Most of us know a senior citizen or two with habits we think are a little eccentric that they attribute to life in the Great Depression or World War II. Adding salt to coffee. Swiping out the last of the egg residue with her index finger. Saving jars. Dealing with tiny soap nubbins. Most of them think it's normal, or don't even realize they're doing it. But of course, lots of people don't do these things.
Now that the Recession is ending and Rebecca has been a doctor for more than a year (see my post about what med-wife life is like), we no longer hemorrhage money or burn up savings or wonder how we're going to pay for things as much as we used to. The financial stability of her having a regular salary and me being on a decent hourly-wage paycheck has allowed me to reflect on habits I formed during the Recession.
One habit I have been teased about (and yes, I often still do this) is calculating price per pound on food - as in, "well, our vegetable this week will be cabbage and onions, since it's winter and they're the only thing under $1/pound." Of course, now I sometimes splurge, but one consideration is still amount of nutrition, price, volume/weight in terms of the whole meal. Sun-dried tomatoes seem expensive per pound, for instance, but they're very high in nutrients, and given that it takes something like 6 pounds of fresh tomatoes to make 1 pound of dried, divide the dry price by 6 to compare to fresh. As a bonus, they keep longer, reducing my food waste. I've done this to varying degrees, but I probably reached my peak when we were living in Wyandotte, couldn't go to Horrock's anymore, and had to fall back on food stamps for about a year (as I describe in my post about being a welfare queen). To many, this practice seems strange coming from someone who didn't deal with food insecurity as a child and is now married to a physician, but I doubt I'll ever completely stop thinking of food like this.
Another habit from the Recession is putting off major purchases as long as possible. Rebecca and I finally got a new printer in the last couple months. The one we have has never worked well, and the software, hardware, interface, etc have only gone downhill. By the end, it could take up to a half hour to print or scan a one to two page document, and Rebecca couldn't use it from any of her devices, so she would print from work or borrow my computer. The new one has saved so much time and frustration - part of me can't believe we lived like that for so long. I hope we don't have to again. But I don't know where we would have gotten money for a new printer before recently. We have no intentions of getting a new TV before what we're currently using dies (and I think it was a hand-me-down, and might actually be a computer monitor - it doesn't have a remote, and to change it between input sources requires physically unplugging things). In the end, I guess I don't know why I would pay more money for something unnecessary, though I suppose I might be surprised in the same way I'm still delighted when the printer actually works.
All of these were survival techniques for a while. I've been asked if we ate a lot of ramen. We didn't. I think some of that came from knowing this isn't ending anytime soon, so temporary nutrition fixes like ramen noodles, mac and cheese, and hot dogs, that could ultimately jeopardize our long term health if we persisted, seemed more dangerous than it would have been if we were just dealing with a couple summers during college. This wasn't time limited. If it was going to last indefinitely - and remember that we didn't know the Recession would ever end - we had to look past foods that would be cheap short term but could come with serious health implications. And so our grocery carts were filled with lots of dry beans, tofu, rice, and fruits and veggies carefully calculated at $1/pound or less. My meal planning list started to include homemade whole grain focaccia, rice pilaf, remnant paella stew with the cheapest canned tomatoes and canned white beans and frozen veggies I could find. I saved pasta jars to avoid buying Tupperware. We sharpened our thrifting skills.
Most of my Recession habits will be ultimately beneficial. Resources on this planet are finite, and remembering that and acting accordingly is not only thrifty, it's the moral path I choose to take. Delaying gratification can have great payoffs in the end, sometimes.
Some other Recession habits I'm working to break, though, because I'm finding them detrimental. For instance - believing I'm just fortunate to have a job, any job, fortunate to be paid anything, anything at all, and don't deserve a raise or bonus or autonomy. During the Recession, I was fortunate never to experience long-term unemployment, but I was underemployed, underpaid, and even uninsured at one point. Believing I had little worth and had to just be a pawn or commodity deeply affected how much agency I believed I had, how talented I thought I was, or how impactful my life could be. I also internalized my difficulty paying our bills as meaning that I was a bad person for not having money saved and for Rebecca having to take out debt (see post Gays didn't break marriage: we found it like this).
Combine these beliefs, and I've ended up in a lot of workaholism benders in the past year, fearing that I will fall back into my previous circumstances. I've also put off buying items that, unlike a new TV or printer, drastically affect the quality of everyday life. During the Recession, my weight fluctuated a lot for a variety of reasons. That started to bother me less at some point, as I discuss in Eff Your Beauty Standards and My Philosophy of Food, but at some point, there really wasn't money to keep buying clothes that actually fit me, and weight fluctuations were another reminder of our limited resources. Some fixes were to buy dresses that were A-line or flowier in the areas where I tended to carry my weight - and I have to admit that I really love wearing dresses as much as I do now, so I'm grateful it was kind of a necessity (see this post about looking like a lesbian - or not). But I've chosen to wear other things that were really uncomfortable - slacks, undergarments, shoes, etc - longer than I should have because I didn't really have much of an alternative. Or I avoided buying trendy clothing with the thought that I didn't know when I could buy something new or when things would go out of style. Even thrifting was kind of out some months.
In the last year, I've tried to be careful about purchasing new items, but I've had to replace a lot. And some of the things I'm buying, if I'm honest, are still hedging against the possibility that my body might change, that style will change, that money might be tight. I've had to learn that being comfortable enough to live my life is worth something, and that buying a new pair of jeans is okay.
I'm glad the Recession is over. I wish I could have learned these lessons some other way, or that I hadn't had to learn some of them (mostly just the one about being underpaid and a commodity) at all. We've been blessed, as I've mentioned before, to have had our educations, and each other, and access to credit. Things could have been much worse. In any case, I'm glad that I have learned most of these lessons, and I hope that I'll remember them, whether or not I choose to continue living that way.
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