The best money I ever spent

For British Somalis especially, the weeks leading up to a big wedding rival the anticipation felt for the Met Gala. Once you have secured your embossed cream-colored invitation to an event, the planning and video chats with girlfriends begin, and it is game on.

You would think it was everyone in Leicester’s wedding day, the way mere guests go about dissecting the night’s details. Who will be doing our henna, and does she do nails, too? Does that girl you went to school with still do makeup? And let’s not forget the most important question: What are you wearing? This last question is one that sits at the forefront of our minds for weeks, but in typical Somali fashion, it is only ever addressed in the last 48 hours before the big night itself. Young or old, that question is almost as sacred to us as the wedding itself. We approach it with a mantra that our people have carried with them for generations: You must show up and show out. You must.

I grew up comfortable. Not rich, but with two loving public servants for parents, in stable jobs that could provide everything my two brothers and I would ever reasonably need. Our quarter-acre block was quiet and dense with trees, and even now when I return, it feels like a deep, calm breath, nestled on the green fringe of inner-city Sydney, just a little over four miles west of the opera house and the famous Harbour Bridge.

My mom is the daughter of an Irish truck driver, risen above her station to become the first in her family to go to university. My dad is the son of a stuffy British family made briefly wealthy by World War II. They never let us forget our luck to have been born into such a life.

Begin. In the middle of a pandemic. Buy three buckets of paint. One 5-liter bucket of white paint for the ceiling and two 10-liters of paint for the walls. Choose a color you would paint a room to symbolize a new beginning. As many coats of cream white paint as needed to silence dirty baby blue walls. Paint. Hang a framed black-and-white photographic portrait. Purchase new sheets. Discover the womb of your healing. Create the space to love yourself. Start again.

I was raised by my unemployed, widowed mother in our three-bedroom home in a small suburb in Johannesburg, South Africa. There was only one bedroom for both my younger sister and me. It had two single beds and an antique chest of drawers that housed our underwear, socks, and pajamas between mulberry-painted walls. While I have reverence for the room for providing a safe space for my sister and me to share secrets since I was about 9 years old, sharing a very intimate space with someone else meant having no intimate moments alone. It was dreadful having to wait until my face was facing the wall right before I fell asleep to be able to cry. There was nowhere for me to feel anything that demanded to be felt, because I had to think of my younger sister’s feelings before I could even welcome my own.

Four days after we walked down the aisle for the first time, my wife Antoinette and I cruised off on our honeymoon to Cozumel, Mexico. On our second night, we found ourselves sitting in a theater full of our fellow passengers as contestants on a knockoff version of the ’60s game show, The Newlywed Game.

The first question was easy — “Where was your first date?”— but they devolved quickly: Which in-law would you least like to be stuck on a deserted island with? Which movie best describes your love life? What is your husband’s most annoying habit?

At the beginning of the movie Freaky Friday (2003), the mom character (Jamie Lee Curtis) pulls on the feet of her daughter (Lindsay Lohan) as she clings to the bars on her bed’s headboard. An alarm clock blares as they start their day with a battle of physical and mental wills. The bedside clock is small and black, with loud red digits. Its face reads 6:00 as it shrieks.

When I was in high school, I too engaged in a battle of wills each day with my mother and my alarm clock. My mom didn’t yank my feet, though. “I would put my face right down by your head and whisper in your ear and (try to) kiss your cheek,” she recalled in a recent text message. That annoyed me so much that I would eventually relent and get up. (I now find it sweet.) I remember lying in bed before school picturing this “Freaky Friday” scene, wondering what my life would be like if I had a headboard.

Not long after I gave birth to my second child at age 40, I lost my ability to read. I don’t mean literally — I could still look at a sentence and know what it meant. I could read a menu. I could, unfortunately, still suffer through The Big Book of Paw Patrol on demand.

But within the space of a year, I could no longer find my way to the end of a novel or a lengthy article. Anything more complex than a children’s book left my brain spinning in neutral. No matter the genre, no matter the time of day, the sentences I read and re-read remained fragments that I could not assemble into a comprehensible whole.

When people share that they are a “dog person” or a “cat person,” throughout my life I have had to apologetically admit that I was neither. I grew up with dogs, and I even owned several as an adult, but I never got that warm fuzzy feeling toward them, that special bond that others so often describe. As for cats, I learned by osmosis from my family that they were feral animals who used our garden beds as their litter boxes. I thought of them as aloof and disloyal animals who got their paws all over countertops and sunk their nails into furniture. I certainly never expected to spend almost $3,000 on a pandemic rescue cat.

When Covid-19 first disrupted the world, my fast-paced, busy schedule came to a screeching halt. I was four years into a different type of grief. My husband had unexpectedly passed away, leaving me a single mother to a 13-month-old, 3-year-old, and a 6-year-old. All of the things I used to seek comfort in during the years that followed — overscheduling, running away on trips, and the built-in company of my social networks — completely dried up. School became exclusively online, and as a high school government teacher, I struggled to teach my classes virtually while juggling solo parenting at home. I felt stranded on a desolate island, and being stuck at home left me feeling more alone than ever. As my despair deepened, I watched other people scramble to adopt pets to fill their own pandemic voids. My daughter seized this opportunity to push harder for the orange tabby kitten of her dreams. I never thought I would agree, but as the uncertainty of the times slowly drained me, somehow I said yes.

