I started work on this sculpture when Robin’s mother died, in 2011. I’d held her, my mother-in-law Rodica, at a comfortable distance for many years, until I eventually came to realise that her constancy and her affection for me would endure whether or not it was reciprocated, because I loved her son.

Rodica’s first plan for Robin and I, when we got married, was to subdivide their Pymble property so we could build a house in their backyard, and move in. I totally freaked, and scarpered back, a secure number of emotional miles from what I perceived to be suffocating Jewish familial enmeshment. I was having none of it.

But after tenderising for the first ten years in Rodica’s persistent warmth and welcome, I succumbed.

If she ever complained to anyone about having to cook vegetarian family dinners on account of the lukewarm daughter in law, (she being a Romanian carnivore), I never heard a word. I started to peer out from my tidy cocoon of assumptions. I couldn’t fathom her lack of resentment towards me. No martyrdom either. So I fell head over heels in fondness with her. Deep fondness.

I officially declared her to be my “mother-in-love” in my mother’s day card for her in 2001. It wasn’t just words; it felt like an offering.

This was momentous for Rodica. She had secured her place as Beloved in my tribe, and subsequently never tired of showing her mothers day card to her friends as proof-of-entry to my heart. And throughout the ten years remaining of her life, we basked, almost smugly, in the fact of each other.

For instance, she would take delight in exclaiming to me that, being mother and daughter-in-law, we were supposed to hate each other.

Two glasses started appearing on her kitchen bench when we’d arrive for a dinner. They sat expectantly, waiting for the gin & tonic she and I would share before sitting at the table. Every time I’d arrive and see those two little glasses set out, I’d feel moved. They were a pronouncement of our special bond, and the toast that would celebrate it. My sweet little mother-in-love, now breaking my heart without even trying.

In the first year after her death I moved slowly through a morass of disbelief and grief. She’d left so suddenly, so unannounced. I’d had in mind to party with her after Yaramin, our daughter, finished high school. She’d had plans to dance at Yaramin’s wedding.

I miss her so very much. All those years of rocking up at Robin’s parents’ for dinner, and being greeted with Rodica’s plaintive “I MISSED you!” have coalesced in my belly into a sense of her indomitable warmth and welcome. The dinners that initially presented a dreaded familial obligation eventually transformed, for me, into a ritual of familial homecoming where I never doubted I was wanted.

I remember the very night it turned for me. We were there for dinner, and I had left the table, tired from a long day. I lay myself down on the couch just to rest my eyes, and fell asleep to the cosy sounds of dessert and gossip. On the way home, Robin said, “Hey, you fell asleep on the couch! You must be feeling safe there now.”

She won me; she so utterly won me. My little mother-in-love, I’m sorry it took me so long.

This sculpture began as an expression of pain, quite hunched and bowed. Over months, her form unfurled into a meditative posture; a bit Madonna-like, a bit angel-like, a bit monk-like.

By completion, her form had evolved to express the feelings that my relationship with Rodica left me with; gratitude, tenderness, sorrow, respect, humility, mothered. I named the sculpture ‘Grace’, because the crafting of her brought me equanimity.

And I think Grace does bring equanimity. We seek it, we long for it, we pray for it. We meditate for equanimity, but if and when it settles in our heart, it is by Grace.

‘Grace’ has found a home in an exquisite, Japanese-style courtyard garden, and she holds an apophyllite crystal in the well of her sleeves.