Who Am I? Seems Like Someone Knows
Last week a friend form high school came over with his three kids under three. He lives in New York now and our interaction has been intermitten over the past 20 years. I was so happy to give him a view of our crazy life. As it turns out, the house was more chaotic than usual – there were kids running in and out, the puppy was zooming around and then a neighbour’s kid brought over his dog. So all in all there were nine kids, two dogs and two adults causing a happy havoc.
And I was so proud of what I have created – a laid back and beautiful home, kids running in and out stopping only to put their hands in the cookie jar filled with my homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, a puppy bouncing all over. I served up homemade mac and cheese with a fabulous salad for dinner and everyone was out the door by 7. I am a paragon of easygoing, non-perfectionist, hip, inclusive parenting. Yey me!
And then I wondered. Maybe my friend didn’t see it the way I saw it. He lives in ultra-cool Tribeca, NY and brings up his brood in a no-sugar, no-TV enclave of hipness. Maybe he saw me as a chubby, boring stay-at-home mom reveling in my homemade mainstream treats and barely holding on to an intellectual life. Maybe I'm both of these.
This question of self-definition was haunting me when another friend sent me this article from Fast Company magazine about the store Anthropologie. She considers herself a fairly alternative person who loves to score some eclectic finds at Anthropologie. After reading the article she realized that she was being typecast and that the store's marketers knew her right down to the fact that she would love to travel, but doesn’t. She suffered an "aha" moment of self-recognition when she read this.
Ask anyone at Anthropologie who that customer is, and they can rattle off a demographic profile: 30 to 45 years old, college or post-graduate education, married with kids or in a committed relationship, professional or ex-professional, annual household income of $150,000 to $200,000. But those dry matters of fact don't suffice to flesh out the living, breathing woman most Anthropologists call "our friend." Senk, 46, says, "I like to describe her in psychographic terms. She's well-read and well-traveled. She is very aware -- she gets our references, whether it's to a town in Europe or to a book or a movie. She's urban minded. She's into cooking, gardening, and wine. She has a natural curiosity about the world. She's relatively fit."
Hmm… other than the income that pretty much sums up most of the people in my urban ‘hood. But that’s not all:
The Anthropologie customer is affluent but not materialistic. She's focused on building a nest but hankers for exotic travel. (She can picture herself roughing it with a backpack and Eurail pass -- as long as there is a massage and room service at end of the trek.) She'd like to be a domestic goddess but has no problem cutting corners (she prefers the luscious excess of British cooking sensation Nigella Lawson to the measured perfection of Martha Stewart). She's in tune with trends, but she's a confident individualist when it comes to style. She lives in the suburbs but would never consider herself a suburbanite.
So all these confident individuals are actually not so individualistic, are they? They might as well as add, a stay-at-home mom who thinks of herself as a cool, urbane, intellectual currently on sabbatical making chocolate chip cookies.
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