If I could turn back time

I am fortunate. There is no one in my life who is so heinous that I would like to see them dead by my hand.

For that, time travel would be necessary and I have a hard time deciding between two deserving persons, so I'll choose the one that committed an actual crime against my mother as opposed to just a father abandoning his children.

Orphaned at 16 months, her mother dying alone in a bathtub, having given birth at home to my mother’s younger brother, bleeding to death, and then, subsquently, her father leaving my mother and her siblings with different relatives, never to be seen again, was devastating for my mother.

But, his actions were not illegal.

Raping an innocent girl, that's illegal. As well as traumatizing. That single, horrifying, event destroyed her ability to have a healthy, warm, intimate relationship ever again in her entire life. She tried. She married my dad. But she couldn't bear the marriage bed. She never said anything against him, but she had nothing good to say about men in general. The lesson for me from her was always they cannot be trusted. Ever.

I was nearly fifty when her reaction to something made me ask if she had been raped when she was young. She burst into tears. She had never told anyone. Suddenly her life, who and how she was, made sense to me.

So, I would go back in time and I would kill that man before he saw my mom. Who knows, perhaps eliminating that one shattering event would have allowed her to have a better relationship with my dad and then perhaps he wouldn't have drowned his sorrows and then he might still be here and they could be celebrating their 57th wedding anniversary.

Might as well dream big....