Rosemary McLeod: I've become my mum

All women become like their mothers, the great Oscar Wilde observed. Well, I've become like mine in a way I never anticipated, and which I find deeply embarrassing. I've become a weeper.

I was always too cool for this, standing proudly to one side among the weepers of the world as they went for it. Picture my squirming embarrassment, then, long years ago while watching with my mother that sugary film, Pollyanna, starring an insufferably cute young Hayley Mills. Hated the book, loathed both the film and her. It culminated, from memory, in Mills singing some stirring American anthem, draped in the American flag.

Ghastly doesn't do the sentimental ick justice as a description. I turned to my mother. To my horror, tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was at it again.

My mother would weep over old-fashioned poetry, "Mary go and call the cattle home" always set her off; over heroic dogs in Victorian children's books; at anxiety over her mother's possible demise; at the memory of her disrupted marriage; and probably at kittens in baskets, though she could also cold-heartedly drown them in the creek. Naturally, as we all do, she wept in self-pity from time to time. Oddly enough, music never did it for her, which is where we differ.

This year's YouTube footage of a flash mob somewhere in America singing the Hallelujah Chorus to unsuspecting shoppers was instant mush to me. So was the footage of Susan Boyle bursting into I Dreamed a Dream to win over the cynical, eye-rolling judges on Britain's Got Talent, who appeared to have prejudged her on her appearance. And yes, snaggle-toothed Paul Potts, the mobile phone salesman, did the same to me with his Nessun Dorma.

Maybe they had that effect, in part, because they were so very homely to look at; you can tire of the endless procession of plastic popular singers with perfect noses and teeth, looking like wind-up tweenage girls' boy-toy, Justin Bieber. Maybe, too, it was their complete lack of cynicism. In any case they broke through mine, to remind me that human beings, however odd their exterior, can contain within them something sublime; that you can't give up on people as I was at times ready to do when I was young, and the world often seemed to be an unfriendly place.

Cynicism is an easy position to default to. You'll never be disappointed: bad things happen in the world at every tick of the clock, among them the vicious attack on a 5-year-old girl in Turangi that couldn't help but cast a shadow over Christmas.

The toys, money and messages of goodwill from strangers in a foreign country have apparently been some comfort to her family in their terrible situation. At a time like that you'd need to be reminded that ordinary people everywhere are decent; it's only the exceptional who are capable of such shocking acts, though at times there may seem to be too many of those.

That crime was a dark contrast to the reason for the season, the worshipping of the birth of a baby who would, according to Christian belief, save the world. I wonder how many children in this country shared the big day with adults who were drunk and throwing punches by lunch time, and how many are only dimly aware of the Christmas story anyway. Too bad if they are, I guess; they're at their families' mercy.

As Christmas approached, a mother - who claimed not to be a bad mother, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary - was jailed for inflicting horrific abuse on her young daughter. Her lawyer, in a remarkable display of illogical thinking, blamed her sadistic acts on politicians who'd never met them.

We can't buy into that sort of argument, whatever our political persuasion. There's can be no genuine defence for a person who knowingly shuns responsibility for her own actions, and flings blame at everyone but herself.

The mother's in jail, and I'm glad about that. Let's hope for a better year ahead.