I Wasn’t Born with a Silver Spoon, But I Do Have These Heirlooms

On the materialism of millenials

The second time my electricity got turned off, there was no panic. I already knew exactly what I needed to do. I calmly called the power company, and paid the bill with a credit card. Next, I lit some candles, apologized to the cat, and opened the blinds to let the last afternoon light slant down into the cramped basement apartment I’d been renting for the past nine months.

The light caught the curved edge of a tarnished silver champagne bucket, one of the many odd inheritances I’d accumulated from my grandparents, the artifacts that spoke to how well they’d done. They were not rich, certainly, but my father’s parents had been able to retire early and enjoyed regular cruises. His mother collected gaudy gold jewelry and china teacups. My maternal grandmother bought good antiques at auction and installed wall-to-wall bookshelves made of rare wood in the big brick house she and my grandfather downsized to once their five children were out of the house.

My inheritance, this is all to say, is very modest. It is made up of the material evidence of four individuals who grew up in the Great Depression and went on to do better than their parents had. What my cousins and I had handed down to us were the artifacts left over from the youth and middle age of two lawyers, a nurse, and a school teacher who raised their kids in the Camelot era and watched them start their own families during the Reagan years.

This is the curious position of the twenty-something striver: The millennials who were given the leg up of a modest college fund (halved though it was during Bush’s presidency), who had families who could eek out a little post-grad support, who possess privilege of class and race, who nevertheless can’t quite seem to get ahead.

Our parents don’t entirely understand why our lives look so different from theirs at the same age. We appear to be late bloomers, childless and still hitting the bars like they did in college. At my age, my mother had a six year old trailing behind her through Berkeley, where my father was doing post-grad work in hopes of making tenure at the university that hired him right out of a PhD program. Unlike my mother at thirty, my cousins and I have decent furniture. We carry small supercomputers in our pockets worth hundreds of dollars. We drink bottled wine and cook from scratch. We make time for brunch and time-consuming hobbies like photography and running marathons.

In some ways we have what our parents waited years to enjoy. I was furnishing my first apartment at the same time my parents were shedding themselves of the graduate school furniture they’d bought when I was a baby. They had justed moved into a big brick home that, for the first time, wasn’t a concession to the cost of raising a kid. We swapped decorating advice over glasses of Cab Franc and bites of goat cheese spread on gluten-free crackers.

Despite the niceties, despite putting the days of past-due electric bills behind me, there is the ocassional hard punch of anxiety that sinks into me like a pool ball into a corner pocket. There are the short term worries. The Toyota Tacoma I share with my partner is in the shop. It rolled off the assembly line the year the Macarena took the world by storm, but we bought it last year off Craigslist with our small savings. One of our cats has a scrape on its foot that needs attention. The other night, the dog couldn’t stop vomiting and we had to whisk her off to an expensive appointment with the emergency veternarian.

After a clerical error, I unexpectedly owned the university one last tuition payment for my graduate program. I found out a week before the deadline, and had to push back graduation by a semester so I could come up with the money. I did it knowing this degree isn’t going to pay off the way it would have in 1989, when my father was hired before he’d even finished earning his diploma. I did it because I was too close to the finish line to quit.

There are the longer term concerns, too. There are things I can afford because I don’t have children right now. But I also don’t know if they will ever be something I have room for in my budget. The playful conversations my partner and I have about kids, usually couched in terms of his nephew, are ones I refuse to engage in too seriously. They are a way to communicate a growing sense of commitment, a shorthand summary of our values.

The fantasy of motherhood itself is one I resist. I can’t afford to linger too long on even the idea of my children and I nestled close together at night as I read to them, their father playing lullabies on a second-hand guitar. When I think about the future, I consider less what I want and more what I think will be possible.

One of my cousins ruefully, jokingly calls this position being “middle class poor.” Our indulgences belay an uncertainty that there will ever be more than this. We delay the old markers of middle class adulthood and adopt something distant from (but still akin to) the mindset of small, short-term pleasures documented in those who experience real, chronic poverty. We negotiate between the financial lessons our parents taught us and the part-time paychecks our bosses cut. We get by, just making rent on apartments and leased houses that we fill with midcentury modern dressers and 1980s nigthstands we paid nothing for.

It’s almost become a cliche that, wherever we live, the middle class of my generation use the language of museums to describe their homes. Our carefully curated rooms, our coffee table vignettes, they are made up of objects we collect and display, that we enjoy and to which we ascribe meaning. Our exhibits of inherited antiques tell the story of one generation’s security and another’s uncertainty.

We exist in a moment when aging voters fear the future and look to leaders like Trump who seem to offer a throwback to the good old days they remember. Conservatism, after all, contains an implicit promise to bring back not only tradition and its attendant values, but the security, prosperity, and innocence of decades past, of childhood.

Some of our totems and tochtkes only evoke the aesthetic of nostalgia. We buy items described as “heirloom quality,” hoping we, too, will have someone to pass our material evidence on to. We purchase hand-made, limited edition pieces authentically crafted in the image of what we wish we had, in the shape of an unfamiliar sort of confidence.

I spent my twenties holding a fear that I imagine many others of my age and class share — that our lives, as they were promised, might never start. I see my peers move carefully, cautiously, as if we suspect that what what we were told to expect is null and void and that we will have to craft a different kind of existence. It’s hard to get us to the polls and to church, trends that hint at our mistrust of the future, whether four year or eternal.

I remember when I took for granted that my mother’s parents had five children, and sent each of them to small liberal arts colleges. And here we are, my cousins and I, a generation down the line, some with arts degrees and some with associates from community college, all trying to get a start.

This is the liminal space between the struggle and invisibility of real poverty and what we were told our lives would be. This is privilege and discomfort. This is the struggle not to slide out of the income bracket we were born into. This is living with material things that are not valuable enough to pawn or sell, or in stakes dire enough to try, but knowing they are frivilous if purchased new.

Much of this material inheritance is silly and impractical for people in our position to own — for some reason, I have a crystal punchbowl and matching glasses given to my mother as a wedding present. No wonder my generation treats irony as cultural currency. Living in this moment, in this liminal space, means stress over income and expenses, and shame over privilege. It is a first world problem.

This is also the space in which it seems reasonable, when the power is turned back on, to find an old 80s comedy on Netflix that hinges on class commentary — Trading Places, Working Girl, Sixteen Candles. To laugh at the Blues Brothers behaving badly in a restaurant where “the soup is fucking ten dollars.” To simultaneously scan through Pinterest photos of brides who spend $20,000 on rustic barn weddings, through snaps by Instagram prairie moms who register for $100 infant dresses and expensive modernist high chairs.

In the gentle glow of the TV, in the dull blue light of the laptop I am both lucky to own and rely on for work, a ten dollar bottle of Andre champagne chilled in an antique silver bucket found by my aunt in the back of my grandmother’s closet. I paired it with Velveeta macaroni and cheese, eaten out of an old Corningware pot. The basics, at least, were covered. The creature comforts were there.

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