I like to uphold my children’s privacy and respect their wishes, the foremost of which is: “Please respect our privacy by not writing about us.” So, let’s imagine I spent Mother’s Day with my nieces, except there were four of them and one of them was a boy.
It cannot have escaped the notice of anyone in south London that Sunday was a beautiful day; the last time the sun happened to coincide with the celebration of the matriarch was, I believe, 2020, on the eve of lockdown. I concluded, as any right-thinking person would, that we were in for a beautiful spring, rolling from one T-shirt to another across days of blue skies and weirdly warm pavements.
My male niece asked me to stop extrapolating the weather from a single data point. Another niece chimed in that I always did that, and that this irrationality was foundational to my untrustworthiness. “Look, though,” I countered. “Sunshine! Are you wearing sunscreen? Whoever thought such a question would have to be asked in March?”
I set off on an imaginative excursion of all the things we would be able to do in April that would previously have been rendered impossible by inclement weather. An Easter egg hunt! Maybe we could get another pet. Should we take up basketball? All those municipal courts, all this weather. “Please, for the love of God,” one niece said, “save this for when you have grandchildren.” But that won’t be for ages, and there is weather I don’t want to waste now.
I have blown hot and cold on the usefulness of Mothering Sunday over the years. Before I had children, I thought it was a stick with which to beat childless women – and I still think that, a bit. When the kids were small, I felt it was mainly the gift of admin to fathers – admin that somehow they never quite got right, so really it was Bickering Sunday. When the kids were old enough to make their own cards, it was briefly the highlight of my year. Then, when they were old enough to refuse to make a card, I was forced to admit that it was just yet more commerce, piggybacking the bond upon which there can be no price.
But one thing has remained constant: I always think the weather that weekend determines what happens, meteorologically, for at least the next three months, if not the year. So really, subconsciously, I think of it as Groundhog Day.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
