By S.E. White
Eating at a popular local restaurant, a millennial-aged mom named Sarah said, “Forget the mortgage, that avocado toast looks amazing.”
Sitting with her husband and three children, she was well aware of taking a risk going out to support the food service industry at all. After all, millennials are rumored to be the reason mediocre casual dining chains are dying out fast, along with plenty of other industries that were indispensable to previous generations.
The rallying cry behind most business woes lately has been: “If you can’t find anything wrong with the overpriced kind of shitty product, blame a millennial.”
Even knowing everything is her fault, as one of the generation born between 1982 and 2002, she wanted her family to enjoy a night out. So she battled back the growing unease and took them out to eat.
The menu included pricey add-ons, like avocado and soda. They even indulged in dessert. To her great surprise, when it came time to pay the mortgage that month, she and her husband somehow had enough. She credits this startling discovery to the fact that they have the obscure skill known as “budgeting.”
“It sounds foreign to all the old-timers, clutching their pearls and writing articles about how terrible millennials are at saving money or delaying gratification for anything, but it’s true,” Sarah insists. “We do know how to budget. I thought we were living dangerously, ordering that avocado toast. I mean, there were all of those articles floating around about it. But it turns out, we had set aside enough to splurge a little and we were just fine. The mortgage is getting paid right on time.”
This raises some startling questions for the constant critics of millennials trying to parent in 2017. Questions like, “Are we acting the same way our parents did when they criticized our lazy-assed, constantly-divorcing generation?” or “Could we, perhaps, lay off the millennials for a while?”
Whether or not these questions ever find answers, Sarah is happy to be able to parent secure in the knowledge that the occasional treat won’t take away from family necessities too much.
“It’s just such a relief,” she tells us. “I already felt bad enough for being part of the generation that cooks more at home, drinks less beer, buys more local and supports small business products over mass produced crap. If I had to add the guilt of overspending the mortgage money to all of that, I don’t know what would happen. But it turns out millennials like me are doing fine. I’m starting to think the people who write those articles don’t know what they’re talking about.”
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About the Author
S.E. White is an author, blogger, and full time. When not reading she is writing, when not writing she’s wrangling the three tiny destroyers who call her “mom,” the bearded guy who calls her “wife” and the cat who doesn’t call her anything and denies her very existence. Her posts can be found on sites like Writers Helping Writers, Parent.co, Mamalode, and Her View From Home.