Postcards From a Stranger (Postcards #1)

by Imogen Clark

It’s funny how your mind rewrites history with the benefit of hindsight.

I’ve never been the kind of woman that weeps openly. You need a true depth of emotion for that kind of display and that’s not something that comes naturally to me. Love is a learned behaviour, I understand. If you’re not shown it then you struggle to demonstrate it to others. I suppose Dad, Michael, maybe even Mum all love me in their own ways but I’m not sure that I’ve absorbed enough to teach me any empathy. Their love feels like it’s a feather on a beach, leaving no imprint of where it has touched the sand.

In years gone by, the lack of a social engagement on what might be considered the biggest night of the year would have sent me into a spiral of fretting about my lack of friends. I’d have convinced myself that everyone was having a much better life than me. Now, though, I know that most of it is hype. So many fabulous-looking lives are fake. People only share the good parts and skip over the bad.

But then, maybe, when times are desperate, people take leaps of faith without really considering how far they are going to have to jump to get to safety.

What makes the perfect mother? This is something that I’ve thought about a lot over the years. I’m certain all mothers do, as they try to process the crushing guilt they feel for the mistakes they believe they have made.

You see, there are so many ways of parenting a child. Who can say which is the right path to take? Every mother has to work this out for herself. She must decide what she thinks is best for her children at any given moment. Yet this decision cannot help but be coloured by so many other factors: her own childhood, her financial position, her partner’s views, her mental fortitude. And what she does may not be what she would choose to do in an ideal world; life is all about compromise, after all. However, the one thing that drives each mother on is a visceral need to do her best for her offspring. She may make mistakes, have regrets, wish for another spin on the merry-go-round, but each mother truly believes that the decisions she makes about her children are the best that she is capable of making at the time that she makes them.

So condemn me if you choose, criticise my decisions, compare how you would have played my hand if it had been yours. But remember, before you rush to judgement, that all mothers are ultimately driven by the same engine, despite their differing makes and models. We are all just doing what we think is best for our children.