My grandpa Bob had a favorite line: You can’t soar with the eagles in the morning if you hoot with the owls at night.

My husband has another, though slightly less flowery one: You play, you pay. 

This line is often deployed the day after a sleepover, when a tired child has to engage in a family hike or clean their room, and suddenly hooting with the owls has lost its appeal. 

Both of these sayings remind me that in life, there are choices to be made, however unpleasant. You can have what you want, but not all at once. Or, if you’re me, you can eat popcorn with abandon at the movies, only to regret it the next day. Every choice has a consequence, and so the choosing becomes all the more important. 

I understand this acutely. 

So much of my life, like all our lives, has been lived in the delicate balance of choices. One choice I keep coming back to is our family’s commitment—sometimes voluntary, sometimes necessary—to frugality. 

Frugality, at its core, is the art of delayed gratification, of making choices.

And it can be exhausting.

It has me noodling, lately, on my old car situation. 

I’ve reached the point in my adult life where I no longer want to drive an old car. And my car is very, very old. 

If my car were human it would have already graduated high school and gone off to college. It would be eagerly awaiting its 21st birthday at a campus bar, a send off before entering a perhaps unkind job market.

And, to add injury to insult, I collided with a landscaping rock this winter on one particularly icy day. Thankfully, I narrowly avoided a large telephone pole which surely would have caused more harm. Now my old lady has a slightly mangled front, albeit no damage except that to her looks. And my pride. 

Because I am frugal, or, if we’re being honest, because I would rather spend money on vacations and house projects, I’m driving her just as she is.

The internet assured me I can afford a car payment, despite having lived without one for 15 years. But my old Toyota has only 80,000 miles on her and because the price of cars today gives me sticker shock, my sensible side won’t make the jump. 

So I’ll keep saving for the sad (triumphant) day Old Greenie can’t make it any longer. Or until a child needs a car. If said child can still fit into a tiny Corolla, that is. 

Though rational, this decision doesn’t help me avoid moderate embarrassment when I pull up to the country club for a work lunch. And who can forget that one time I arrived at a rather large house to pick up a child from a playdate and the father came around the passenger side to chat. I was forced to lean all the way across the seat to roll down the window. With a crank. 

On that note, I wish for everyone to be a fly on the dashboard when a child’s new friend gets in my car.

“How do you roll down the window?” they ask, innocently enough, before proceeding to roll the window up and down to their heart’s content. 

“This is hard work!” one cherubic passenger proclaimed.

It delights me, even when it’s 10 degrees outside and they sometimes get out of the car having left the back window down, just out of my reach. 

“Do you want me to roll that back up?” a helpful volunteer in the school drop off line asked. 

“No, I prefer to embrace my circumstances fully,” I want to reply. Plus, we all know closing a crank window would take far too long in the drop off line. There are protocols to follow, you know. 

Driving old cars allows us to invest for retirement, save for college, and give in a way that stretches our monthly budget. But there’s no moral superiority in the decision. Having a new car would not make me any better or worse than I am now.

Whether eagles or owls, paying or playing, we’re all still human, living with our choices. 

This intentional frugality has made my life far more interesting though, than were everything on Buy Now status. 

For one, forced scarcity has allowed me to finally make it through all of the tea I don’t particularly love. 

When you’ve depleted the fancy teas your sister-in-law bought you, the ones with the fabric bags and pretty names, you’re forced to work through the less appealing choices in your tea divider. The tea divider is also a gift from your sister-in-law, who, like Apple, tells you what you need before you know you need it. And you really do need a nice tea divider box, regardless of your frugal inclinations.

Forced scarcity has bred a new level of creativity in me too.

When you ask yourself, “How can I achieve this objective without spending as much money, or by spending none at all?” you open yourself up to new possibilities. You grow plants from seeds you harvested the previous fall. You turn pants into shorts for the girl who never, ever, stops growing. You swap tools with a friend, creating the kind of relationship where when you blow a bike tire near their home but don’t want to stop the ride, you find yourself on a new bike from their garage. You repay them with homemade banana bread when you pick up their daughter for school. You discover another way when you pause before purchasing.

When I started embracing my natural frugality, a funny thing happened. Instead of feeling more closed fisted, careful to preserve what I did have, I actually felt more willing to give.

I knew, instinctively, that my network would catch me were I to fall. That in the same way I had made it work before, I would be able to figure it out again. 

After all, this is how people used to live, right? Borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor was actually a thing people would do, not just a quaint idea. Living within your means was commonplace, not unconventional.

