The Birthday Card You've Been Signing on Someone Else's Behalf

Let me tell you about a moment that hit me harder than most of the big ones.

It was a Tuesday in February. I was in a card shop picking out something for his mother's birthday, which I had already texted him about twice and which he had acknowledged with a thumbs up, which I had correctly interpreted to mean that I would be handling it.

I was looking at a card — something with a flower on it, tasteful, nothing that would invite comment — and I had a sudden clear thought, which was: I have been buying this woman birthday cards for four years and I do not think he has ever bought me one.

Not never. He had. Once. With a message that was clearly written in the shop, in slightly desperate handwriting, because I had mentioned my birthday was approaching and the mention had evidently registered in a different part of his brain than the action-required part.

This is a small thing. I know it is a small thing. But the small things, when you begin to actually list them, have a way of not being very small.

The birthday card is administrative labour. It requires knowing the date, remembering the date without a dedicated reminder system because you are the reminder system, buying the card, thinking about what to write, writing something that reflects the relationship warmly and accurately, and making sure it arrives in time. That is, conservatively, four or five separate cognitive tasks. Multiplied across every birthday in his family, every Christmas, every significant event involving his friends, his former colleagues, the neighbours he grew up near but no longer saw.

I had been doing all of it.

And I had been thinking of it as simply the thing I do, rather than labour he was not doing.

Here is the real question — and I want you to sit with it for a moment — whose social relationships are you maintaining for someone else?

Who do they stay close to because of you? Whose birthday do they know because you told them? Whose feelings do they not hurt because you stepped in before the situation became a situation? Which friendships remain intact because you remembered to reply to the invitation, because you nudged them to send the message, because you tracked the thing that needed tracking?

This is invisible labour at its most invisible, because from the outside it looks like your natural warmth. Your gift for people. Your organisational tendencies. You're just good at this, aren't you. You just care more.

Sometimes. And sometimes you are simply the one who got handed the job without anyone saying so.

I bought the card. Something with a flower on it. I wrote something warm and accurate and signed both our names.

On the way home I started counting. I got to about eight before I had to stop and look out the window for a bit.