A new national day for sisters would be the mother of all inventions

ISN’T it strange that we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but neither a Sister’s Day nor a day devoted to appreciation of brothers?

Apart altogether from the fact that each of the established days of celebration are marketing devices designed to fleece the offspring, they’re also foci for emotional blackmail. Daughters (mostly) and sons (or their wives/partners) feel they have to go out and purchase cards carrying the implication that their parents were and are the joyous centre of their lives, even if the reverse is the case.

“Mother’s Day is the worst day of my year,” a friend told me recently, on his way to his mother-in-law’s house for a knees-up to mark her motherhood.

“She doesn’t like any of her children and they don’t like her. They think she was a rotten mother and it drives them around the twist when she criticises how they raise their kids. The air will vibrate with tension and hatred. And you know the worst thing? She really likes me. Of all the in-laws, she likes me and only me. And shows it. Which means that on Mother’s Day, everybody else hates me, too.”

The thing is that you’ve no choice about your parents. You get imprinted with them from birth so that even if they’re horrible to you, you’re joined at the heart to them.

There’s a great line in one of Tom Murphy’s plays where the hero says he’s hoping to win the Sweep, which was the precursor to the National Lottery. When he does, he says, he’s going to give every penny of it to his mother and pay her off.

The beauty of sisters is that you never get to that stage with them. You can take them or leave them. If a woman admits to disliking her mother, there’s a bit of the indrawn breath in the reaction. Not liking your own mother may not be a crime against nature, but it’s certainly a misdemeanour.

The sibling relationship, on the other hand doesn’t carry the same implications of enduring affection. Lots of women admit to disliking their sisters, and when they tell other women, half of them join in, confessing that they can’t stick their own sister.

It is, however, important to note that, within the slithery coercion of the family dynamic, it’s only women who are allowed to come to a consensus on sibling rejection.

It is an unwise male partner who says “You’re right to hate your sister. I told you she gave me a pain on first meeting. She’s a seriously self-absorbed moron and she dresses like an aging tart.” He may be objectively correct, but it doesn’t matter. Family solidarity kicks in and the man gets a cold shoulder.

Of course brothers occasionally hate each other, too, but mostly they fight and get over it. ‘Coolnesses’ lasting months or in some cases years tend to be restricted to the girls.

It could be argued that bitching about one’s siblings has diminished a little in recent times because we’re all doing the ritual rant against bankers, government and developers.

But all this generalised complaining is beginning to wear us down. The nation is boring itself to death with pointless bitching about people who are totally beyond our control. Fury and impotence are bad bedfellows. Maybe it’s time to revive gratitude, particularly in relation to sisters.

Gratitude is a virtue that died off during the Celtic Tiger years. Those years were all about entitlement. Shoes, for example, were constantly described in women’s magazines as ‘must-haves’.

Cosmetics were sold to us using the slogan “Because you’re worth it”.

Outside of consumption, the State was there to provide, and if it failed to, we rang Joe Duffy. Grateful? To whom? For what?

That sense of entitlement and lack of gratitude ebbed a bit when the recession got its teeth into us as individuals.

You know the recession is personal when you put your card in the ATM with a slight frisson of fear that it will not only be rejected but that the screen will tell you that it knows just how badly off you are and you needn’t think you can fool it into giving you cash.

I now feel grateful whenever the ATM lets me have money, just as I feel grateful when I find cash in a jacket I haven’t worn for a while or down the side of the couch. I feel pathetically grateful when I get a Match 3 in the Lotto. Increasingly, I’m getting into counting my blessings, although it’s about as appealing as facing a dish of lightly boiled maggots.

Top of the list of blessings I’m grateful for is my sister. Her name is Hilary.

This is because our parents, in the days before pre-natal scans when you didn’t know which gender you were getting, didn’t like calling their impending infants “It” so they gave us unisex names.

Hers makes her sound taller than she is, which wouldn’t be hard. She’s so challenged in that department that when she kicks off her high heels, her height is halved.

Hilary is an interesting case study. She does vertical take-off rage and is promiscuous in her sympathies. She cares passionately about justice, injustice, poverty, the environment, flexes left on the floor where someone could trip over them and break their leg, biscuits not replaced in the tin, racism, overseas aid, organic eggs, chickens that aren’t given an acre apiece to wander through, child abuse and corruption. Not necessarily in that order.

Not necessarily, in fact, in any order.

On a dull day, you can poke her on a topic drawn at random from that list and in seconds, she’s airborne, spitting tacks and ready to lead a campaign.

This is counterbalanced by a riotous and often self-directed sense of humour. Her laugh sweeps her and everybody else into better form.

The most important factor, though, is that she’s precisely the kind of sister you want in a recession. Not only would she give you the shirt off her back, she’d give you the shirt off her husband’s back too.

A few months ago I needed to buy something that cost €3,500 (God be with the days). I asked the person who was buying it for me to get a cheque from our financial controller, who holds my personal chequebook to prevent me using or losing it. Wires got crossed and the person pitched up in front of my sister.

“Terry needs a cheque for €3,500,” Hilary was told. Without a word or a question, she wrote the cheque. If the withdrawal pushed her bank account over the edge and the sheriff arrived the next day to take away her furniture, so be it, was her attitude.

Clearly, I got lucky in my only sibling, but I’m not alone. Lots of other people have great sisters. So we need a national day to honour them and show our gratitude for having them.

All in favour, raise your hands.