It all started in April 2021 with some children’s cherry cough syrup, a baby humidifier, and a 32-ounce box of Aunt Jemima pancake and waffle mix. That was the first receipt to hit my inbox from Walgreens ​​store #3924 in El Paso, Texas. Total: $67.89 on a Visa debit card with 63 cents earned in Walgreens rewards.

The thing is, the receipt wasn’t mine; I live 2,000 miles away in New York. Whoever had signed up for the Walgreens’ loyalty program in El Paso had put down my email address and, in doing so, had primed my Gmail for a wacky collision course with American drugstore commerce. And ever since that fateful day, each time they buy something at Walgreens, I get an auto-generated receipt telling me all about it.

It took me until my father’s funeral to understand how different my mother’s grieving process was from mine. Not because she was his wife of 30 years and I was a daddy’s girl, but because she was raised in Japan and I was raised in Guam. Unknown to us, we had lived in two separate worlds, my father often serving as a bridge. And without him, we quickly discovered how significant that gap between us was.

Three months prior, my mother and I had flown to Japan to lay my grandfather — her own father — to rest. Dressed in a black ensemble with our juzu beads in hand, we attended his wake at a Buddhist temple and said a thousand prayers that would seal his vase.

Bobby and I sat huddled together in the closet, my head on his shoulder. The warm glow of the grow light washed over us, making us sleepy.

“... And when I’m done with residency,” he said, “we can get some land and start to grow our own food together. That’s why we’re practicing now.”

In the 15-minute break in a lecture on dominance and submission, during which our porn-star professor had complained of the heat in the room and then nonchalantly shucked herself out of her tights, I sat in a folding chair, unable to move, tears rolling down my face. My husband shrugged it off as “hormones” and went to the water cooler to chat with the friends he’d acquired that evening. A short middle-aged woman who looked like she could’ve been your second grade teacher sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders.

“My husband is crazy about it, but I hate this whole scene,” I told her, and then, realizing I was criticizing her lifestyle choice, added, “No offense.”

I’m exhausted. I peel off the clothes I spent the past nine hours in, careful not to put them on my bed. It’s a familiar, welcome ritual for me and has been for the past few months: closing a laptop and slipping out of the grip of corporate America and onto the Euclid Avenue-bound C train, until finally arriving back at home, where I undress and settle in.

Cocooned within the safety of the four walls of my apartment, I feel untouchable, invincible even. I stand in my studio kitchenette and thumb through a stack of letters I retrieved from my mailbox on the way in. A white envelope addressed to me from a marshal’s office with a Queens address catches my eye. I examine the letter and feel a burning in my cheeks; my stomach drops. Bad news, packaged and stamped. I dig my pointer finger into the very edge of the envelope and tear along the length.

There is footage of me as a middle school girl in Los Angeles that aired nationally in the late ’90s. In the clip, which was part of a Candid Camera gotcha segment, the comedian Richard Lewis and I sit alone at a long rectangular table in an unused room on campus, a map of the solar system hanging behind us. He tells me he has analyzed me and determined I will grow up to work as a manufacturer of waste disposals. While in front of Lewis — a tall self-assured man, telling me who I could be — I shrug, as if to say, “Seems reasonable.” My frame is cowed, hands in lap, lips pursed in consideration of the news, eyes dead, a little sad. I bow to male authority. I look as though I’m folding in on myself.

When Lewis leaves, however, my entire body unlocks. I make an animated face of disbelief, and later tell a friend who visits me in the room where I’ve been cloistered by producers what Lewis said. I do so with an admirable amount of gumption.

I first learned whittling at 6 years old, holding my grandpa’s beloved hunting knife with so much caution you would have thought it was a venomous snake. We’d been on the back porch of my grandparents’ home in Young Harris, Georgia, with the Blue Ridge Mountains cradling everything they could hold in every direction you looked.

He’d taught me the basics of it all, where to keep my hands in relation to the blade, the speed at which I should go, and how judiciousness should never be sacrificed to the sheer joy of seeing the wood pull away from itself in angry curls. Rather than setting me off to carve a bear or even something unimaginative like a fox, he’d simply told me to whittle the wood off of the pine branch he’d given me and that we’d take it from there.

In the last diet book I ever bought, the author is pictured throughout at her kitchen island and in her garden. She’s following the template of many would-be diet and wellness gurus: a smiling and serene white woman, posing with artfully arranged food in a vast kitchen, inviting you into her perfect life.

When I purchased the vegan keto book in the fall of 2018, I noticed the sharpness of the author’s collarbone. Her skeletal sticks of arms. Her hair that hung limp and greasy. The smile that didn’t reach her eyes. There was something disturbing there, a message trying to reach me.

