Fifty-year-old Tim goes back to the time before he was born with two important questions for the woman who would become his mother.
If you actually wanted to change things—say, to tell your mother lies about your father so she’d marry someone else, so you wouldn’t be born because you hate your life in the present—you wouldn’t be able to do it.

Variants

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  1. “The Messenger” by Bruce McAllister, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2011.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Bruce McAllister