I don't like the phrase "guilty pleasure," but I do have one, and it's Real Simple magazine.
It's sleek! It's glossy! It's full of helpful household hints and beautifully-styled recipes and thoughtful articles!
It's also a microcosm of one of the longest and most complicated relationships I have in my life: the relationship with me and the entire concept of the "middle class."
Zach and I are definitely middle class. Together, we make a salary that Millennials on the internet loudly proclaim is literally impossible to live comfortably on… but is nearly double the Missouri poverty line for a two-person household. We consider a walk to the library and a $5 frozen custard concrete to be a hot date, but we are also are one of the minority households (of any income level) who can easily weather a $400 emergency. We don't eat out because we can't justify the expense, but we do take vacations and have a mortgage and a paid-off car, which are out of reach for so many people.
Once, I thought I was too good to be middle-class. Too cool, too alternative. I was above all that materialism and consumerism. Yet why was I drawn back to Real Simple again and again, smoothing my hand over those glossy pages and feeling both a morbid fascination and an anger that I refused to dig underneath?
I sit down with my copies of the magazine (borrowed from the library, of course) and read about lipsticks that cost more than I spend on clothing in a month. I page through the six-page ads and marvel that people will pay for a magazine that is just there to sell them things, both in the ads and in the articles themselves. An article about making time to volunteer is followed by a feature about cute cocktail dresses that cost more than I made last month. I gaze at these signs of wealth with fascination: is this how people really live, or is the magazine just aspirational, that others like me, with leaky 90-year-old windows and a front porch that is so rotted that I literally fell through it, are also flipping through and aspiring to be able to buy $200 gifts for everyone on their Christmas list?
Since Zach has been delivery driving for Walmart, he's been inside many sprawling mansions, in gated neighborhoods with pretentious names and vast lawns tended by groundskeepers. And yet, these people are still ordering groceries from Walmart. Last week while he was unloading groceries in a woman's gigantic shiny granite-topped kitchen, she quietly asked if he could put the groceries in plastic bags next time, because "I like to save them to use for other things."
I'm not so different from the people in the McMansions, really.
I've often felt guilty for our middle-class life. Felt guilty that we have been able to save money when other friends were living paycheck to paycheck, that we were able to pay off our car and afford plane tickets to visit family. Occasionally I would panic that we were too wealthy and try to convince Zach that we needed to give more of our money away, that we were living too extravagantly, that how could we continue living in comfort while people near and far were going hungry?
In the same breath, I often feel incredibly out of my depth with other middle-class people. Someone asks me if I've seen the latest show at the Fox Theater, and I blink at them in confusion. I congratulate myself for not making a comment when someone talks about how "we all" can relate to accidentally spending a couple hundred bucks on a Target run. Someone asks me if I've ever been to an event hosted by the local yacht club, as if that is a normal thing that everyone goes to.
Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I feel anger. Sometimes I am Aesop's fox in the vineyard saying the grapes are sour, but actually having a crisis in the middle of someone's funeral because the eulogy is talking about how this guy spent his life working a good job and volunteering in the community and taking his kids to Six Flags and traveling to Europe on vacation. You've been to Europe! I chide myself. You've done so many cool things that most people never get the chance to! So why do I suddenly feel like crying?
Despite the common wisdom (usually spouted by people who have always had enough money), money does buy happiness. Every time we solve a problem with money, every time a problem that can't be solved with money is made easier by the presence of money, I give thanks. I don't take it for granted. I know how privileged we are— and I know that underneath all of this is not anger or sadness but fear. Fear that I will not have enough. Fear that we erroneously chose this life path and that we will be lacking.
Maybe it's time for me to admit that I'm allowed to have complicated feelings about things. If I simultaneously feel guilty about being "too rich" and sad about being "too poor," maybe the truth is that I don't fit comfortably into either category.
Maybe it's time to put away the magazines. Maybe it's time to take a walk in the dappled sunshine of the hiking trail near my house, to look for cardinals and listen for woodpeckers, to wave at the barges chugging down the river, to pick flowers from my yard until the house is bursting with bouquets. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that fear of not enough simmering below all my anger, to peel back the layers of defenses that cover up the envy and let the envy breathe a little. To read my latest book from the library and listen to a podcast, to repeat the mantra, Everything you need, you already have. To trust the abundance of life and community, to cherish the gifts I already have.
Maybe it's time to accept whatever this present reality is, in all its complexity— accept that it's real, but it sure isn't simple.
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