TODAY is International Women's Day: for a lot of women it's not as important as tomorrow, which is Mother's Day.
Women often measure themselves and their worth by the cards they get, the flowers, the invitation out to lunch, the breakfast in bed.
Expectations are high. A mother for whom the day passes unmarked is a mother who will wonder how she failed her family.
She will not be consoled by anyone telling her the main beneficiaries of Mother's Day are the florists, confectioners, hotels, and greeting card manufacturers. And indeed, it would be a poor consolation for someone whose family managed to remain immune to the social pressures of the celebration.
But what do we, those who will not be involved in any official or communal celebration of International Women's Day, think about today? Will it pass over us without our giving a thought to how life is changing for women and whether these changes are for the better?
It's pointless having a big day people pay lip-service to if they don't think about it as well.
Even if we were just to think about women in other countries for a bit today - not necessarily march for them, collect money for them or fight a battle for them but just think about them, then the day would not just go by on the nod.
"Haven't women got everything they need?" a man asked on a radio programme. "What do they want a special day for? Every day is a Women's Day as far as I can see."
Days are certainly brighter for women than they were, but not bright enough for anyone to dismiss the concept of a special day as trivial.
Today, I will think about women in three countries
MARY in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. I wrote about her before her parents back in Ireland don't recognise her marriage because it was to a divorced man and took place in front of a registrar, not a priest. They love her, they say, but they have a strong and sincere belief that to condone what she did, to set aside her sin, would be like ignoring the sin of murder or theft. They think that to visit her or to welcome Mary and her family home would be to say the laws of Gods do not matter, and that we still love and accept those who break them.
Mary has two little toddlers now: all the other women in the crescent where she lives have welcomed their rellies out to see the anew families growing up. Not Mary.,
On my advice, she has sent pictures of the babies home at Christmas with the Christmas card, which is the one exchange they have. It hasn't worked. There is no answering comment from this couple on their own flesh and blood, a little girl and boy, their grandchildren growing up in another hemisphere. It's as if they didn't exist.
Mary is hard now, she doesn't want to hear any good of Ireland. I am worn out trying to build bridges, to tell her people will change, that they are the product of their generation, a time when there were absolutes.
But it's not working. It's no use my pretending that I am Mary's mother and oohing and aahing over the pictures of her children squinting with lopsided smiles into the Australian sun. Mary only wants to hear bad news about Ireland.
She was delighted when the Chime in the Slime had to be taken way. Typical of the country, she wrote to me in her letter, a letter which has no love for the land where she was born and brought up.
HlLDA works in New York as a house cleaner. She is much in demand, she says, because she tells the women she works for she likes to kneel down with a bucket and wash their floors by hand.
Of course she doesn't like it, and Hilda at 59 finds it harder to creak down and up, but it's a selling point. They like to think of the thoroughness, and they tell her friends she is a real old-style cleaner who does the thing properly rather than leaning on a mop, and they recommend her on to one other.
She can't do nights in offices because her husband is sick, and hem needs her. During the day he is at a centre. She wheels him home when her day is done. He doesn't talk much so she makes little bead jewellery items at night. It's piece work and her eyes are getting tired but she has a big bright light in the corner and since he has the television on she listens to the sound and could tell you the plot of almost everything.
She is saving for her two daughters. She got no start in life but they will. One is finishing a law course, the other is doing accountancy. She had them late in life and they are her pride and joy and her hope for the future.
No, of course they don't know how much she sacrifices for them. There's no point giving something if you make heavy weather of it, is there? And look at the pleasure Hilda herself gets from thinking about the lives they will lead. That's reward enough, isn't it?
CHANTAL is 32, she is infertile and she wrote to me once from France to ask me about a well in Ireland where barren women went and prayed and tied things to a tree. She thought from my books that I'd be up in such things.
Her husband is going to leave her this year. She knows this is true because she has heard he is making arrangements with the lawyers.
Chantal says she has only herself to blame. She didn't tell him the specialist said she would never conceive, she just let him go on hoping. Her thinking was that it would eventually die down, this longing for a child. Or that perhaps he could consider adopting or organising in-vitro fertilisation and having another woman carry his child to birth. Although she hated it, Chantal told him she would consider surrogacy. But he is adamant; he wants his own child to leave his business to, the business he staved over and lost his youth building up.
He shakes his head sadly when she pleads: he does not discuss love, love is immaterial to him now. His wife lied to him, deceived him, told him she was capable of bearing him a son when this was not the case. He will go from her, and her life is over.
She wrote to me and in this week when we are being urged to think about women all over the world I sat and cried real tears over my penfriend in France. She wrote and asked me did I think this was wonderful news about the sheep that was cloned? Would it come in soon, then perhaps her husband could clone himself and have someone to leave the business to, and then he would stay with her?