Editor’s Note: All of the pieces in our confessions series are anonymous.
A few years ago, I was hanging out at a Sonic near our duty station with a group of moms I was friends with. We were all watching our kids play on the little playground and waiting for our food to come out during one of our monthly get togethers. We looked forward to these monthly events, a time when we turned off our Facebook and met in person to laugh, hug and goof off. We all loved those days.
This particular day, one of the girls (we’ll call her Cindy) came carrying a messenger bag she’d made out of a set of her husband’s old cammies- this was before the bags became popular.
We all “oohed” and “aahed” over the bag. It was super cute, really well made and just ingenious!
Cindy was a talented seamstress to begin with, so her bag really was a high quality thing, and it wasn’t long before we were sending her our old cammies and asking her to make them for us. She barely charged anything and, honestly, it was way more affordable to send her an old pair of cammies and pay to have a bag made than it was to spend the money on a cheap diaper bag from Walmart that wasn’t going to survive one baby, plus cost over three times as much as one of her bags.
It was a no brainer, really.
Ten bucks for a cammie bag that would last a good several years or forty bucks for a vinyl bag that would fall apart after the first toss into the washer from a formula spill?
In a place where military wives were constantly being accused of being gold digging tag chasers and dependasaurases, saving money ANYWHERE we could was a smart choice.
The bags caught on, and before we knew it, they were being manufactured in bulk and sold at the main exchange, which I thought was motivating.
Cindy kept making the bags (still WAY cheaper than the PX) and we all went about our merry little lives.
But then, some significant time later, I was surfing Facebook when I came across a post on one of those “deployment support” pages.
You know the ones.
They’ve got like upwards of 500 members, mostly women, and they “debate” about important topics like what to wear to the ball and how to dress at homecoming and when to tell your mother in law where to shove it.