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Tonight my kids' school had a fundraiser where we showed up and got to decorate our own gingerbread houses. We had a wide assortment of candies, a tube of icing per house, and cookies and cocoa to snack on in hopes of keeping the candies for the decorations. There was also someone playing Christmas music (and general nice sounding piano music) on the piano over to the side. My kids really wanted to do this and I had my doubts, but it ended up being a lot of fun. I was Will's appointed helper and icing-putter-onner, while he handled the design and creative elements. His house is pretty cool, as is Alisdair's. Maybe this Christmas I can end up getting a digital camera so I can show them off here before we all grow old and die. :)
While I enjoyed the evening, it brought home to me again how different things are here. It's sorta subtle, at least to me, but there is a whole different culture here that I'm having a small amount of difficulty adjusting to. For instances of what I mean, see the following:
1) There were lots of daddies helping make houses. Not as many as mommies, but still quite a few. In Oklahoma, sports were the only childhood activity the fathers participated in with any regularity.
2) The thing was put on by the PTA (specifically, to raise money for scholarships for the school's Montessori program). Now, while I think this is cool, it also means that... well, put plainly, I make a lot less money than most of these folks, and have for most of my life. It isn't especially evident on the surface, but any extended proximity brings it out in spades. The clothes, while not too fancy, are obviously not from Wal-Mart. The kids are in Gap sweaters and Levi's rather than T-shirts and no-brand jeans. The moms all have really good hair, well-chosen make up, and nice clothes. They aren't lacking for baby stuff if they have babies, and everything's in really good repair. And I'm not entirely sure they all realize that this isn't the way it is in the rest of the world.
3) People cared about helping someone else send their kid to a Montessori program. Sounds cruel, but for all of OK's virtues, I've never seen a community as willing to give as the one here. There are charity things all over the place, and a surprising number of people take part in them. Maybe it's because there's a lot more excess money floating around here, so there's more to give, but it's still a radical change from the "charity? What's that?" outlook to which I've been accustomed.
I've never exactly been concerned with keeping up with the Joneses. I've always been in the fringe, and material things were not really a part of the dynamic in the groups in which I most easily found inclusion (aside from "have you seen this cool game yet"). Hell, the Joneses didn't even live in my neighborhood, or near anyone else I knew. Even when my brother got into the silly-amounts-of-extra-money category, we were so far removed in income as to make competition a non-factor. Envy was there a bit, especially when I saw what he could give his daughter that I couldn't even dream of for my boys, but not competition. Now, however, I suddenly find myself in a whole other world. I've got an income. I'm making all the bills. We have health care. We can do things like give to charity and support the school and go to movies now and then and visit cool places and buy new clothes when we need it. It's heady, this sense of not having to scrape by any more. It's like I'm suddenly in a dream, only instead of waking up at the end of two weeks, another dose of dreamwine shows up in the form of a paycheck, and the whole things starts over again.
That feeling of unreality marks me, though. I still have to scrape for quarters for the coke machine. I still only have two pairs of pants that I have to wash really often. I started working out, but it took me two months to buy a new pair of athletic shoes with tread and support to replace the $10 Wal-Mart shoes I'd had for 4 years. Ihave a nice haircut, but I can't bring myself to set aside the money to get any product to put in my hair, much less a fancy diffuser hairdryer and such like. I'm still using the shampoo I took from Mom's store before I left, because buying the sort I really like seems far too extravagant. My blush broke into a jillion pieces the other day, but I don't replace it because it costs $4-$7 at Wal-Mart -- and forget about buying the stuff in Macy's or Nordstrom's.
I don't know how to feel at ease in this world of plenty. I can't shake the feeling that I don't belong here. And now that I am here, I feel both blessed and cursed with the knowledge that no matter how I try, it's never going to seem any more natural -- at least not for me. It might become more natural for my kids, though, and that's really probably the best I can do anyway.
While I enjoyed the evening, it brought home to me again how different things are here. It's sorta subtle, at least to me, but there is a whole different culture here that I'm having a small amount of difficulty adjusting to. For instances of what I mean, see the following:
1) There were lots of daddies helping make houses. Not as many as mommies, but still quite a few. In Oklahoma, sports were the only childhood activity the fathers participated in with any regularity.
2) The thing was put on by the PTA (specifically, to raise money for scholarships for the school's Montessori program). Now, while I think this is cool, it also means that... well, put plainly, I make a lot less money than most of these folks, and have for most of my life. It isn't especially evident on the surface, but any extended proximity brings it out in spades. The clothes, while not too fancy, are obviously not from Wal-Mart. The kids are in Gap sweaters and Levi's rather than T-shirts and no-brand jeans. The moms all have really good hair, well-chosen make up, and nice clothes. They aren't lacking for baby stuff if they have babies, and everything's in really good repair. And I'm not entirely sure they all realize that this isn't the way it is in the rest of the world.
3) People cared about helping someone else send their kid to a Montessori program. Sounds cruel, but for all of OK's virtues, I've never seen a community as willing to give as the one here. There are charity things all over the place, and a surprising number of people take part in them. Maybe it's because there's a lot more excess money floating around here, so there's more to give, but it's still a radical change from the "charity? What's that?" outlook to which I've been accustomed.
I've never exactly been concerned with keeping up with the Joneses. I've always been in the fringe, and material things were not really a part of the dynamic in the groups in which I most easily found inclusion (aside from "have you seen this cool game yet"). Hell, the Joneses didn't even live in my neighborhood, or near anyone else I knew. Even when my brother got into the silly-amounts-of-extra-money category, we were so far removed in income as to make competition a non-factor. Envy was there a bit, especially when I saw what he could give his daughter that I couldn't even dream of for my boys, but not competition. Now, however, I suddenly find myself in a whole other world. I've got an income. I'm making all the bills. We have health care. We can do things like give to charity and support the school and go to movies now and then and visit cool places and buy new clothes when we need it. It's heady, this sense of not having to scrape by any more. It's like I'm suddenly in a dream, only instead of waking up at the end of two weeks, another dose of dreamwine shows up in the form of a paycheck, and the whole things starts over again.
That feeling of unreality marks me, though. I still have to scrape for quarters for the coke machine. I still only have two pairs of pants that I have to wash really often. I started working out, but it took me two months to buy a new pair of athletic shoes with tread and support to replace the $10 Wal-Mart shoes I'd had for 4 years. Ihave a nice haircut, but I can't bring myself to set aside the money to get any product to put in my hair, much less a fancy diffuser hairdryer and such like. I'm still using the shampoo I took from Mom's store before I left, because buying the sort I really like seems far too extravagant. My blush broke into a jillion pieces the other day, but I don't replace it because it costs $4-$7 at Wal-Mart -- and forget about buying the stuff in Macy's or Nordstrom's.
I don't know how to feel at ease in this world of plenty. I can't shake the feeling that I don't belong here. And now that I am here, I feel both blessed and cursed with the knowledge that no matter how I try, it's never going to seem any more natural -- at least not for me. It might become more natural for my kids, though, and that's really probably the best I can do anyway.
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Date: 2004-12-03 03:07 pm (UTC)From:It's always awesome to appreciate what you've got!