Caroline O'Donoghue: Things we should have 'thank-you' cards for
The other night I was really On One with my friend Jen, and three glasses of wine and one cocktail in, we found ourselves revisiting our favourite topic: finding ways to celebrate life that are not wholly reliant on the milestones of marriage, mortgage and children.
Where are the congratulatory texts for keeping your dog alive? To quote Carrie Bradshaw, where are the 'Congratulations, you didn’t marry the wrong guy' cards?
We stopped, recalibrated. We decided that no, actually, we didn’t want to be congratulated for arbitrary milestones. We didn’t want congratulations at all.
What we wanted, instead, were ‘thank you’ cards.
This came about when, halfway through the night, one of us stopped a girl to tell her that her coat was exquisite. Do you do this when you’re drunk with your friends?
When I’m out with my friends we become like travelling bards for complimenting random women.
We reach across from our table to women having slightly dull, untalkative evenings with their partners and say “you look fabulous”, partly because we mean it, partly because maybe he has forgotten to tell her.
“We’ve told three people they look lovely,” Jen said, pissed as a fart. “But no one has told us.”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “Here we are, performing a public service, and with no thanks.”
“Unmarried women in their 30s are keeping the morale of the country up,” she continued. “And no one ever sends us cards.”
With that in mind, here are some cards.
People in their 20s need to get drunk to dance; young parents are too tired to dance; children love to dance but nothing makes you feel closer to death than a bunch of toddlers in chocolate-stained formal wear jumping around to at a family wedding.
The elder patriarchs want to dance but won’t do it yet; the elder matriarchs need convincing as well as . Who, then, is left? I give you the childless extroverted 30-somethings. Alive long enough to know most of the songs; sexy enough to cast a spell of revelry on the evening; not so sexy that everyone gets frightened and intimidated. We are the first to start and the last to leave, and that deserves a card, I think.
You know when people say 'that’s the good shit'. Ever wonder who the arbiters of ‘the good shit’ truly are? It’s women who live alone. I walk around shops with them and I truly can’t believe their confidence with fast-moving consumer goods. “Expensive lipstick, cheap mascara,” says Dolly. “Mascara is all the same; don’t spend money on it.”
I nod mutely, mentally throwing away my Chanel mascara. “This dental floss,” Jen says, pulling a box of floss out of her bag that can only be described as ‘indie’ dental floss. “Is amazing. Go floss right now. Go on.” I go to floss. It is, obviously, the best floss of my life.
Picture the scene: a dinner of mixed ages and demographics. A 24-year-old whose political beliefs roughly boil down to 'Free Britney, and old people don’t get to vote.' A 60-year-old whose political beliefs roughly boil down to 'no one who has enough money to pay an accountant should really have to pay taxes'.
Neither party has any intention of backing down, and both are enjoying their spirited grandstanding so much that they haven’t noticed that no one else has had an opportunity to speak for 20 minutes.
The host is beginning to waver, and it looks like they might cry at any moment. It is up to the 30-something woman to be the UN, ie, to do nothing but talk a lot until everyone calms down.
This one could just be for me, a certified idiot, who regularly texts the women in my life “remind me what’s going on with the alpaca???”
A few weeks ago I had dinner with a friend I had not seen in a long time.
She, it turned out, was on a difficult fertility journey with her husband. It had been a hard time for her, and the whole situation was made harder in that she felt there was no one to talk to. “I haven’t really been able to talk to anyone about this,” she said.
At first, I thought she was exaggerating. I had not seen her in over two years. There was no way on earth that I was the only person she was able to speak to about this.
“All my friends have kids,” she said. “They just feel guilty that what was easy for them is hard for me, and they just keep saying ‘it will happen, it will happen’. I feel like it’s just their way of shutting me up. Like if they don’t calm me down I’ll show up at their kid’s birthday party in a cloud of smoke, cackling and saying ‘I too have a gift for the child’.”
Maybe we don’t need a card for this, considering we keep doing it with such alarming regularity.
