This 2,000 word story was published (under the title Completing the Circle) in the UK magazine My Weekly in January 2012 and is the one referred to in my column, Ideas Store, in the March and April issues of Writers' Forum.  I hope you enjoy it.

Five year old Olivia couldn't see the point of circles. She loved straight lines and Miss Bennett, her teacher, once said Olivia's lines were the straightest she'd ever seen. But Olivia didn't think this was very likely when the lines on the pages of her writing book, not to mention the ones on the zebra crossing outside the school gates, were much straighter than anything she could draw.

Straight lines made squares and triangles. She particularly loved drawing triangles. She'd push her pencil carefully up the steep side, turn a little pointy corner at the top before sliding quickly down the other side. Then came the bit she liked best of all, hurrying straight along the bottom to join up with the starting point.

She loved triangles so much she wished her name started with one instead of a circle. But Miss Bennett said that was impossible. Nobody, she said firmly, had a name that began with a triangle.

So Olivia, being a very practical little girl, decided that, from then on, she would be called Livi. That way, she could write her name very neatly, without having to worry about the silly old circle wandering about all over the place and refusing to join up.

Of course, as Livi grew older, she became very good at drawing circles. In fact, she became very good at almost everything she attempted. She flew through her school and university years with an entire galaxy of gold stars, top marks stars, star firsts and culminating eventually in a PhD in astrophysics. Then she flew into a very smart job as a very smart research scientist where she was given her own lab and a space in the car park with her name, Dr Manning, painted on it.

Then in accordance with the sound scientific hypothesis that says opposites attract, she fell in love with Nick who was not a research scientist but an artist. He made a living teaching art at the local college but his first love (or rather, his first love until he met Livi) was painting. Big swirly canvases, zinging with colour, that left Livi puzzled and dizzy from trying to work out which line went where. And why.

'It doesn't have to mean anything,' Nick would patiently try and explain, as if she was one of his less bright students. 'It can mean whatever you want it to mean.'

Livi frowned. 'But what did it mean to you when you were painting it?' she asked. 'Surely you must know.'

He smiled. 'The only thing I know for sure is that I love you, Livi Manning and I can't live without you. Will you marry me?'

So, of course, she did. Because she knew she loved Nick from the first moment she met him, even though the attraction they felt for each other defied all logic. Nick came from a big, chaotic family who laughed, cried and fought with each other in pretty equal measures. Livi, who valued order and control above everything and was the only child of quiet, bookish parents, found the noisy, quarrelsome, affectionate brood as puzzling as Nick's paintings.

They'd been married for four years when Livi stopped taking the pill. One month later, exactly as planned, she missed her first period and did a test to confirm her pregnancy. Nick was overjoyed, his parents ecstatic and her parents pleased but surprised.

Livi began to read everything she could about pregnancy and the early years of a baby's life with the same absorbed single mindedness she'd applied to her studies.

Their little Tadpole, she was determined, was going to have the best possible start.

So she ate all the right things, avoided all the wrong things and had a healthy, trouble free pregnancy which ended, right on schedule, with a relatively trouble free labour and delivery. It was, in fact, no surprise to her when Tadpole arrived on his due date. After all, hadn't she spent the last nine months, planning that it would be so?

But then, it all started to go wrong. Nowhere, in any of her books, was there anything about what to do with a baby who cries when (a) he's been fed not five minutes ago (b) has had his nappy changed, (c) hasn't got wind and is warm, dry and comfortable.. or he would be if he'd stop working himself up into such a state about nothing.

To make matters worse, he'd stop the minute Nick picked him up, so Livi could only conclude that he was crying because he didn't like her very much. Which brought her to the thing that had been worrying her since the moment he was born.

She was deeply ashamed that not only had she failed to feel that instant stab of love and recognition new parents are supposed to experience but - and this was something she'd admit to no one but herself - she didn't actually like him very much either.

There was no reason for it. He was obviously a very likeable little chap. Nick was completely besotted with him, as were both sets of grandparents and the legions of doting aunts and uncles.

And that made her feel even more guilty. If she'd been a young single mother shut up all day in a dreary high rise flat, wondering how to pay the bills and with only a screaming baby for company, she'd maybe have some excuse for feeling the way she did. But her company had given her a very generous maternity package and she and Nick had moved in to a comfortable family house six months earlier - and the baby had been born right at the beginning of Nick's summer break so she didn't have to cope on her own.

She'd tried to like her little Tadpole - or Harry as she must now remember to call him. She'd read all the books and articles she could lay her hands on. She even wondered for a while whether she might be suffering from Post Natal Depression but the symptoms didn't check out.

