adriana Bellet |
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I bought the toddler-sized vacuum cleaner at 3 a.m. in early June. I felt slightly giddy when I pressed the button. |
I’d just spent the past four hours scrolling Twitter, watching as police officers injured protesters, reading the vitriol trolls spew, stopping every so often for the more beautiful images — the black cowboys in Texas and the ballroom dancers doing death drops in the middle of a march and the Amish carrying Black Lives Matter signs. |
I’d drunk in all the chaos, and I was jittery and sad and scared. My daughter was asleep beside me, and everyone in the house was asleep, too. I had no one to talk to about any of it at that moment. So I bought the toy vacuum cleaner for a little release. |
I knew I shouldn’t do it. I knew consuming a child’s hard-plastic toy that is probably going to end up at the bottom of the ocean in 15 years was a terrible response to all of those feelings. But it was an impulse that has been irresistible to me in these months of uncertainty. |
Since March, so many packages have come to the house in Massachusetts, where my daughter and I are quarantining with my sisters, nieces, brother-in-law and mother. My mom ordered something from Amazon nearly every day. My sister did, too. One of my nieces only emerged from her room for the mail check. She is just 11, but was engaged in a long-running, cat-and-mouse game with an off-brand earbud website. Every few days, the company sent her non-Apple earbuds that didn’t work, and every few days she sent them back and requested a replacement. The company was not aware that they were playing this game with a sixth-grader who had infinite patience and still trusted that those in power would do the right thing. |
Purchasing nonessentials is always fraught for me. I grew up poor, when the miscalculation of overspending by $20 could mean the lights were out for a week or the car was repossessed. |
When you are poor, everyone has advice on what you can do to not be poor, but weirdly, none of it ever comes around to “your employer should pay you a living wage.” Instead, there are many people who wish to tell you that if you just thought better about how to spend that $20, it wouldn’t matter if you were chronically underpaid. |
So, as an adult, even small purchases can cause a panic attack. When my daughter was born, I was between regular paying gigs. I remember sobbing as I bought a smoothie at our local juice bar when my daughter was a few weeks old. I was one month away from a recurring paycheck with a comfortable amount of savings in the bank, but I was certain that that $6 would send my family into financial ruin. |
And for a smoothie! What a cliché of a millennial parent I would be. I wouldn’t be able to live the embarrassment down. |
I had hoped adulthood, relative financial stability and parenthood would cure me of this anxiety. I did not want to pass it on to my daughter or have her live in the tense atmosphere of it. |
But then quarantine and protests and all of a sudden it felt like my anxiety around purchases was justified. I have never bought more things on a whim than during this time: baby-sized tool kits, baby-sized musical instruments and so many novelty onesies. |
It’s about control, of course. Life feels normal when I remind myself I can still buy things that will make my daughter laugh or things that will make her look cute. I can’t say what our life will look like next year at this time, whether the record unemployment rates will come for our family. I can say that a toy truck will make her happy today. |
The craziest thing we’ve bought during this spending frenzy is a pool. Not a big one. It is only 3 feet deep and 10 feet long. It happened because my sister and I were talking about what we would do with our kids during this Covid summer, when the Y was closed and we feared the beaches might be closed, too. |
In general, our quarantine house is a surprisingly harmonious set-up, but even our close family bonds would be stretched to the limit on the first hot, muggy day of summer. A pool, then, my sister suggested. |
“Absolutely not,” I said. “The property values. The housing insurance. It’s not worth it.” |
“You’re right,” my sister said. Then she and my mom bought the above-ground pool when I left the room to feed my daughter. |
“It was only $700,” my sister said. “If the adults split the cost, it’s not that much.” |
I could feel the old wave of money anxiety coming, countered by this new wave of uncertainty for the future. I thought of the first hot day together. I imagined my daughter, who runs hot and always feels sweaty even on a 60-degree day, clinging to me, and the only relief being an electric fan. |
“It will be OK,” my sister said. |
I spent the next night searching for pool floats. A sloth-shaped one will ship to me in two weeks, I am told. |
Want More on Parenting and Money? |
| Parenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories. |
| Instead of going through the usual bedtime struggle, one night I decided to only say the word “pajamas.” After seven repetitions, my toddler said, “OK, mama. I give up.” And she put on her pajamas. — Rebecca Van Sickle, Portland, Ore. |
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