Affluenza

I'm flabbergasted and feel slightly nauseous.

I'm part of an online club of people who are interested in living frugally.

Most of us are not interested in living under hessian sacks. Rather, we are interested in living cleverly and focussing our spending so we don't end up in that modern trap: treating credit cards as income, working overtime to maintain a life we have no time to enjoy, etc.

Perusing the threads, I read one from a woman who was asking how much people spent on their kids at Christmas.

A mother of three, she was spending $300 per child, and was feeling bad because her friends were spending $400.

I don't mean whoever wrote it any offence, but, I don't know anyone who would spend that much money at Christmas! I guess it's relative and cultural, but I don't know anyone who could afford to spend that much money, even if they wanted to!

For me, I would rather spend time with my son than work overtime to pay off credit cards so he can have all this JUNK.

Another woman was spending $150 on stocking stuffers, and $150 on other presents!! How big is the stocking going to be?

Another woman said that older kids are more expensive, and people with younger children didn't 'get it.'

I don't know, maybe things are different, I don't want my kid to keep up with the junior joneses. I'm not buying an ipod for my kid just because someone elses kid has one.

What are we teaching our kids? I'm thinking about an article I once read, about generation "Z," (the current teens). These kids spent their childhoods in substandard child care centres, were given piles of toys, and so on.

Is it just me, or does the current youth culture seem awfully self-centred, materialistic and vain? I feel quite queasy.

And the dollies little girls play with, they look like prostitutes! Do they even sell baby dolls anymore? I remember playing mummies. I had a barbie, but even she was a mummy.

Maybe kids don't play mummies anymore. I guess their main influence and caregiver is no longer mum. That makes me feel horribly sad. I believe kids play is their way of learning how the world works.

It cuts me to think that little girls might have stopped playing the nurturing role, and are now playing a gross, materialistic, sex object role. Who are these kids taking as their role models? Paris Hilton? Britney Spears? Where are the positive role models for little girls? Or little boys, for that matter?

I was watching a group of primary school girls, dressed in knee high boots and short skirts. Why are they dressing like that? Where did the corduroy overalls go?

It's a culture I don't feel comfortable in at all. Apparently kids are getting diabetes and heart disease now? Kids! They're literally dying of affluence, god help them then they get older.

I really feel like I'm in culture shock a lot of the time - in my own culture! I'm a mother myself. I have a four-year-old boy. At the moment, I'm his main influence, but soon he will enter the 'big, bad world' with a myriad of other influences that I have to control. As a parent, I feel it is my job to guide him, and it is a daunting task.

The threshold.

It's a funny time to begin a blog, because in many ways, my life is full of endings just now.

I've spent a good part of today packing my life into boxes, and watching my home transform into a rental property which no longer holds any mark of my presence. It's a strange, slightly disorienting feeling. I am in that void between homes.

I've finished my job and will shortly move to another town, leaving behind my home town of almost ten years.

Up until today, I've not felt too much about the reality of my situation, because I've been too busy. My son has left to be with his dad for a few days. Today has been the first day that I've felt the mental space around me to really think about what is going on. A deluge of kaleidoscopic feelings has engulfed me.

Deep sadness and regret. Excitement at the allure of a new chapter. Hope. Terror. Reflection. Desire. Tears.

I spent part of today with an old flame. I began my time here with him. He and I had many adventures together, travelling and camping, before settling here, in this town, nigh on ten years ago.

He makes me realise how I've changed. We were both such different people then. He spoke of his current relationship sorrows, and I did what I could to comfort him. I also recalled our own tumultuous break-up, a time when I believed we would never find peace. We were two people who could no longer see each other - we were too obscured by our own private pain. How life changes. Things happen. Time moves on.

And we spent today together, two friends, at ease with one another. We spoke of things we had never had the courage to speak of before. I realised there was no residual bitterness on either side, and that felt good.

Another chapter closes. I was a different person then.

For the past four years I've been a single mother. For two of those years, I've been a single, working mother. This has been an all-consuming exercise. The daily to-do list has been consistently long - and getting longer.

This year has been particularly exhausting. I've barely socialised or done any kind of pleasurable activity for myself. My friendships have suffered, my health has suffered, and - worst of all - my mothering has suffered.

Most of the time, I've been too busy to consider how I felt about it, but funnily enough, the feelings overtook, every month before auntie Flo's visit.

Bit by bit, the realisation dawned on me: I was managing to keep everything running, but only just. It sort of crept up on me that the whole exercise was getting out of hand.

Somewhere amidst all this blur, I've managed to raise a wonderful, intelligent, articulate, sensitive little boy, who is my crowning achievement.

I wanted to write an introduction about myself, and it occurred to me that while I could write pages about my beautiful little boy, I really can't think of much to say about myself. My life has been so overcrowded with responsibility that I've forgotten to pay attention.

And now, I'm leaving all kinds of things behind. It's like part of my life is washing out to sea. Which is scary. It's also good, because I could barely move for all the emotional debris.

It's freeing, painful and necessary. A new life awaits - one of my own creation. What will I create?

In many ways, I've held myself back, because I have presumed that I can't do things. All kinds of things. I have doubted my abilities, and held limiting beliefs about myself that have kept me stuck. I would like to push myself out of my comfort zone in 2009. I want to be courageous, and prove things to myself. I want to build a wonderful life from this rubble.

I am scared, but I am free. I have proven to myself that I am capable and strong. I just need to keep remembering.

The rude loop....

I'll tell you something which is not very fun:

Finding a spot to park your car in sub-tropical Australia when your air conditioner is busted.

