I thought buying my daughter her first car would be one of those memories we’d both keep forever. Then I overheard what she was telling her friends about me.
My daughter, Stacy, is 15, and lately I’ve started feeling like I’m raising two completely different people.
At home, she’s still my girl. She’ll crawl onto my bed at night to show me some stupid video, steal fries off my plate, ask what I think she should wear, and occasionally even hug me without making me beg for it first.
Over the last year or two, she’s become obsessed with short videos, influencers, brands, what everybody at school owns, and whether something is “embarrassing.”
Normal sneakers aren’t good enough because somebody else has expensive ones.
Our vacations aren’t interesting unless the hotel looks good enough to post.
Once, she asked me not to pick her up directly in front of school because my car was “giving soccer mom.”
Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have.
The truth is, I’ve probably contributed to this more than I want to admit.
I grew up with almost nothing.
My parents worked constantly, and there were years when I knew better than to ask for new shoes because I could see my mother calculating grocery prices in her head.
If her classmates had something nice and I could reasonably afford it, I usually found a way.
Not because she demanded everything, but because I remembered exactly what it felt like to be the kid always explaining why she didn’t have something.
Which brings me to the car.
Stacy turns 16 soon, and for almost a year, my husband, Dorian, and I had quietly been putting money aside for her first car.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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