There are very few days in our life when we struggle to think how it could have went better. My theory is that if we take instances of our day and isolate them, we should be able to have more of those incidents more often. I need to learn to let things go, live with the moment and count those feelings as they come. Today was one of those such days. I woke up, lounged in bed, had a shower, got picked up, spent the day at the beach, driving, talking, laughing and eating with people who love me for no other reason than just being me. They’ve seen the worst and the best and somehow have stuck around for the last twenty years of our lives.
Regardless of the fact that I get unconditional love from these two people in particular, it was today in particular that reminded me that I am lucky. I may not have everything I ever wanted but up until a short time ago neither did she. Like me, she thought her life would never work out the way it had for the others in our little circle. Like me, she was ready to accept that her life would consist of adventures with younger people that our friends would never understand. She was ready to accept the company of herself and was willing to admit that she would live out her life happily with wine and shoes. Afterall, what woman could possibly want anymore than that?
When her life changed and she graduated from this life of wine and shoes, I was sure that my own social life was over. Who would be my date at our table of couples, who would look at me and understand when my friends asked my how my love life was? In the beginning her decision to leave this life was one that she made on her own. She was making her own ‘escape to the country’ and she was prepared to stop buying shoes and increase her wine consumption all by herself. And that’s when it happened. That’s when she met him and I knew that my life really was over. Not only would she no longer drive the hour or more to the city to join our dinners and my excuses to get trashed, but if she did, she would bring him too and that makes us a table of seven.
I don’t have to tell you that the prospect was not a good one for me. I tried and tried and tried to convince myself that this was an amazing thing to happen for her. That as part of the BFK wearers brigade she had done it. She had graduated to the world of the skinny girls where relationships were common and sex with the same guy was not only a given but it was reciprocal. As a fellow BFK girl, I should have been ecstatic at her graduation but all I could manage to think about was what kind of restaurant had a table for seven?
Part of the curse of living with big frilly knickers is that you get used to watching your friends take off their much smaller and more attractive knickers much more often. As a BFK wearer, you accept that you have to wear them in order to even get your guts to look like their from the same species as those of you who have only had to wear BFK for special occasions. This ‘privilege’ of wearing BFKs ensures a number of things…
1) You spend more money on washing powder
2) It takes two pegs to hang them on the clothes line
and 3) You have a lot less sex partners in your twenties.
When a BFK wearer meets another BFK wearer a number of things happen. You find this solidarity with them, secretly knowing that her undies are as big of yours, you begin to pass knowing looks to each other – doing the secret eye roll when incredibly skinny women make some ridiculous comment about the guy she shagged last night seeing her size 10 fat rolls in the morning sunlight. It becomes a bonding experience.
When the fellow BFK wearer has been part of your inner circle for twenty years there are secrets signals, unspoken rules and countless facial expressions that help you deal with skinny girl whining. It’s part of a secret society where only the BFK girls can go and I thought my discount for dual membership subscription was about to be over. I was convinced she was about to become one of those women who went on and on and on about the ‘drags’ of relationship life. About how hard it was to pick up the undies of another human being, about how hard it was to have sex all the time, about how hard it was to watch war movies and how hard it was to convince a man to take out the rubbish.
What I should have known is that once a BFK wearer, you are always a BFK wearer. She said to me today that everyday she counted herself as lucky. Lucky that he found her, lucky that he stayed, lucky that she got everything that she never thought she’d have and that she’d always wanted. Not once has she ever whined to me about his lack of ability to take out the rubbish, not pick up after himself or leave his dirty clothes on the wrong side of the bedroom.
I think that when we get to a certain point in our wine and shoe lifestyles that anything after that can only be a bonus. Today my friend reminded me of that. While she may be a lucky one, she reminded me that she wasn’t always. (And really she wasn’t, she’s never loved shoes as much as I have so all that was left for her was wine.) At some point we ALL feel unlucky. And while I tell myself that I am unluckier than most when it comes to men, when I finally decide to sort it all out, I know that I will join her in the land of the lucky because I am already there. I am damn lucky to have a fully stocked wine cabinet and even luckier to have more than forty-two pairs of shoes and truly blessed to have a friend who understands what’s it like to live at the bottom of the wine bottle and has come out the other side, albeit with a glass firmly in her grasp.
life in big frilly knickers 