Wrong Place Wrong Time

by Gillian McAllister

but she still misses him in the way that children will always miss their parents’ guiding hands, the way they can hold your problems away from you, if only temporarily.

those you’ve left behind don’t stack up, create new people, in front of you.

the worrying she did about it, gone, into the ether, as soon as it corrected itself. Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.

Time is just a way of us thinking we are free agents. That our actions have cause and effect. That’s what makes us think that time flows in one direction, like a river.’

It isn’t his fault. She knows that she mothered him well enough. She knows because of his eyes. They are lit with love. They are lit with love for her. She deflates right there on the sofa. She tried her best. And, even when she didn’t, the guilt is as much evidence as anything else: she wanted to do her best for him, her baby boy.

The hindsight paradox that this very person here teaches her about in a decade’s time: she thought she knew it would happen, self-blamed. Thought he’d killed because of a poor relationship with her. But he doesn’t. It was an illusion. And so this is the moment, the moment Jen realizes that it isn’t about this. It’s not about Todd’s childhood, at all.

We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.