Four years ago, during a sticky New York summer, I anxiously sat in the lobby of the clinic waiting to meet my new therapist. Glued to the torn pleather couch in front of the rattling AC (which did nothing to relieve the heat and I was convinced was only there for show), I wondered what this mysterious person would be like. Will they be nice? Will we get along? Will they really listen?

I saw a psychiatrist every week at the clinic, which also required me to attend talk therapy. I didn’t have any say in who was assigned to me. I’d been going there for six years. In that time, I’d been with five therapists. The first therapist I saw for only six months. The last one I visited for a year and a half.

Another day at the office, but I wasn’t at work. My new office was the mall. My new work was to spend as much time there as I could in order to avoid being home alone with my new baby.

I had little money, and my clunky stroller was impossible to navigate through most store aisles, so each day I budgeted for a small coffee and a completely aimless walk from one end of the mall to the other. I felt lucky to work for a company with parental leave (or “vacation,” as one childless coworker suggested), but I craved company beyond my cranky baby.

I touched down in Denver, made my way through the airport, and got an Uber to a restaurant a friend had recommended. I had made a reservation in advance, walked right in, and was seated at the bar. I enjoyed an entrée and a cocktail and caught up on podcasts while I ate my meal. Later, I paid my bill, then took another Uber to my hotel.

This all sounds pretty mundane. As a 35-year-old professional, I had gone on a million business trips before, but as a newly minted openly blind person, it was a huge first for me. Checking in with the hostess, ordering the dinner I selected in advance after perusing the menu online, and being just another patron amid the chatter and clinking of dishes in the hip, busy downtown spot made me feel powerful and present in a way that was entirely new — and frankly, the meal was quite delicious.

Ana and I were in Columbus, Ohio, for a friend’s wedding, our first big celebration as a couple. An apartment full of friends hurried to get ready before the night of heartfelt vows, joyful dancing, and talking really loudly over music. I still remember dancing so full-spiritedly to Despacito (it was 2017) with Ana at the end of the night and leaving the party on a high.

Going to sleep only a couple of hours later, Ana and I held each other in sadness.

“Dean passed away from Covid, Alex,” a friend told me over the phone last March. “I’m so sorry.”

In that moment, I wanted to climb into a hole and pull the hole inside with me. I wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Every day, we find ourselves at the mercy of our own purchases. Living within the clutches of consumer capitalism means we’re subject to the forces of production, price, and planned obsolescence. Food will spoil in our fridges before we realize the crucial moment has passed. The clothes we order online will likely fall apart when we wear them. We’re in constant danger of being scammed. We can only hope our bets pay off and that we aren’t buying something that will bite us in the end.

Here at The Goods, we have a recurring essay series called The Best Money I Ever Spent, in which we publish pieces that really try to examine the value of the things we purchase and the good they have added to our lives. Here, we’ve flipped that, asking a few of our favorite people about the worst money they’ve ever spent. From skin care mistakes to bad sneaker investments, the question of how much better life would be if we could just get our time and money back is one that haunts us.

—Melinda Fakuade, associate editor of culture and features for Vox.com

I never really pictured my birth until halfway through my pregnancy, when I took a class on Zoom. Over the course of two weekends, a childbirth educator talked about avoiding unnecessary medical interventions and shared strategies for coping with the pain of labor without medication, like an epidural.

When I started the class, the closest thing I had to a birth plan was “anything but a C-section.” But as we practiced breathing techniques, visualizations, and long, sustained eye contact with our partners while pressing ice to our wrists, visions of my “ideal birth” came into focus.

There are a million things worse than watching a movie on a Monday night. But at the end of this past March, I couldn’t think of any. Suddenly, I didn’t ever want to watch a movie, ever again.

This is not a great position to find yourself in if what you do for a living is write about movies. I could read a book, of course, or watch television, but during this awful year, those have been my choices every night: watch something on my TV or read a book. Rinse and repeat.

We thought of a name for our new kitten before we went to collect him.

I’d wanted a male tabby; I’d had them when I was a child, and I decided I liked them best and believed maybe they liked me, too. My husband, daughter, and I felt that the kitten should have a simple name. An ordinary everyday name. Mike, or John, or Steve.

I first thought about buying a new jumper (what Americans call a sweater) on New Year’s Eve, as I walked into a friend’s apartment for a couple of drinks before curfew. It was one of my first evenings out in Milan since my homecoming: I was born here but spent most of my adult life abroad, and when I came back in late December 2019, it was only a few weeks before the local Covid-19 outbreak.

I spent the evening wishing I’d worn something else. I looked sheepishly at my friends’ turtleneck jumpers, shiny dark blazers, and perfectly slim-fit shirts, and hoped they didn’t notice the ensemble I’d tossed on. My dark blue jeans were once neat, but their hems had become frayed over the years. The white and gray striped shirt fit me perfectly when I bought it in 2014 but the fabric had since stretched and stiffened. As for my red jumper, it was just too red and too bright. “I should take better care of myself,” I remember thinking, and I set out to buy a new jumper.