Wrong Place Wrong Time

by Gillian McAllister

She’d thought motherhood was so boring at the time, so unrewarding, the hours and hours dedicated to the same tasks in a variety of orders. But it wasn’t, she now knows; to say so is like saying breathing is boring.

His hand is her anchor, a woman alone, out at sea.

And, just like that, a friendship was born, out of tragedy and humour, as they often are.

They are here, tonight, together, even if they might part again tomorrow, like two passengers on two trains going in opposite directions.

‘This isn’t time travel, or science or maths. Isn’t this just – you have the knowledge – and the love – to stop a crime?’

She’d wanted to sleep in the same room as Todd, for him to hear her breathing, she’d wanted to breastfeed, she’d wanted, wanted, wanted to do it perfectly, and maybe that was compensation for what she should have felt but didn’t.

Building his own family unit again, from the rubble of his upbringing. If those you’ve left behind don’t stack up, create new people, in front of you.

Love them, just love them, and never go forwards into the darkness and lies that await them, remaining here in blissful ignorance.

But knowing the future is worse than not knowing. Isn’t it?

The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.

The way families sometimes bear resemblances that aren’t obvious. Bone structure, the shape of their foreheads, the way they stand: the way they seem to hold potential in their bodies, like runners on the starting blocks.

A sad, soft feeling came over him, like he had swallowed a hot and melancholic drink.

‘Another person just sort of makes life feel official, doesn’t it? Even if we just have beans on toast.’ Jen knows exactly what he means.

They, mother and son, are a zip, slowly separating as the years rush by.

‘You’re growing,’ she says, slipping seamlessly back into the role of the mother of a younger child. It’s innate, she was always told. It lived within her. Only she had never thought it had. It had taken her so long to adjust. The birth had been such a mess, the baby years so fraught, so busy Jen felt like she was in a vortex, always something to be doing. The clichés were all true: cups of undrunk tea left dotted around the house, friends neglected, career bodged.

Jen buried it. The shame of it, of not falling head over heels for her baby, who arrived in her life like a detonated grenade. She lived alongside it, that inadequacy, got used to it. But then, years later, she still felt the shame; but she also felt the love, too.

The love, true love, it should have eclipsed the shame, but there is so much judgement involved in parenthood that it never did. The shame is so easy to access, at the school gates, at the doctor’s, on

She had seen it in candid photographs sometimes, but she only recognized it truly when he did it; her reflection.

Kelly has been a natural father. Kelly is a natural everything, never plagued by a surplus of thoughts, by resentment, by guilt. He loved the baby they made, and that was that.

All 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.

No child can be loved too much.

‘Sometimes,’ he says gently, when she’s finished, ‘the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?’ He rubs at his beard. ‘If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out …’

Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small.

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.’

Like with most things in parenthood, he wanted support, to be understood, rather than for her to take over.

Jen is disappointed that irritation flares up so easily on just a single day with him.

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.

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