This year is a big one for our family: In the spring, we celebrated our first “diaversary” with our daughter; our 10 year wedding anniversary was in the summer; in a few months, I’ll be 40. And we planned absolutely nothing — no vacation, party, or elaborate gifts to commemorate any of it.

“This year is a big one for our family… And we planned absolutely nothing — no vacation, party, or elaborate gifts to commemorate any of it.”

Every time someone asks after our plans, I find myself feeling defensive and a little guilty. If they seem disappointed, I feel almost responsible for it; if they start trying to sell me on how important it is to mark these occasions, I feel anxiety grip my gut in a vice.

This is a year of recovery for our family — a gentle, slow re-entry into aspects of our lives we had abandoned when our daughter’s medical diagnosis upended our world. We can’t really afford to spend any more resources on much right now. Which is okay! I know that trying to find the emotional bandwidth and the money to throw at a whole big thing would feel more stressful than it’s worth. I’d rather go big next year, or whenever the prospect seems exciting instead of exhausting.

And yet even with this intellectual clarity, some deeply rooted, nagging sense that I’m missing out and doing things wrong continues to creep into my thoughts. It only takes 30 seconds of scrolling on my phone to remember exactly why.

Go big (or else)

It’s no secret that social media has been a bit of a mixed bag for us as a society. While community-building, education, and resources are much more accessible, it’s also a lot easier to internalize a standard of living that isn’t really based in real life at all, but in the performative fever dream of personal branding.

Having professional-grade photography and editing tools at our fingertips raised the ante of not just how we were showing off our lives, but also what we were doing in them. Why post a still photo to announce your engagement when you can make a two-minute reel the same quality of most contemporary music videos? And why stop at a simple pregnancy photoshoot when you can have a gender reveal party with a 200 person guest list and pyrotechnics? 

“Having professional-grade photography and editing tools at our fingertips raised the ante of not just how we were showing off our lives, but also what we were doing in them.”

It’s fun and cool to see our lives as glamorous and beautiful, as if in the pivotal scene of a high budget blockbuster, and we get to be the stars. I get it! And also: I feel like the more common it is to see certain types of extravagance online in our peers’ lives, the more likely we are to feel like we’re failing when we can’t/won’t do the same.

I know I’m not the only one affected by this as the school year begins. What used to be post after post of kids standing in front of a chalkboard sign is being slowly replaced by identical lawn-sized displays of their names and grades, bedecked with balloon arches in tasteful pastels. I’m struck by how quickly they all begin to blur together. And the more I see, the more I notice how strained these smiles appear, how fixed and blank their eyes look, as though they’d been standing in front of a camera for far too long, striking the pose they’ve been trained to perform every time they see their parents’ phone. 

The little Carrie Bradshaw voice in my head can’t help but wonder: Who is this all for? 

Is going as big and over-the-top as possible for every occasion the only way to make it feel special? Or does following such a template actually do the opposite, voiding the moment of meaning altogether?

Where did you learn to want that?

Let me be clear: I am not anti-balloon arch. What I want to push back on isn’t the celebrating itself, but the particular pressure many of us feel about what we are “supposed” to do to celebrate certain events in our lives — particularly when the standard is generic and expensive. 

“The idea of being lauded far and wide simply for existing is a concept I am 100% on board with.”

In fact, let me go ahead and make my confession: I am a bit of a birthday princess, one of those people who has claimed October as My Birthday Month. The idea of being lauded far and wide simply for existing is a concept I am 100% on board with. Just ask my husband, who once seriously thought that taking me to a pretty new trail for a run at sunset was how I’d want to celebrate my birthday. (Reader, it was not.)

In some ways, my partner and I are aligned in our sense of occasion: We can both turn a random afternoon into something intimate and memorable with just a bottle of wine and a wedge of cheese. But when it comes to the big events, my husband and I couldn’t be more different. What he thinks of as “extra” I would call “the bare minimum.” While I want to be fěted in very specific and personalized ways, he is happy with a grocery store cake and some time to himself.

“When it comes to the big events, my husband and I couldn’t be more different. What he thinks of as ‘extra’ I would call ‘the bare minimum.'”

Deciding how we want to approach celebrations as a family was much more complicated than either one of us could have anticipated — in fact, I don’t think we’d even realized it was something we’d have to work out at all before becoming parents. Not only are we constantly absorbing the rapid trends of escalating social expectations, we’re also building on internalized templates we’ve always considered “normal” — until someone else’s version challenges it. In fact, it wasn’t until we found ourselves in an argument at 1am on Christmas Eve about whether or not Santa wraps presents (I will die on the hill that he does not!) that it first came to our attention that what makes a holiday feel right to each of us is pretty specific — and not exactly the same.

We’re all familiar with the Wedding Industrial Complex — many of us probably fell victim to it ourselves. There’s nothing inherently wrong with marking special occasions with traditional trappings if you have the means and the desire to do so. Bridal bouquets, bridesmaid dresses, groom cakes, and garter tosses might be the things that make the event feel like a “real wedding” for some people; while for others, these might sound as an overly complicated way of setting their money on fire.

“What ultimately matters is what feels meaningful to you, personally.”

What ultimately matters is what feels meaningful to you, personally. The tricky thing is when the explicit and implicit ways we’ve been told we’re supposed to want certain things crowd out our true desires. It’s well worth it to spend the time asking yourself what you really want and not just what you’ve been taught to want.

