A friend had a moment of real thirty-something angst recently. She has a gloriously smart car that, rather generously, she lets her careless colleagues use. Most of them respond to this uncalled for niceness by filling up the tank before returning the car, or at least throwing a few quids' worth into it. All except one girl, who borrows the car regularly to drive home to Carlow, and gives it back without a sniff of petrol in the tank. To add insult to injury, she also dusts it down with a fine layer of sweet wrappers and Coke bottles.
Now, the most obvious thing to do would be to throw a fit and demand a full tank of petrol and a good going over with the Hoover in future, but here's the bind - every time she goes to say something she hears herself sound just like her mother.
All through her youth, she would borrow her mother's car and, as she was skint, she wouldn't fill it up. She may even have been guilty of leaving bits of rubbish on the floor on occasion. But she didn't think it was so much of a crime, whereas her mother most certainly did. Even the memory of her mother launching into her habitual lecture on car borrowing etiquette is enough to bring her out in a rash.
Every time she tries to phrase her request for a bit of consideration, she sounds like she's giving out, and her voice even seems to have developed the same infuriating tone as her mother's. As she's spent most of her life trying to be as unlike her mother as possible, this is seriously annoying.
So she hasn't said anything to the bold girl, and she continues to be irritated on a regular basis - it's just that the irritation is better than the fear of becoming a nag. As we discussed this situation, I realised that moments like these are happening to me with increasing regularity, and I'm obviously not the only one.
There are certain things that used to really annoy me about adults, and now I'm beginning to do them myself - expect thank-you letters, save used wrapping paper, disapprove of television. However, I'm not old enough to be able to justify these actions for reasons of sense - "Well I know that it's a little dull to put on a wash as soon as you come back from holiday but it means my clothes will be clean for work next week."
Instead, when I find myself doing something like putting on a wash before I'm down to my last pair of clean knickers, I start to congratulate myself, realise that I am being uncharacteristically grown up and then get freaked out. I can hear myself sounding like a sensible, rational, boring old adult, but I can't help myself.
My habitual response to these moments of horrified awareness is to go out and do something silly, which usually results in a hangover, further reinforcing the belief that really it would be better to be sensible in future.
The same friend provided another good example of this tiring syndrome. She realised that all her nights out were becoming masterpieces of organisation and planning - tickets booked weeks in advance, friends notified of possible event some time just after the ark set sail, that kind of thing.
This was obviously not good news - where was the spontaneous, daredevil, spur-of-the-moment girl of yesteryear? So that very Friday she and her friends headed into town with no plans at all, no bookings, nothing. "Anything might happen," was the thought running through her head. The problem was that absolutely nothing did.
They tried to go for dinner but were looked at as though they were several sandwiches short of a picnic - "No reservation, you say? And what millennium were you hoping to eat in?" Then they thought they'd go to the cinema, but there was only one film that they all wanted to see, and it was booked out. Finally they settled on going to a club only to be told that it was full. "I am never going to be spontaneous again," she muttered through gritted teeth, as the terrible realisation dawned on her that people were anally retentive for a reason. It works.
My mother has always claimed that she still feels like she's eight years old most of the time, and I always laughed and thought "Impossible". I think that I have always believed that there would come a day when a) you suddenly felt grown-up and b) you wouldn't care that you were doing all the things you swore you wouldn't. Some Great Plan would be revealed to you, along with the real reason that it's vital to plan ahead, not to show off and to do the washing-up once a day rather than once a week.
But oh no; instead you just find yourself muddling along, betraying your own principles left, right and centre and knowing that you're turning into the kind of person that has always irritated you. It's a pretty poor way of doing things, and I can't help feeling that somebody should have planned it all better and made Awareness of Adulthood into a stage of life, like puberty or adolescence. Then there would be books on the subject and classes at school and movies that deal with the trauma. If I had a bit of sense, I would capitalise on the market and write the script myself, but hey, who ever said I was sensible?