If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

At some point, you have to give up wishing for your parents to be who you wanted them to be and accept them as they are,

That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution together.

She’d never been called a survivor. She turned the word over in her mind: she liked how it sounded, applied to her. It wasn’t victimhood and it wasn’t self-aggrandizing, it was about coping.

I think women spend a lot of time beating themselves up about how they caused or deserved male behavior, and it doesn’t happen anything like the same way in reverse. They get on with doing what they wanna do.”