SLUG: B05_disneyland_bathroom
SET: B
CONCEPT: Crying in a Disneyland hotel bathroom
HEADLINE: Watch the setup video
WORDS: 591

She was crying in a Disneyland hotel bathroom on a Wednesday and it was not sad crying.

The kind of crying where you sit on the tile with your back against the tub because your legs stopped working.

Her two grandkids were screaming about Mickey Mouse in the next room.

Actual screaming.

The kind of screaming a kid does when they cannot hold the joy in their body anymore.

She had not heard them sound like that in years.

Maybe ever.

She had booked the trip on a Tuesday morning six weeks earlier, sitting at her kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of bills she kept adding up because the number kept coming out wrong.

$2,483 was what the trip cost.

Hotel, park tickets, gas, the little breakfast place the kids picked out of a magazine.

She had the money for the first time in her adult life.

Not borrowed money.

Not a credit card she would panic about in October.

Actual money that had shown up across the summer in a way she still did not entirely trust.

She almost scrolled past the video that started the whole thing.

Back in March.

Sitting in the pickup line at the elementary school with her phone tilted against the steering wheel, thumb halfway down the screen, half listening to a woman say something about a little device that ran off her house wifi.

She scrolled past.

Then she scrolled back.

I want to tell you why she scrolled back.

Because that woman was me.

And the reason I scrolled back was because the day before, I had put a package of ground beef back on the shelf at the Walmart on Route 9 and told the cashier I did not need it after all.

There was a lady behind me in line who saw me do it.

She did not say anything with her mouth.

She just reached over and put a bag of oranges in my cart and looked at me the way my mother used to look at me.

I got in my car in that parking lot and I cried the way a person cries when they have been holding it since 2019.

So the next day when I saw the video I scrolled back.

I watched the setup video that night after the kids were in bed.

Twenty minutes on a Sunday morning to set it up.

Runs off the house wifi.

That was it.

The first one was small.

The next one was less small.

By August there was $8,200 sitting in a jar on the top shelf of my bedroom closet that I kept dragging a chair over to look at because the number did not feel real yet.

That is the money that paid for Disneyland.

Every dollar of it.

I sat on that hotel bathroom tile listening to my grandbabies scream about Mickey Mouse and I put my hand over my mouth so they would not hear me making the sound I was making.

Because a year ago I could not afford the ground beef.

And this year I was in a hotel bathroom at Disneyland listening to them lose their minds over a cartoon mouse.

If you are the person sitting at your kitchen table right now with a calculator trying to make a number work that will not work.

Tap the button under this post and watch the setup video.

The same one I almost scrolled past.

Make sure you tell somebody else too.

All they need is a phone and wifi.
