Born in 1980, I never know if I’m a baby Gen Xer or a – thank you, pop culture, for coining this phrase – geriatric millennial.
On the one hand, I definitely grew up under the more relaxed Gen X model of parenting – biking around the neighborhood, playing in the sprinkler, coming home when the streetlights came on, surviving entire summers on ramen noodles and red Kool-Aid and peanut butter sandwiches on Bunny Bread. I was pretty much born cynical and disaffected with a deep appreciation of irony, and I still wear jeans and Converse to work some days.
On the other hand, I’m not really a slacker; I love words of affirmation and, yes, even participation trophies; I hate making phone calls; I am despondent when I don’t have access to WiFi; and I could happily eat avocado toast for breakfast for the rest of my life.
Oh, the avocado toast. Somehow, avocado toast has become the symbol of everything wrong with millennials. The reason they can’t buy homes isn’t inflation or student loan debt; it’s spending money on frivolous things.
And here, too, I am something of a hybrid. I bought my first home at 23, sold it at 28, and got very lucky on the timing of all of that, managing to get out right before the market absolutely tanked in 2008. I try to make careful financial decisions. My husband and I don’t take vacations (unless you count one of us tagging along on the other’s work trip), and dining out is a special treat reserved pretty much for birthdays and anniversaries. We drive practical cars that we bought used. I buy a ton of my clothes and even some of my kids’ clothes at the thrift store. I rely heavily on the library to support my reading habit.
But…when I found myself with an unexpected small windfall earlier this summer as the result of a freelance job…well, I didn’t do what a financial planner would have told me to do.
I didn’t put it in savings, even though we desperately need to replace our 2012 minivan that is falling apart in almost every conceivable way a car can fall apart and is going to die entirely on us very soon. I didn’t earmark it for any of the numerous home repairs that are on our to-do list. I didn’t fold it into a pair of socks and hide it in my underwear drawer to serve as emergency money in case of a hurricane or mandatory evacuation. I didn’t even get a head start on buying school supplies and back-to-school clothes and uniforms, even though I always end up panicked about money come late August after the glut of school expenses has cleared my bank account.
Instead…well…I bought my 16-year-old daughter a Taylor Swift ticket.
For months, she has been longingly watching TikToks from The Eras Tour and telling me excitedly what the surprise songs were in Houston or Tampa or Nashville. She’s (jokingly – I think) asked me if I’d let her sell a kidney to buy a ticket. She’s made dozens of friendship bracelets just to get in the spirit. She desperately wanted to go, and yet she also understood that we really couldn’t afford for her to go. She was fine with it. Which made it all the more delightful to be able to surprise her with a ticket to the Kansas City show while she is spending the summer with her dad in St. Louis.
Now I will say, in my partial defense, that I’m not crazy. This wasn’t wise or prudent, but it also wasn’t complete lunacy: I didn’t spend thousands of dollars or anything even close. But I did spend more than any reasonable, sensible human should spend on a single concert ticket.
Do I regret it, though?
Not even a little bit. She had the time of her life and will never forget it.
And no matter how cynical I might be or how much avocado toast I might have to forgo to recoup this expense, there is nothing worth more to me in the world than making my kids happy.
