Tears, flowing onto a pillowcase. A heavy heart aching in a chest. A dark corner of the mind in which no light could shine.
Twilight Velvet, Mother to Shining Armor, and Twilight Sparkle, was one mare whose soul weighed heavy with regrets.
Being a mother to royals seemed to mean- to pretty much every pony who didn’t know her- that she was utterly perfect. To raise two ponies who rose to such incredible heights, it was assumed that she never had any regrets or made any mistakes. That was the complete opposite of the truth. She made more than her share of mistakes. She had an ocean of regrets. What ponies didn’t seem to understand- what they didn’t want to seem to acknowledge- was that she was not some plastic figure with a smiling face and hollow insides. She was a real pony, with real emotions and feelings, and she could feel pain too.
It would be assumed that with who Twilight and Shining grew up to be, that she was a perfect mother and their childhoods were smooth sailing. That was a lie. She made more mistakes than she could count, and their childhoods weren’t smooth either. For a long period of time her husband was working so late and so long at stretches that her children wouldn’t see him for weeks. She had raised them for a while by herself because he was away on business. There had been a strain on her marriage because of that, and She’d thought more than once he would leave her. Her children would ask her when Daddy was coming home, and she could never give an answer. And when she cried, she made sure to hide it from them, because she could not afford to break. Her children needed a strong parent to look up to, and for that time, she was it. Still, some of the things she did from that time carried over to her. Even today, she wore waterproof mascara in case she ever cried, so it wouldn’t stain her face.
She had so many regrets when it came to her children. The should-have’s and would-have’s tended to come to her in the night, before she got to sleep. All those doubts, all those regrets always haunted her in the dead of night. She should have found a way for Twilight to find the positives in making friends earlier- and would have helped her make a book club to make her comfortable and help her meet other fillies. She should have cherished Shining Armor’s innocence more when he was a colt, because his work now tended to wipe the smile she’d treasured away, and she would cherish it even more if she had that chance. Her biggest regret was, when her children were very little, wishing the bad moments away to get to the good.
Hindsight was 20/20. She saw now that she should have treasured those tantrums, staying up all night with her teething babies, those nights where she lost sleep because her babies crawled into bed with her in the morning or woke her up with questions. All of those moments were a part of their childhood. Those moments where she could soothe them and dry their tears, when she could kiss a scraped knee better, when she could hold her babies as they slept soundly against her because they were afraid to sleep alone, they were the best ones. In the heat of the moment, when she was tired or frustrated or upset, it seemed so correct to wish that away. She wished she could tell her past self that it was like expecting a wish from a genie to not have a catch. There was a cost of losing the best moments of their childhood, those moments of innocence that would never come.
If she could go back in time, she’d do so many things differently. She would cherish every moment of children’s foalhood. She’d force herself to stay awake to not miss a moment. She’d stay calmer in those moments of stress and remind herself that someday she would miss it. She would pick her children up as often as they wanted or allowed. Why? Because those were her babies, and they were still little enough to believe she was their world, and the second that they stopped asking her to hold them was they day she would admit to herself that they were growing up and wouldn’t need her the way they once did, and she’d wish that she’d picked them up just one more time.
So much of her time and effort had gone into shaping those little souls she’d once carried inside her into good ponies. She’d spent so long and worked so hard to make sure they knew the value of kindness, loyalty, generosity, laughter, and honesty. She had known that someday she’d have to send them out into the world, with it’s sharp teeth that would eat their innocence alive. She’d held off as long as she could on doing it, but she knew it wasn’t what was best for them. So she’d set her babies free, even though a piece of her had seemed to die inside at the idea. She just wanted to protect them, keep them safe, but she couldn’t do that forever, and it ate at her. It was why her mind was so often plagued by the should’s and would’s of what might have been.
When regret became too much or the mistakes weighed too heavily on her, she would cry. She would cry and cry for what seemed like hours. Typically Night Light would either be sleeping heavily next to her or away on a trip. The times when he was away on trips were when her histrionics came out. She’d shake the bed with her sobs and her shrieks of grief and anger would reverberate off of the walls. The only constant was the stains on her pillow that always appeared.
She cried every day. And it wasn’t all because of her mistakes. She knew her tears would stop when she was able to forgive herself. It was about her loving herself enough to forgive her mistakes, and accepting that she had done the best she could with what she was given. But not unlike her daughter, she was a perfectionist. She couldn’t forgive herself because some of her mistakes were too severe. And so, the tears came.
Twilight Velvet loved her children, and her husband, and her life. But every night, without fail, her pillow would always end up stained.