This activity is particularly traumatic at the frenzied peak of the Christmas buying-season.

Doing so has been known to drive people to violence, as I saw for myself the other day.

Before I get to the grisly details, I better introduce myself. I'm Greta, an aussie mum. I'm, you know, nice and stuff.

I don't live in a one-horse town, but it's definitely no more than a two-horse town. Like most modern two-horse towns, it has two shopping precincts - the 'old' one, and the
'new' one.

The 'old' shopping centre is like a ghost-town. Dilapidated with flickering, grubby flourescent lighting and perpetual scuff-marks on the linoleum, 'the old place' is now mainly frequented by coin-counting old folk, and families who are willing to put up with the dinge to save a few dollars. There are shops in there which are not franchises, and they are not doing very well these days.

People who consider shopping to be a weekly event to buy groceries tend to go there. I call these people 'functional shoppers.'

There aren't many of these people in my modern two-horse town. Shopping is considered a hobby here. Like it has in many parts of the developed world, I suppose.

That is why the 'old place' has been eclipsed by a flouro wonderland: the 'new place.'

Crammed with teen boutiques and food franchises of every description, and with careful, directed lighting to give everything a vivid colour and sheen, 'the new place' is for all the truly dedicated shoppers. It is very popular, and often crowded.

I absolutely hate 'the new place.'

Most of the time I shop at the 'old place' out of some weird compulsion to support the 'underdog,' even though I know it is really another supermarket from the same company. However, recently I went to the 'new place' to get a seventeen-dollar photo of my son almost crying with terror on 'Santa's' lap.

Waiting in the queue for 30 minutes, I listened to the mothers battling to keep their kids neat and still. I heard parents snapping at their terrified kids to smile and look happy as they sat for a 'happy-snap' with Santa Claus.

There were raised voices and tears all around. I remember one little boy in particular. He was so terrified of Santa that he was screaming to the rafters as soon as his mother took his hand to lead him in. Snot was flying from his nose, his eyes were streaming tears. He kept trying to bolt, his eyes desperately scanning the tinselly enclosure for a place to escape. His eyes reminded me of a horse in a thunderstorm, hooves raised, about to bolt.

His harried mother interpreted his terror as 'naughtiness.' How dare he ruin her happy snap? Aunt Gladys would be SO disappointed.

"Cooper, stop that at once, you're being silly," she snapped. She looked like she was on the verge of smacking him. Cooper was crying so hard that he vomited all over Santa. A frayed-looking woman in an elf costume tried to allay Cooper's fears by waving rubber duckies and honking toys in front of him.

I know when I'm terrified to the point of vomiting, it REALLY helps when people wave a rubber duckie at me. I hope that Elf gets a Christmas bonus. She sure deserves it.

Finally, Cooper calmed down enough to stop crying - audibly, at least. No amount of duckie-squeaking was going to get a smile out of him.

Merry Freakin' Christmas, I thought.

Why didn't I just wait until I could get a free photo with Santa at the library Christmas party? I thought.

Bah, humbug, I thought.

I noticed a palette of coca-cola cartons, marked down from fourteen dollars to eleven. Cartons of coke were stacked to eye-level. There were probably more than a hundred cartons there. I should have counted them when the palette was first wheeled out. At any rate, there was a lot of coke there. By the time we got to the front of the line, there were only two layers left.

Doing a quick calculation, I estimated that of about a hundred cartons, eighty of them sold in a half an hour. If each carton contained ten cans of coke, then about 800 cans of coke were sold in the time it took for me to get to the front of the line.

Hmmmm.

This little story gives a pretty good indication of the kind of place it is. Perhaps this is such a universal theme that I did not need to illustrate with a story.

A shopping centre is a shopping centre is a shopping centre. No explanation needed.

So, anyway.

Recently, I thought I'd pop in and grab some cherry tomatoes for my child to eat. I have no idea why I decided to go to the 'new place,' but half an hour later, I found myself caught in a labyrinth of beeping cars and no way to get out. We were literally trapped in there, because the exits were blocked by incoming and turning traffic. Nobody was getting a park. Everyone had angry faces. I saw mothers with contorted faces, screaming at their howling kids in the back of the car.

Which brings me to my theory about the 'rude-loop.' I believe some people are caught in a perpetual loop of rudeness that they cannot escape. Let's call them the 'rude-loopers,' because it sounds cool.

What happens is this: One morning, for whatever reason, these 'rude-loopers' wake up crabby. This is where it all begins. Maybe they got out of the wrong side of the bed, or thy cooked their eggs wrong, or they had a rough childhood. The reason is not important.

So, the 'rude-looper' wakes up crabby. People are such assholes, he thinks to himself.

Then somebody gives her the wrong change, or looks at her in a funny way. Angered by this, the 'rude-looper' snaps and glares.

None of us react well when somebody is rude to us.

If we have emotional maturity, we may be able to dismiss their rudeness and pity them, but mostly, we're cranky back, or we are hurt and take it personally. I think it's fair to say, though, that most victims of crabbiness will get crabby back.

So, having been rude to others, the 'rude-looper' receives rudeness in return. This further enforces the rude-looper's idea that people are assholes. To counteract this, he becomes ruder. Which causes further reciprocal rudeness. And so it goes, on and on.

This continues in a perpetual loop, until the rude-looper is convinced that the world is full of rude, horrid people. So she become trapped in a world of her own creation, where everybody is rude and unpleasant.

The number of people caught in this loop increases at Christmas and other holidays.

TO BE CONTINUED