The Back-to-School Total, and the Shoes Caleb Wanted

Raiment is on Paul's list.

People quote 1 Timothy 6:8 at children standing in shoe aisles. The verse names clothing as one of only two things we're asked to be content with, food and raiment, and it says nothing about brands or about clothes being dull. Nobody I know has taught it as a verse about shopping.

Caleb, Lily and I went out Saturday morning with a list while David stayed home with Ben and a garden that wanted picking. We came back with $301.37 spent at three stores and one pair of gray Nikes I had said no to twice.

What two kids cost the week before school

I wrote it all down in the car, because if I don't I tell people a smaller number. Before tax:

• Caleb: sneakers $85, two pairs of pants $44, four shirts off the clearance table $24
• Lily: sneakers $32, three pairs of leggings $27, four shirts $28
• Supplies from both teachers' lists: $41

That's $153 for Caleb and $87 for Lily and $41 in folders and glue sticks, so $281, and tax took it to $301.37. Socks and underwear weren't on this trip. Ben got nothing and is wearing Caleb's old shirts, which at two is a perfectly good plan.

Lily was easy. She spent about nine minutes on her sneakers (purple, clearance wall at the back) and the rest of the morning choosing between two pencil pouches with horses on them. She took the one with the stitched mane. It was four dollars and it's in the forty-one.

The shoes took the rest of the morning. David and I had said sixty dollars on Thursday night, in the kitchen, so that neither of us would have to invent a number in the store, and the gray Nikes were eighty-five on the tag.

Eighty-five dollars and four boys at one lunch table

He's been naming those shoes since April, and I'd gotten good at hearing it as weather, so when he said in the aisle that everybody at his lunch table had them I asked who. "It's literally four boys," he said. "But it's the four."

I laughed, which was a mistake.

I made myself stop and say I understood that the four mattered, because they do, and a sixth-grader's lunch table is about half of his school day.

Then I said the numbers out loud the way I'd say them to David. Eighty-five on the tag, sixty from us, and there was a gray pair on the wall for fifty-two that would be fine. I didn't say we couldn't afford them. We could have, and he'd have known I was lying, because Caleb knows what the Odyssey repair quote was last month better than I'd like. What I said was that sixty is what we're spending on shoes this year, and the other twenty-five was a thing he could decide about.

He stood there doing arithmetic with his lips moving and asked whether tax counted, and it did, and he paid thirty-one dollars of the ninety-one and change from his birthday money. I covered the other sixteen cents because I wasn't going to make a boy count out pennies at a register in front of the girl scanning his shirts.

I had driven there meaning to say no and I left the aisle having said yes. On the drive home I asked if the new ones felt any different and he thought about it for a block and said, "Kind of the same, actually," which seemed to me a fair review.

I keep thinking about the sixty. In my classroom years I watched a lot of kids carry in the right backpack with the tags still on, and the ones who had it figured out were the ones whose parents had said a number early and stuck to it. Nobody had to find out in a store.

My sister Hannah and the shoes she drew herself

The fall she started ninth grade, my sister Hannah, who is three years older than I am and a nurse in Cedar City now, wore white canvas sneakers from Kmart that cost $9.99. She drew a swoosh on the side of each one with a black Sharpie from the junk drawer by the phone. It came out closer to a fishhook. In homeroom a girl named Tricia looked at Hannah's feet and asked, "Are those real?" and Hannah said yes.

She's told me she has never lied that badly before or since, and that she can still picture the tile she was standing on. I was in sixth grade that year, the same grade Caleb is in now, and I remember only the Sharpie, which sat on the kitchen counter for a weekend with the cap off.

Our mother saw it there, and the shoes by the back door, and she didn't say a word about either one. In October she put a pair of real ones on layaway at the sporting goods store on Tabernacle Street, ten dollars a week for eight weeks. Hannah got them the Friday before Christmas break in the store's plastic bag, and she wore them nearly every day until June.

I asked Mom a few years ago what she'd been trying to teach. She said nothing, she just didn't want Hannah laughed at again. Hannah says it was the kindest thing anyone did for her that year.

What 1 Timothy 6 says about wanting, and what it leaves out

For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.

1 Timothy 6:7-8

The very next verse is about people who "will be rich," which I read as people who have set their hearts on it, and verse 10 gets to the love of money. A boy at a shoe wall isn't in verse 9. Caleb doesn't care about money, he cares about sitting at a table with three other boys and not being the one who looks different, and Paul wrote to churches full of people who wanted that.

Near the end of the same chapter, in verse 17, Paul says God "giveth us richly all things to enjoy." Wanting isn't the thing he's against. If I were going to quote one of these verses to a child I'd quote both, and I wouldn't do it in the aisle. I taught third grade for five years and I know what a kid does with a grown-up's quotation in the middle of a want, which is wait for it to end.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I say no to the expensive shoes without making my child feel poor?

"Those are eighty-five and we're spending sixty on shoes" gives him something to react to, where "we can't afford it" gives him something to worry about. If it truly is a money problem, I'd still say so plainly and early, because children can tell, and a hidden shortage scares them more than a stated one.

My child says everyone has them. How do I answer that?

Ask who, and make him name them out loud without laughing, which I failed at. Mine got to four and then started saying "basically," so that's where I stopped asking. We've been here before with a screen, and I wrote about how that went in Caleb Wants a Phone and Everyone Else Has One.

Should he pay part of it himself?

For the extra, yes, I think that's reasonable, and it was his idea to look at his envelope before it was mine. For the plain pair a kid needs, never, since nobody should have to earn shoes that fit. Lily is only a few weeks into her first allowance, which I wrote up in Lily's First Allowance and the Question About Grandma's Card, and she isn't buying anything bigger than a pouch for a while.

Where do you actually buy for less?

Cleats come from the ward swap shelf every spring, and school sneakers come off the clearance wall at the back of the store, which is where Lily's purple pair was. I don't buy shoes from resale sites because I can't judge a sole from a photograph. Clothes, yes, anything with a collar or a hem, and the clearance table beat everything else on Saturday.

One thing I still don't like

I still don't like that a pair of shoes does the work of a membership card for eleven-year-olds.

I don't like being the one who decides, with a price tag in my hand, how much of that membership we'll buy. The usual advice is to tell the child it doesn't matter, and it plainly does matter to the four of them and a little to him, so I'm not going to say that. I'd rather the shoes cost less.

I'd rather nobody were checking.

with love, Melissa