It was Mothers’ Day here yesterday. I say ‘here’ meaning the UK, because I know other countries celebrate it at other times. Our Mothers’ Day changes each year – something to do with Easter wobbling about, which is something to do with the moon, I think. Never really figured out what or why because it never really interested me that much. All I know is that it often more-or-less coincides with my birthday, which means my offspring tend to send me some sort of greeting on one or the other, but rarely both.
This year the two dates were separated by a few weeks. All three remembered the birthday. For Mothers’ Day I received a text message and two phone calls, plus a DVD which arrived a week ago, it’s computer generated Amazon gift message proclaiming it to be an extra birthday/Mother’s Day gift.
I just didn’t rear the kind of kids who splash out on expensive mail order bouquets, trawl through Etsy for the perfect personalised gift and quirky card or spatter Facebook with multi-coloured ‘best mum ever’ photo collages covered in hearts and anaemic-looking teddy bears. For that I’ll be eternally grateful.
No longer having a mother in the physical realm, I spent my Mothers’ Day communing with Mother Nature in my garden. It was a glorious spring day and I was blissfully happy, up to my elbows in deep, dark loam, planting out a new herb bed, enjoying the nodding daffodils and clearing the grass from the ever-expanding clumps of primroses and cowslips that beam up from every cranny and corner. My garden had a gift for me, too – a beautiful little tumbled crystal, just lying on the earth’s surface and waiting for me to find it.
In the evening, I sat down to watch the gift DVD – a sci-fi film called Arrival. My youngest had selected it for me because he knew I would love it – intelligent, very cleverly constructed, with some fascinating takes on how language, communication and – most important of all – time itself works. One line shone out and left me buzzing by the end. It was something like: Imagine writing a sentence, using both hands, and starting from both ends at once. You’d need to know everything that the sentence was going to contain in advance and you’d need to know exactly how much space to leave so that it met up perfectly. You’d need to know the future.
Yes, my kids don’t shower me with trinkets on Mothers’ Day, but they know me very well. I’m one lucky mother.
Right now, at this point in my life, I’m having fun.
The way I considered it was this: Quicksand is thixotropic. The more you bash and flail and struggle, the more unyielding it becomes. If, though, you very softly and gently relax, flow with it and – causing as little resistance as possible – swim slowly and carefully towards the edge, you can gradually escape.
It used to be one of my favourite science lessons – cheap, easy and fun: give the kids a bowl, some cornflour (I think Americans call it cornstarch) and a jug of water. Tell them to try mixing the cornflour and water slowly and they’d get a nice, smooth liquid. Tell them to hit the mixture with the spoon or try beating it vigorously and it would splatter them with goo and/or become a slimy solid. ‘A non-Newtonian liquid’, I’d tell them; ‘a thixotropic substance’ – from the Greek thixis, “the act of handling” and trope, “change”.
As regular readers will know, last year I started up a very small cottage industry with one of my sons, making steampunk-style miniature figures, gadgets, dolls’ house rooms and jewellery. He set up an online store. I started a blog to link to it. It all looked very promising and there has been plenty of interest. Sales, though, have been almost non-existent. The stock was piling up and we were getting disheartened. 
So, encouraged by my other son and daughter, I’ve spent the last few weeks madly learning new tricks (difficult for an old dog) – attempting to master Instagram, creating a new business page on Facebook, approaching museums, shops, magazines… and generally running myself into a state of anxiety and frustration.
Looking at Life 