Catch-22

I love to play the, 'What if...?' Game. You know the one I mean, where you think about a choice you made, and go down all the different choices you might have made, and try to figure out how much your life might have changed as a result. I prefer doing it with fictional characters when I feel they've had too rough a time of it. In the Harry Potter series, for instance, my Severus Snape is saved from Voldemort's snake by an unrequited love spell, the spell-caster turns out to be one of his students who's actually a witch under an anti-aging spell, he learns to love again as a result of her unrequited love shielding him from death, at that point she begins to age normally once more, they marry, have a son, and the son grows up to marry Harry/Ginny's daughter named Lily... so Severus Snape's son marries Lily Potter, in a way allowing Severus to fall in love with Lily all over again, and finally giving him a legitimate way to become part of her family. Awww. And then, if I take the fantasy out a little further, that Lily has a daughter, with the same green Lily eyes, middle name also Lily, and Severus gets to fall in love with Lily for the third and final time, as his favourite grandchild. Super awww.

Now, that only even vaguely matters (or makes any sense to you) if you're a fan of Harry Potter, but you can still appreciate the general idea. I enjoy the game, and my primary purpose in playing it is to make the universe better for someone, albeit someone who doesn't exist.

I was playing it earlier, and I realised--and it may come as a shock that I had to 'realise' this, but bear with me--I realised that you can really only play the What if? Game in your imagination. You can't do it in real life, regardless of how good your intentions might be. You can't go back and undo things that you maybe shouldn't have done in the first place. You can't go back to the root of a problem, and correct things before they get out of hand.

What I mean is, take my parents. Now, they've been divorced for two decades, and that was my mother's attempt to fix something that she maybe shouldn't have done in the first place. The problem being, of course, that she couldn't erase it; my sister and I already existed. Not that my mother would have it any other way. I know, in the way that I know very few things, that she would never want to erase us, no matter the cost (and the cost to my mother was, in so many ways, unfathomably steep). But our existence means that her marriage to my father also continues to exist, on some level. She'll always be reminded of it. She'll always be stumbling upon some memory of that time, that makes her cringe or cry or feel ashamed. Because of us, she will never fully escape the memory of my father. A guy who, as a daddy, is usually above-par in a lot of ways. But as a husband... being married to him nearly destroyed my mother.

And now, she can never truly recover from those memories. She can never stop reliving, in the back of her mind, all the ways in which she and my father hurt each other.

I sympathise. Worse than that, I have reason to empathise, which I know breaks my mother's heart. But just like my mother, there's nothing I can do about it. No matter what I do, I cannot rectify my current situation. And even if I could, I wouldn't. I couldn't, for the same reason my mother wouldn't go back in time and avoid meeting Daddy, even if she could.

Sometimes life is nothing more than the perfect illustration of the phrase 'Catch-22'.