And yet, I sometimes can’t shake the feeling of wanting more. 

My thoughts about Old Greenie echo the near constant heartbeat of my adult life:

“Am I there yet?”

“Have I arrived?”

The great Kate Bowler synthesized this feeling well in a recent podcast, when she said:

I was thinking about this, will I always feel this achy? Will I always have this kind of rawness of being incomplete and never done? And will it always hurt so much? Because sometimes you see that ache be transformed into something beautiful. Like the blues, like all these gorgeous forms of music that take those minor keys and make them sweet. But sometimes it just does not feel sweet. It just feels freaking awful. So lately it’s just like, will the ache always hurt this much? …why haven’t I gotten used to it by now? Why does it always feel like a surprise?

Why does the hedonic treadmill continue to trip me up? Why do I always want something sooner, bigger, better? 

I turn 40 next year and it has me wondering these things, hoping for some sort of divine sign that I’ve made it. 

And I know I’m not alone. It’s what many of the younger generations have wondered for years. 

It’s no longer easy to break into the housing market. Groceries cost nearly as much as my mortgage. Childcare and student loans make everyday life unaffordable for many. 

To some extent, I think we’ve all wondered from time to time, “Just how does one get ahead?” 

Knowing my extreme privilege, I often wonder, “If I’m feeling this way, how is everyone else getting along?”

There’s a fascinating substack all about this, if you’d like to learn more. It chronicles this notion  of doing all the right things but still feeling behind. Some of it is the overall economy, but for households like ours whose needs are always met, overcoming this cognitive dissonance is “psychological: separating what you need from what you were trained to expect.”

Social media certainly doesn’t help. It trains us to want more, allowing us to compare ourselves not just to our neighbors, but also to influencers earning millions for convincing us we don’t have enough.

And so I remind myself what I often tell my children:  There will always be someone with more, and always someone with less. We can be grateful for what we have, and do our best to steward it. 

Trite but true, this logic overlooks the origins of my discomfort. The drive many of us feel has less to do with outward signs of wealth, or a confirmation we’ve made it. Instead, it’s a condition of the heart. 

What then, can fill this gap? How can we soothe the ache? 

There are myriad ways to dull the pain, but in the end, I believe living with pain of any kind takes recognition and practice.

And so we do it intentionally, in small ways at first, until we’ve flexed the muscle for future use.

The other night I took Margaret to Kohl’s where she found herself standing at the register, in a heart-wrenching battle between one sweater and another. 

Could I have bought both? 

Of course. 

Would it have been easier, faster, and less maddening for myself and the very patient cashier? 

Yes, one thousand percent yes. 

But I’m trying to give my kids a few tiny disappointments along the way, if only to bolster their resolve for the bigger, real life disappointments that come for us all. I’m encouraging them to live in the achiness of limitation. I want them to understand the feeling of not being able to have it all, or at least, not all at once.

Margaret stood at the checkout counter, waffling between two very lovely choices, likely knowing full well that a). I had the money to buy both but b). I wasn’t budging and c). The kind cashier’s patience had its own limits. It was closing time after all, and even at Kohl’s, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay there. 

Margaret left wearing her newfound cardigan, bidding an emotional farewell to the oversized, 90’s checkerboard zip-up. We even took a picture of it for posterity.

“I feel sad Mom,” she said on the way home. “But I think if I had gotten the other one, I might have felt sad then too.”

“I know, Marg,” I replied, “Choices are hard. I’m proud of you for choosing.”

Perhaps there is a world in which we can have all the sweaters, endless packets of fancy tea, and new cars with power windows. But perhaps, too, there is a world in which the ache we feel can drive us to lean on our neighbors, to wield our creativity, and consume less to the benefit of our earth. 

And when that feels too far away, perhaps we can start small. 

I’ve been doing more yoga lately. One phrase the instructor often says when approaching a difficult posture is this:  “Choose what is available to you today.” 

There will always be limitations, financial or otherwise, and there will always be choices to be made.

The ache may always be present, though hopefully, it will dull with practice.

Because in yoga and in life, I’m finding that by choosing what’s available to me now, I can finally rest in what is.

We’re planning to cross off a few more stadiums on Mike’s bucket list this summer.

P.S.: If you’d like to hear from a few experts on choosing non-conventional, community-building frugality, might I recommend a few of my favorite blogs:  Going Country, The Non-consumer Advocate, Prudent Homemaker.