Keeping up with the Joneses

“Peer Pressure doesn’t just end after your teens, it morphs into keeping up with the Joneses” Karl Nova

I remember growing up wearing Cortina sandals to school (it’s the school sandals made by Bata the shoe maker) If you know anything about this brand it’s that it lasts forever…. literally. When I asked my mum to get me a new pair at the beginning of a new school term, she asked me to show her my old shoe. I showed her all the scratch marks from kicking stones and the pavement hoping to get her to buy me a new pair. She asked me to put the shoe on, of course the flipping thing fitted perfectly so she asked my dad to help me renew the polish and get it ready for the new term and as you would expect I was not a happy bunny.

Everyone will be wearing new shoes and
I am stuck with these old banger???!!!!!

Day one of new school term, I came up with the loveliest of ideas when I discovered that my friend’s mum, like my mum did not buy her a new pair of school shoes. I swapped mine with hers, which was cool since we wore the same shoe size, the only thing was hers was black and mine was brown; my bright idea was that my parents would surely not watch their precious daughter wear two different colored sandals to school; or would they?

I told my dad my well thought out story when he picked me from school later that afternoon; something along the lines of….
‘… Well, I put my sandals in my locker when we went for PE and when we returned someone had stolen one of mine and left theirs”
“Hmmm…” he responded.
When we got home, he sat me down and stooped to my level (eyeball to eyeball) and gently explained to me that since I was careless enough to loose one leg of my sandals and clever enough to find another size that fits perfectly, there was no need to get me any new sandals! Huh? ***** Blank stare****
When I returned to school the next day, my friend had on a new pair of sandals while I had on my black and brown pair. I wore those shoes for the rest of the term too!

I think I learnt a vital lesson from walking around the school in my brown and black pair of Cortina sandals, my parents’ spending pattern will not and cannot be influenced by my peer pressure to conform. I also leant that you can be your own person in the midst of a crowd because three months of wearing my crazy pair of sandals and sticking out like a sore thumb did not kill me… thanks dad!

It’s ok to be different……..
It’s alright to move at your own pace……..