This morning, we were at Target (where else does one find a midwestern family on Saturday mornings?). I don’t love shopping at Target, but we needed some household items–baby wipes, water softener salt, dishwasher detergent–and it’s by far the easiest place to buy them.
While we were there, we picked up some new sketchbooks for the kids. It had been a few months since I replaced them, and I couldn’t find a blank page the last time I looked. As we were walking away from the craft aisle, my second child said to me: “Don’t we need new markers, too? Ours are all dried up.”
Hmmm. I also couldn’t find a functioning marker in our art box the last time I looked. Then again, I couldn’t find much of anything, since it was crammed to the brim with broken crayons, capless markers and marker-less caps, scraps of paper, crusty paintbrushes, peg people, little containers of dried-out slime, etc.
I told him we’d test the markers when we got home and get more if we needed them. This turned into a big project. Not only did we toss all the dried-out markers, bits of broken crayons and actual trash; we cleaned the container and the paintbrushes and sharpened all of the colored pencils. We recycled old notebooks and scratch paper, too. The kids were excited to get to drawing with their “new” art supplies, and requests for new markers were forgotten.
It’s good to teach “waste not, want not” to my kids, but how many times do I buy something new for myself without even attempting to salvage an old thing, or find it secondhand, or borrow it from someone else? Way too often.
I would say my biggest offenders in this habit are:
- Food, especially those unique ingredients you pick up for a specific recipe, don’t end up making it and then they languish in the back of the cupboard until they expire. And tea! I have SO many teas but usually stick with either peppermint or chamomile.
- Skin or haircare products. I often buy the big “value” size for shampoo, for example, and then decide it isn’t for me halfway through the bottle and buy a different one. Right now I would really like to shampoo-hop again, however, I’m working on the last ~1/8th of two bottles at the moment (with another in the cupboard, luckily the kids are using that one) so I’m barring myself from adding another until they’re done! And next time, I’m buying the small size to test it out before committing.
- Craft projects for the kids. We do use our drawing supplies, play-dough, paints and sketchbooks quite a bit. It’s the “kit” projects or ones that require more setup/cleanup that don’t get used so much. Right now we have those dino eggs where you excavate a plastic dinosaur, dot paints, a build-a-birdhouse kit (that I gave to my oldest two years ago…), “water wow” pads, a magnetic face kit, a dry erase board with markers… you get the point.
- Books. I love to check out books from our library or order from Thriftbooks, but I’m also a sucker for the convenience of e-books on my kindle sometimes. The thing is, most books I read, I wouldn’t want to keep if I owned a physical version. I’ve given a lot of books away on Buy Nothing. So, my kindle is full of books I probably won’t read again, which feels like a waste of money and support for Amazon, ugh.
I think a lot about consumerism lately. Probably living in a fairly well-to-do suburb contributes to that. (For the record, we are definitely in the lower half of household incomes here.) Many people are very money and class-conscious here.
Money is only important when it can buy opportunity, my late grandpa used to say. Money buys a lot of opportunity here, where we live. It can mean that you don’t have to cook, bake, clean your house, sit on the waiting list for library books, visit ThredUp to buy jeans, wait for a treadmill at the Y, or use up your shampoo bottles before buying new ones.
I kind of think, though: isn’t all of that just life itself? What would I be doing if I outsourced all of that to someone else? Why would I want to fast-forward through the things all humans have done to take care of their families for millennia?
And as Barbara Kingsolver wrote in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
Wanting and waiting; seeing our choices and purchases through to their end; stewarding our money well. I value all of those things. That will not change, no matter how long I live here (and I’ve lived here on-and-off since 2002). I feel like a square peg trying to fit in a round hole sometimes. Not that people who don’t value what I do are wrong, and I’m right. Just different. And difference can be isolating in a place that values conformity.
Hope you are enjoying your holiday season, friends. Hard to believe that Christmas is next week already!
xx Claire