Finally, she was forced to conclude that she simply wasn't the maternal type. Parenthood was, for Nick, a natural extension of his family life. There had always been babies around while he was growing up and they'd never be short of babysitters.

Eventually, she got in the habit of standing back as often as she could and letting Nick deal with the baby. Sometimes she'd plead tiredness or a headache, other times she'd pretend she hadn't heard him. She did it, more for the baby's sake than her own, as Nick was so much better at handling him, whereas her clumsy attempts just seemed to upset the poor little scrap. And who could blame him? So she concentrated on the non-contact tasks, like the washing or preparing the bottles of formula (she didn't want to even think about her disastrous attempt at breastfeeding) while Nick did the rest. And, for a while, it worked.

Until the morning Nick went out. Alone.

'Where are you going?' Her voice was edged with panic.

'I'm meeting a few mates from college for lunch. I told you, remember?'

'But I didn't think - I mean, you can't leave me alone with - with the baby. What if he wakes up?'

Nick grinned. 'What if he does? Feed him, change him, burp him. You know the drill.'

'But what then?' Her throat tightened. 'You know what he's like with me. He never settles. It's like he knows -' she stopped.

'Knows what?'

'That I'm rubbish. He cries the minute I pick him up and yet when you do it, he stops immediately.'

Nick put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. 'He's not made of spun glass, sweetheart. You just need to relax around him, that's all. And forget your schedules and stopwatch. Babies don't do schedules.'

'I don't use a stopwatch.' She pulled away from him, her cheeks flushed with anger. 'You make me sound like a complete control freak.'

He sat down beside her, concern written all over his face. 'Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you. I was only teasing. Look, would you prefer I didn't go out? I can phone and cancel. They'll understand. They've all been through the new baby stage.'

'No, you go. The Tadpole - I mean, Harry and I will be fine.'

Brave words, easily spoken. But she didn't feel quite so brave when, just ten minutes after Nick had driven off, Livi heard the faint but unmistakable sounds of stirring through the baby monitor.

The baby was awake - and about to kick off at any moment.

'Approach the baby with confidence,' the book said . 'Speak softly but reassuringly. Support his head when you lift him up.'

She did all that. And the other one hundred and one things to do and not to do in the baby care book of rules.

Was he hungry? No. Too hot? No. Wind? No. Wet? Yes. The scientist in Livi, never far from the surface, tried to compute how one small baby could produce a volume of liquid that was out of all proportion to the volume consumed.

She placed him on the changing table and, closing her ears to his cries, set about replacing the wet nappy with a dry one, a task that would have been infinitely easier had he kept his legs still. She'd finally succeeded in fastening the tapes around his tiny waist when she remembered rule 87(b). She hadn't put the barrier cream on and if he ended up with nappy rash it would be all her fault.

She turned to fetch the cream from the shelf - and as she did so, saw the baby move. She'd left him too close to the edge of the table (rule 34) and, what was worse had left him unattended on the table. (rule 1, big capital letters).

Time froze. Her mind raced ahead, seeing him crash to the floor, maybe fracturing his skull, or breaking one of those tiny stick like legs.

With a speed she hadn't thought she was capable of, she snatched him up in her arms, her heart racing.

Poor little scrap. Poor, poor little scrap to be saddled with such a useless, criminally careless mother. Nick would be horrified if he knew. And Social Services would probably decide she was an unfit mother.

She sat in the chair, her arms cradling him, as she rocked to and fro. 'I'm sorry, baby,' she whimpered. 'I'm so, so sorry.'

Yet when she looked down at him, she realised he wasn't crying but gazing up at her solemnly, like he was weighing her up and - this was the really weird thing - was quite happy with what he saw. Then his tiny mouth puckered and Livi braced herself.

But what she'd feared was going to be a cry, in fact turned out to be a yawn. His eyelids fluttered, then closed. His little body relaxed. He was asleep.

As Livi smiled down at him, she saw that her arms formed a perfect circle around him. Correction: not a perfect circle. In fact, it was a pretty imperfect circle, with irregular bulges and sharp bits. But the important thing was, it was a complete circle.

Harry didn't need a perfect circle to keep him safe - any more than he needed a perfect mother. He just needed one that was good enough and would always be there for him.

She kissed her sleeping son gently on the top of his head. It was as soft and downy as a peach and smelt of baby shampoo. He gave a little whimper and she moved her arms closer to her body, to make him more comfortable within the circle of her arms.

After all these years Livi finally saw the point of circles.

the end