Which is why you won’t find the answer on Pinterest, Instagram, or TikTok. But you might find some of it in a memory. 

When it felt special

When I was growing up, my mom worked hard to make sure that we felt celebrated. Birthdays meant waking up to a breakfast table decorated with cards and streamers, our favorite foods loaded high on our plate. On Christmas eve we always got to open one gift (a new set of cozy pajamas, well before this was the cultural norm), and on Valentine’s Day we always had a card and sweets with our breakfast. Every major milestone (first day of school, graduation, shows or performances) was honored with a special shopping trip for a brand new outfit to commemorate it. 

“My mom did these things to show us she loved us, and she did so by honoring the people we were at those moments in time.”

My mom did these things to show us she loved us, and she did so by honoring the people we were at those moments in time. She rarely documented it — there were no smartphones or social media, and the family camera was often in need of batteries or lost in some unknown location. But even without the photos, I remember everything.

Take my 18th birthday: I wore a sage green linen shirt my mom and I had bought the week before. It had gauzy, princess sleeves that fluttered around my wrists, and a double V-neck with a wide satin trim that felt luxurious and sophisticated against my skin. I remember the scent of the white chocolate mocha and the warm pumpkin scone she’d secured in the early hours of the morning before I woke up, wafting up through the house. It was still dark when I came down, and the breakfast table glowed with hot pink decorations: envelopes in carnation, bubblegum, and flamingo spread out in a fan; mylar balloons bobbing on ribbons; a spray of roses in a crystal vase. I remember driving to school with the windows down, already feeling like a queen.

“It was a private act of love and care, something my mom did just for me. It was, as the kids say, low-key: a moment of celebration that was personalized and sincere.”

This is the sort of sensory, detailed memory that no Instagram photo could’ve preserved for me. It was a private act of love and care, something my mom did just for me. It was, as the kids say, low-key: a moment of celebration that was personalized and sincere.

And for these reasons I wonder if it wasn’t significantly more meaningful than some expensive blow out party or display that seem designed more for the ‘gram than for the person it was meant to honor. 

More than twenty birthdays later, I remember few of the big parties and the surprise trips or expensive gifts better than I remember that morning of my 18th birthday, when I felt like the luckiest girl in the world — and all because of a new shirt, a scone, and a decorated breakfast table.

Proof of love

My husband does not post anything personal online. While he doesn’t mind me writing about our life, he keeps a hard boundary about what he puts in his socials. I would love nothing more than a full carousel of golden-hour candids he’s secretly taken of me over the years with a long caption professing his love and admiration for me every birthday but, alas, it’s not in the cards. I won’t lie: This used to bother me. But one of the benefits of spending a lifetime with someone is that you learn to understand better when to assign real meaning to something, and when to change your metrics.

“I’d love a public declaration of love, but only because I’m sort of a ham and love a spotlight — and that’s just not more important than my husband’s desire for privacy.”

I’d love a public declaration of love, but only because I’m sort of a ham and love a spotlight — and that’s just not more important than my husband’s desire for privacy. Introverts are gonna introvert, after all. I love my particular introvert, and I’m confident he loves me — even if he doesn’t put the proof on the internet.

Sometimes yielding to the pressure of social media can muddy the waters of not only what we want, but also who we’re doing it for in the first place. We can forget how the quiet joy of a birthday breakfast at our own kitchen table can long outlast the little hits of dopamine we get when a photo of it gets a new like.

It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with a big Instagram moment — but it’s essential to remind yourself that by not having one, you aren’t missing out. Your life, your celebrations, your milestones, are not measured by such flimsy standards. You can, as Brooke Hampton says, “Admire other people’s beauty and talent without questioning your own. Let people live their truth without it threatening yours.”

Quiet, gentle, joyful

Sometimes timing in life is off — I’m having a milestone birthday in a year when going to our neighborhood movie theater feels as rare and exciting as a going to Paris. And though we’d long wished to celebrate our 10 year wedding anniversary in a luxury boutique hotel in Spain, I know I’d spend the entire time sick with worry about our kid, glued to the app that monitors her blood sugar. And truthfully, I don’t even have the bandwidth to feel sad about it — we are not in a season where travel is easy and resources are abundant. It’s okay. The thing about seasons is that they change; I don’t want to miss the sweetness of this season longing for another one.

“The thing about seasons is that they change; I don’t want to miss the sweetness of this season longing for another one.”

This season is quiet, but also good: We have a rhythm to our days with room to flex and pivot if our child’s care needs us to. We are cooking again, introducing our daughter to the pleasures of trying new foods and making a regular weeknight dinner into a candelit event. We listen to audiobooks and paint, watch Project Runway and make doll clothes, go to our favorite ice cream spot and then skip stones along the river.

Sometimes I take photos and sometimes I even put them on my Instagram. But the sound of her laugh is never the same on video as it is in real life; the feeling of my husband’s beard against my skin when he kisses my shoulder can’t be captured anywhere but in my body. Photos from walking our dogs in the late summer light never quite get it right — the moon looks too small and the stars don’t show up on screen at all.

It is its own celebration to be in this season together. It is only without our screens that we can see the fireflies.

Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, artmaking, and work culture. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.