TRICIA was confused. Her birthday is on the horizon, but she is busily and satisfyingly distracted with other things – moving house, a new job, helping one of her children through a difficult time in his life.

“My friends want to go out, but I just can’t be bothered…” she grumbled.

I can identify with her. Having had more than enough birthdays to last a lifetime I have long since abandoned celebrating and now refuse to acknowledge them.

The trouble was that Tricia’s friends were desperate to honour her birthday and were suggesting drinks, dinner, an evening out, bowling… “Well, it’s your birthday; maybe say no?” I asked naively.

“I can’t do that,” came the reply, “they’d be so disappointed. I can’t let them down!”

My suggestion that she produce a life-size cardboard cut-out of herself that her friends could take with them on their night out, while she stayed comfortably at home doing whatever, was not considered helpful.

Learning to strike the balance between what we would like to do and what we feel we should do to meet the expectations of others is a lifetime’s work that begins at an early age.

My young son frequently complains when it’s time to come off the computer that he never gets to do what he wants to do. Never? With the prospect of an evening’s ironing ahead of me, I swallow my tempted reply… I recall an aged relative saying that when his even more elderly mother came to stay she would knock on his door every morning at 7am so he could wake up and make her a cup of tea.

Tom told me that he longed for a lie in.

And his mother later confided in me that she hated getting up so early, but as Tom so liked his early morning call she felt she had to get out of bed and wake him as she’d always done.

It’s as easy to fall into the habit of abandoning our own needs to please others as it is to ride roughshod over their feelings in the pursuit of our own desires.

The danger, of course, is that tension builds up, as it did between Tom and his mother, and risks boiling over at an inopportune moment as we lash out at those we have come to resent.

But the inevitable compromise becomes yet another incidence of the abandonment of our own needs.

The difficult question that lurks behind this is ‘What do you really want?’ An evening watching a film is infinitely more appealing than a pile of ironing, but the cost of seeing my son looking so smart in his freshly ironed shirt and trousers would be much too high a price to pay…