Mandates

Unfunded mandates – that’s who I’ve gone out with most of my life. Or if my mandates got funded, it was about twenty minutes after we split up. Now I’m not one of those wives who put hubby through law school and got left in the lurch when he made partner. I should live so long as to fight over who gets the weekend cottage. I’m just one of those ordinary women in a series of long-term relationships where sometimes I paid the rent, sometimes he did. No problem, no complaint. No money.

At this point in my life, however, I’d like to find a funded mandate. I’m not talking diamond earrings and private jets. I mean someone who could buy me what I want most after decades of hard work: a little free time. Someone who’d say, “That’s okay, honey. You stay home and lie on the couch reading back issues of The New Yorker. I’ll take care of everything.” That kind of mandate.

But funded mandates are hard to find, even if you are as ravishing and witty as I. Funded mandates my age are drawn to womendates who were born sometime during the Reagan administration and who are fierce advocates of trickle-down economics. I’m more of the property-is-theft school of thought, which helps explain my series of unfunded mandates.

My therapist says “Fund your own mandate.” I tell her, that’s what I’ve been doing all this time. It’s not working.

Maybe what I really need is an unmanned fundate, a nice eunuch with a good sense of humor and a healthy bank account. The two of us can lie on the couch reading old magazines and eating chocolate chip cookies, and never go looking for mandates, funded or otherwise, again.