Mum In Aquarius

My mother has a strange habit of suddenly getting obsessed with things that she’d previously not had on her radar at all, or at least hadn’t appeared to. One moment, she’ll be going along with her usual routine, making ceremonial ceramic mugs and selling them through in-app retail functionality, and the next she’ll be in the garage building a fishing vessel.

This kind of shift has happened so many times now that it should barely raise an eyebrow from me, yet it still catches me out every time. It’s never a small thing, like taking up herbal oil making or growing cacti, mind you. It has to be big, in terms of physically taking up lots of space around the house so that you can’t ignore it. Typically, it’s something that requires a goodly investment of time, money and energy. Stainless steel fabrication is a case in point.

“Well, you can’t very well expect your mother to buy fishing rod holders off the rack,” she said to me. What she meant was, in addition to being mad for unusual hobbies and DIY projects, she’s also an extreme individualist, and roundly rejects anything that might render her the same as other people. That includes store-bought objects. I told her that there’s surely somewhere around Melbourne that does marine fabrication, but she was having none of it.

Admittedly, I admire that she knows what she wants and goes after it with all guns blazing. What I don’t relate to is not taking a moment to test the waters; I like to know for sure that I want something before I pursue it, and that comes from experience. She doesn’t seem to have any issue with skipping that step, though, and it tends to work out for her somehow. I mean, she’s never been fickle. The most interesting part about all my mother’s activities is that she almost always keeps them in rotation. She’s not one for starting something and not seeing it through to its logical conclusion.