Why travel with kids? I could’ve had a large-screen TV

So we were driving from Massachusetts to Vermont on Tuesday and Matt turns to me at one point after entering receipts in the check register and says, “You know what? If we had toughed it out and driven straight from Delaware to Vermont and packed a picnic lunch, we could have bought a big-screen TV for the same amount of money we just spent.” I’ll note here that our inherited TV is so old that we can’t plug our newer DVD player into it and have to use the latter just to listen to CDs.

This list could go one of course–what could we buy if I worked full time and didn’t have a flexible schedule that let us travel? What could we buy if we stayed home for Thanksgiving and spring break? What kind of home improvement projects could we have used our equity for if we we hadn’t traveled with Tommy for the year?

(I won’t even tell you what we could have bought if we hadn’t gone to Paris. Something bejeweled.)

Being a parent is hard as everyone knows. Step into your local bookstore or library and you’ll find shelves of books discussing this fact and offering solutions, most of which boil down to a few basic dictates: Buy less stuff. Spend more time with your kids. Take care of yourself and your own needs.

This sounds simple, but unfortunately for all of us, our culture also hands down a different set of instructions than these, teaching us to be consumers par excellence. We learn that we need large houses, which we then of course must fill, heat and cool, and clean. We learn that our children need to be reading by the time they enter kindergarten, that we have to send them to the best schools, and that we must give them either things or lessons to keep them competitive and successful. And as the books I mention above point out, these requirements demand that those of us in the middle class work long hours and borrow money to meet them.

I know I’m lucky to even have the time to bemoan these sad facts. I know there are many people who must work long hours just to put food on the table and who have no options when it comes to education. I’m well aware of the world’s inequalities. But for those of us who can choose, it seems so often that our “choices” are often less than ideal and that they are informed not so much by what we truly want as by what we think we should want.

Here’s to replacing the “should haves” like the big-screen TV with longs swims in the hotel pool and rounds of mini-golf. And here’s giving thanks to having the choice.