No matter how hard we try, we end up just like our mothers – but maybe that’s no bad thing.

WE all turn into our mothers one day. I even know the very day it happened to me. It was when Senior Son was very new and I – who used to sit in the bath to shrink-fit my jeans and then go out wearing them still damp – was carefully folding a pile of tiny vests and putting them on the radiator to air because I was determined my baby should be as warm and cosy as I could make him.

Not so much motherhood, more a total personality change. No wonder my mother laughed.

Ironically, I was 32 at the time – exactly the age at which Hallmark cards has decided that we become our mothers. Giveaways are when we start worrying, stocking up on groceries, going to bed early and watching TV soaps.

All of which seem to me to be the obvious spin-off from suddenly being at home with a small and squawking new person. I lost a night’s sleep when I had my firstborn and decades later I’m still trying to catch up...

And of course, we come out with our mother’s sayings, too. They just slip out, all those little gems about catching your death, or if the wind changes you’ll be stuck with that silly expression and money not growing on trees.

I am guilty as charged of many of motherhood’s sins. But at least I never spat on my hanky and then wiped their mucky faces. They should count themselves lucky.

Tricky thing, being a mum.

MY mother and I once spotted a mother duck and seven little ducklings behind her, crossing the road. Once Mother Duck and four of the ducklings were across, the other three had turned around in the middle and gone back.

Mother Duck left the four and went back to fetch the three. When she did that, two of the four panicked and followed her...

And so it went, with one or two of the ducklings constantly running off in the wrong direction and disrupting their mum’s plans. But Mother Duck wouldn’t give up. She patiently and persistently rounded up the three, the four, ones and twos time and time again until she eventually got all her brood of ducklings safely across the road and we had a long queue of cars behind us.

Mother Duck – and just about any other animal – seems to show us that good mothering is instinctive, as though we’re born knowing just what to do and with the will to do it. If only...

It’s not just those phrases we learn from our mothers, it’s everything else, but especially how to be a mother.

For if we haven’t been mothered properly, how do we even know what we are meant to do? More and more we learn that the lovely, daft things mothers do with their babies – cuddling, singing and smiling at them and telling them they’re beautiful, yes they are, they’re beautiful – aren’t daft at all. In fact, they’re desperately serious and develop all the important bits of a baby’s brain that teaches them how to be human and interact with other people.

Which is why children who miss out – abandonment, neglectful mothers, bleak orphanages – can never really make up for that lost time and often never fully function as proper human beings. So what hope, in turn, for their children? Scary.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will do our best and our children will grow up to laugh at us for it, the way we laughed at our mothers. But a combination of genes, example and imitation means we’re probably doomed to turn into our mothers in the end.

Enjoy Mother’s Day. Hope you get your bunch of daffs.

PS You know that scary moment when you look into the mirror and see your mother staring back from your reflection? Well, it gets worse.

I’ve just started looking in the mirror and seeing my gran looking back. Now that is scary.

WORKING mothers in the UK apparently spend an average of 81 minutes a day with their children. Give them a break – that’s nearly twice as much as working dads do.

There’s a surprise. Meanwhile, stay-at-home mothers spend an average of about two-and-a-half hours with their children, which can’t help make you wonder what they do with them the rest of the day – lock them in the shed? Tie them to a lamppost?

The most depressing comment of all came from a psychologist, trying to cheer us all up, saying that it doesn’t matter really how much time families have together as long as children have fun with their parents.

Good grief. You’re meant to feed them, clothe them, listen to the violin, supervise their homework, remember their gym kit and the note about the trip to Beamish, factor in the dentist, new shoes, school uniform and haircuts, teach them to swim, ride a bike and use a knife and fork and in the middle of all this you’re meant to have fun?

Add it to the list. Another thing for mothers to feel guilty about.

SO Labour leader Ed Miliband and partner Justine Thornton are to marry next month, after six years and two children together.

Ed Miliband has always claimed to be too busy before – too busy for a wedding, too busy to register his son’s birth. Suddenly he’s got time on his hands. Well, he’s only an MP and Labour leader, after all.

But when it comes to marriage, he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, isn’t he?

I sort of liked the way they refused to get married before the election and stuck to their principles rather than bow to traditionalists. So why now? That’s like being a bit principled but not quite principled enough.

The perfect political compromise.

No surprise at all.

Now won’t that be grand?

GREAT news for grandparents. New divorce laws should mean that after parents split up, grandparents would have guaranteed access to their grandchildren.

This could mean an end to the heartbreak for many grandparents when grandchildren suddenly vanish from their lives. Sometimes through quite deliberate distancing by the former daughter/son-in-law, but more often just because of life and logistics and the way things work out. Not so much ill will, just a lack of purposeful goodwill.

These things take effort.

Grandparents have so much to give, never more so than when things are going wrong. They can provide comfort and security and unconditional love at the very time when children need it most.

Loving grandparents aren’t an optional extra. They have a real role to play. So let’s hope that more of them get the chance to do so.

Great news for grandparents, but even better news for children.

Top of the Pops

HOWS about that then? Top of the Pops is coming back, with a re-run of the shows from 1976 shown week by week, just as they were 35 years ago.

Never mind the music, it’s worth watching if only for the hideousness of Seventies clothes. Did we really wear fashions like that? Sadly, we did.

Won’t stop a new generation of dads drooling over Pan’s People though.

Shame that the BBC didn’t start recording TOTP until 1976. In the Sixties, a friend of mine took part in lots of them. There’d be a desperate call for BBC secretaries to go down to the studio, where a dozen of them would have to crowd around the camera and look as though they were hundreds.

Good technique, and one they use now in history programmes, where the same poor infantryman usually dies about ten times, but each time from a different angle.

Not so weighty Katy

I DON’T know if it’s true that Kate Middleton, she of the impossibly slim hips, is actually trying to gain weight before her wedding.

But oh, I want it to be...