for the love of layaway

my mother was the princess of bi-weekly payments

it’s December 1st! This (extra) officially kicks off the time of year everyone is gift giving, card swiping, and getting everything they need to stuff someone’s stocking.

I’ve been watching Desperate Housewives recently, and whenever Vanessa Williams shows up on screen anywhere, I automatically start thinking of the holiday season.

She’s in one of my favorite holiday films, A Diva’s Christmas Carol, playing a legendary pop star with no heart, a perfect blowout, and a lot of fucking money. Of course, there’s a family in the film down on their financial luck, and eventually her icy little diva heart melts and she starts handing out cash and presents like candy.

there are a lot of people who know that feeling, except instead of Vanessa Williams showing up to save the holiday (EYE WISH), it was our parents. I grew up in a house that was hella familiar with the term “we got it on layaway”.

both my parents had jobs, but never any real savings, and they lived very much paycheck to paycheck. Even in their retirement, they still live on a hyper fixed income. When I was a kid, they’d sit at the dining room table doing the bills on the back of one of the envelopes those bills came in. Picking what could be paid and what could be put off.

i remember seeing my dad’s handwriting on those envelopes, throwing them to the side while I went sifting through the mail for my beloved Delia’s or Alloy catalogs. My parents were both coming out of addictions when I was still in single digits (over three decades clean now eowwww) but recovery came with deep debt, not so much financial literacy, and two kids who needed/wanted a lot.

my sibling and I never really went without, but my parents, especially my mother, definitely did. I don’t think I’ve ever directly asked her about her feelings around our financial standing, but she has—in passing—kind of expressed how she felt about it.

when she did, I sometimes could sense a small tinge of shame, which was interesting because it’s a feeling I have very rarely seen her express; she is the epitome of the saying “ain’t no shame in my game”. But I don’t really remember her having like, super nice things. Sure, she’d have a bottle of Exclamation or White Diamonds perfume here and there, but you couldn’t really look around the house and assign many of the things of value to her.

there were things we had that set us back, and that further confused me because again—I don’t associate a lot of those things with her. I later realized they were meant to keep up appearances for the outside world, or were purchased on a whim by my father, because both his selfishness and misplaced pride ran deep through our home and family.

my father was the complete opposite of Julius from Everybody Hates Chris. He hated coupons, could not STAND that my mom went to several stores to stretch our grocery budget, was embarrassed when she haggled, and couldn’t STAND when she asked for extensions on bills or discounts on anything. I know it because he voiced it.

the one time a year I do remember him not giving her shit on it was during its most wonderful time—Christmas.

my mother started shopping for Christmas at the end of summer, sometimes sooner. She’d get as much as she could—clothes we needed, toys we’d talked about, cologne and socks for my dad, gifts for church members and family members—and she’d toss it all on layaway.

there was a Kmart in Southfield that she used the most, in the shopping center at 9 Mile and Greenfield. There was a kosher market, a DOTS where I’d get my seventh-grade businesswoman attire, and a bunch of other now likely defunct businesses.

It was close to her job, close to her bank (the Comerica is apparently still standing) and sometimes I’d go with her when she needed to make a payment. I’d either wait in the car or go inside if I was desperate for a Baby Pan Pan and Crazy Bread combo from Little Caesars.

if you’re old enough to have wandered through a Kmart, you know two things hit you as soon as the automatic doors part—the world’s brightest, whitest, most homophobic overhead lighting…and the smell of aggressively over-buttered crust and slightly burnt pepperoni wafting towards you from Little Caesars…Midwestern heaven.

she’d make payments every few weeks, and the décor in the store would change from back-to-school, to Thanksgiving, to eventually…Christmas. Then the day would come where she’d pull up to our house in her red Jeep Cherokee, honk the horn, and ask for help bringing in giant plastic bags with a red K on the front. They were filled with stuff to wrap for others, hide from Dad or my brother, and also things to wrap for herself. The other bags that I didn’t help with she “hid” in the closet upstairs that my dad and her shared.

After months of payments, it was all finally hers.

she lived on layaway, and for years I didn’t question it until kids at school started weaponizing the word. Not at me directly, but I got the message. I learned quickly it wasn’t something to advertise, so I kept quiet about the fact that my clothes and toys in the new year were likely paid for in installments. I mean, it was already bad enough that they were from Kmart.

They didn’t come down the belt at the cashier and into our car on a random shopping trip. Instead, they were pulled from back cubbies and handed over to my mom after months of careful, meticulously planned out months of paying.

this whole lookback at layaway started because of a thread I saw on Threads one night while scrolling away. BY THEE WAY I HAPPEN TEW ENJOY THAT APP NOW.

people were joking that, this Christmas is canceled or funded by Klarna this year because no one has any money.

like so many things from the ‘90s, layaway has just been rebranded for our generation. Klarna, AfterPay, and their friends are all the children of layaway, but with a twist for the impatient millennial crowd. You don’t have to wait until it’s fully paid off to get your toys, but everything else is pretty much the same. The shame around it seems to be (mostly) gone and maybe it’s because of those Kmart kids of the ‘90s.

i also learned that to some people, it’s all an entirely new concept.

and honestly? shout out to you if you grew up in a world where that’s all deeply unfamiliar to you, I hope and pray that my children are flabbergasted by the concept too. I hope that the kiddos of those who are familiar with it aren’t embarrassed down the line but know that their parents are likely doing the best they can with what they got.

so decades later on December 1st, after watching Vanessa Williams wiggle down Wisteria Lane and planning out my own Christmas shopping, I think of my mom. The mom who was making sure her kids had epic holidays. The mom who was going to do all she could to not let her kids feel left out. The mom who was in the aisles of Kmart making sure she got everything she needed for the morning of December 25—even if it took her all season to pay for it.

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Extras:

• Rent-A-Center was also big in our household lol, that’s why the Tyler the Creator song makes me smile every time I hear it.

• I watched mad movies last weekend and literally none of them were good and ugh that pisses me off.

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Thanx for reading byyyeeeeee!!!