First world problems caused by a bumbling president

I Can No Longer Afford To Keep Myself in The Style To Which I Have Become Accustomed

Striving to live well through the cycles of life and recessions

Photo by Nathan Aguirre on Unsplash

I’m old enough to remember fathers in books and movies asking suiters if they were able to keep their daughters in the “style to which they had become accustomed.”

“Can you support her in the style to which she has become accustomed?”

Not my father, of course. It wouldn't even be a big ask, so he didn’t ask. There hadn't been much style for me to have become accustomed.

Both men I married — not at the same time, I’m not a bigamist — came from higher socio-economic demographics. Those demographics were People Who Had More Money Than We Did. Which was most people.

Therefore, if my husbands were only to keep me in the style to which I had become accustomed, it wouldn’t have cost them much money. A couple of pair of new shoes a year, some homemade dresses to round out the store-bought ones, a one bathroom house, and I was good. At least if my accustomed style was where I wanted to remain.

It wasn’t.

Life with husband number one and after

True, my first husband and I lived meagerly. We were college students paying our own way, and raided his mom’s prodigious pantry weekly.

We drove old, cheap car(s), starting with an old Ford Falcon my parents gave us, and graduated to a Gremlin given to us by his father. It was the ugliest car on the road, and people gawked at it much like they gawk at Teslas today, only the Gremlin was a poor person’s car.

Of course, I got it in the divorce, and he got the Datsun we had just made enough money to purchase. The first of many bad financial decisions on my part.

This is a much prettier, later model Gremlin than the 1975 baby poop green and white one we drove. Photo from Motor Trend

We lived in tiny apartments with one bath, until I graduated and started teaching. Then we could afford a small rent house with one bath, for which the rent was $600. Not exactly the lap of luxury, and no, you cannot live on love!

Still, his parents had money, we ate well at their home a couple of times a week, and my husband was a creative cook like his father, so we ate relatively well at home. I learned social graces from his mother, who I adored.

We divorced before he started making money, though, so for those seven years of marriage, I never lived above the style to which I had become accustomed growing up.

After the divorce, I bought a coffee cup with the phrase, “Living well is the best revenge.”

I left teaching and got a job in marketing and fundraising at a college. I sold the Gremlin and bought a used Toyota. I ran the streets, as all divorced young people do, but also did everything I hadn’t had the time or money to do while teaching sixth grade, paying all the bills in the marriage, and putting my husband through graduate school.

For one, I auditioned for a play. Don’t get it twisted, I suck at acting. I had done a little in high school, but my dreams of an Academy Award for Best Actress would remain forever a fantasy. The play’s director was not impressed.

Still, three years after my divorce, I met the man who would be my second husband at the audition for “California Suite.” After we chatted at the play, we went for a drink, where I wowed him with my use of the word malleable — don’t ask, because I don’t remember the context. He called me later and started quoting romantic lines from the play. I responded with more quotes, and our fate was written. In the sand, as it turns out.

Life with husband number two. We became yuppies

I moved from the college job into an advertising agency. I helped him form a company where he sold advertising in all the programs for the Ballet, Opera, and Symphony, all clients of my agency. We attended galas and balls, to which I wore the most stylish dresses I could find secondhand. We hobbed and nobbed with the inherited rich and the nouveau riche.

I made more money, and bought my dresses from boutiques, laying down $500 and more a dress, which was only $100 less than I had paid in rent four years before. Don’t hate me, I still have some of them. All my retirement money went on my back.

We bartered for sailing trips to the Caribbean. We went to Paris on an inexpensive trip sponsored by a radio station. We lounged on beaches in and near Miami, where his mother and stepfather lived. We partied in New York City, where we went for work. We attended Broadway shows. We bought BMWs from an advertising client.

His mother helped us buy a two-story, three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house with a pool. Living well was the best revenge. I even deigned to occasionally hire my ex-husband as the photographer for projects and events. Yes, he had dropped out of grad school to become a photographer. My being his entré into hobby-nobby society was sweet revenge indeed.

Living well is the best revenge

I certainly became accustomed to a style I intended to keep. I now had social graces, connections, great clothes, a pinch of elegance, and an appreciation of finer things. Which I soon could no longer afford.

If you lived through the 80s, you know the dream didn’t last. The oil and real estate market crashed, Savings and Loans went under, and my advertising agency, as so many other ventures in that era, closed.

After another divorce, my failed company, and my enrollment in a Master’s Program to become a psychotherapist, I was soon broke again. And then I became a single mom three months after graduation. At least I graduated, unlike husband number one.

Life with my son as a single mother

Still, I managed by hook and crook, resilience, free-lance writing, a few Private Practice therapy clients, and a school counselor job, to raise my son to also appreciate nice things. We traveled, and I introduced him to different cultures, as well as to theater and other performing arts. I looked for bargains, bought the cheap seat tickets, and often stayed with friends while traveling, including in other countries.

He took dance, painting and acting lessons. I was always terrified to look at my bank balance, but we actually managed to live — albeit in a small rent house with one bath for the first seven years — as well as possible. I even managed to do it with no credit cards for years, since my credit was wrecked from the divorce. Later I bought one of the few custom built houses in a lower middle class neighborhood. One with three bedrooms, two baths and a huge yard.

We did struggle to pay the bills. His father didn’t pay child support until he my son was nine-years-old, and then it came sporadically. I came close to losing the house. I thought I kept those things from him, but apparently I didn’t. He tells me now he has money anxiety because of my own worry.

Once my son, as a high school kid, said, “I wish we were rich.” I reminded him,

“We live and travel as well as most rich people, but for less money.”

He acknowledged that.

My son is now grown. I have moved to a small townhouse — with two bedrooms and two-and-half baths — in my spiritual home of Santa Fe. I am content. No, I’m happy.

Except, we are in another oil crisis, courtesy of he-who-will-not-be-named, and a real estate crisis, courtesy of wealthy, to fabulously wealthy, moguls and corporations who buy up housing to AirBnB them, pricing the rest of us out of the market. Living well is decidedly harder now. Everything costs more.

How do I live now? I buy well-made clothes at thrift and consignment shops. I buy all my furniture and art from consignment stores, of which there are legion in Santa Fe. I go to lower-priced Happy Hours at high end, gourmet restaurants, instead of dinner. I cook at home, three meals a day, most days.

I will always live as if I have money. I will always enjoy the finer things in life. Those are the things I became accustomed to from the age of twenty-seven or so. I’m not going back.

The actual price? All of my social security and then some. I will work until I fall out of the chair. There will be no retiring for me. But I will enjoy any free time I have, living as well as I can, for as long as I can.

Living well is no longer about revenge. It’s about joy.

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