"I thought we screwed you up so bad this day would never come."

Nora Bing's view on motherhood.

She'd always known, really, that she was a terrible mother. Mediocre, but popular writer? Yes. Really too old to be wearing a dress like that? Unfortunately. Fantastic lover? Most definitely, but she really had no aptitude for motherhood.

It started with the divorce, and the months leading up to the divorce. Sure, plenty of parents got divorced and their kids turned out no more damaged than anybody else, but their mistake had been to pay more attention to their twisted power games than their son. Chandler got caught in the middle and Chandler was the one most damaged and the only one who was innocent.

In fact, her first mistake had been getting knocked up in the first place. Getting a rushed marriage to Charles, because her parents had been the traditional sort. Perhaps she should have given Chandler up for adoption, or something because she knew there was no way she could've raised Chandler on her own, but at the time her and Charles really thought they could make it. They really believed they had been in love. And if they hadn't, their parents would have cut them off.

And so Chandler had grown up a sarcastic, Thanksgiving hating, commitmentphobe and deep down she knew it was because they had been terrible parents. In fact, it was one of the few things that she and Charles agreed on these days, the fact that they had screwed up their only son.

She tried, she really tried, she just didn't know how. She'd ring him, only to be told he was at work, or just busy. The times he did talk to her were worse because then she realised how little she actually knew Chandler. He'd mention his friends, or his roommate, or a girl, or lack of girls and she would long to be part of that life, but faced the crushing truth that he would be embarrassed to have her there. She could see why, she wasn't exactly the sort of mother a son could be proud of; a 'overly friendly' writer of trashy novels, but she couldn't change who she was any more than he could.

The wedding invitation came as something of a shock, not least because she hadn't been aware that he had a serious girlfriend (and wasn't Monica the name of one of his friends?) but she allowed herself to hope that this meant she wasn't a complete failure as a mother.

She knew that she was no advert for marriage, but watching Chandler and Monica standing in front of their best friend, looking for all the world as if nothing existed but each other she felt sure that it would last forever. Whether that meant she was redeemed as a mother or not, she was glad, and she knew that Charles felt the same way. She shifted her hand slightly and touched his and they watched their son get married.