Regret

Asking teenagers to write about what they regret will not elicit much depth. It is not, as you might imagine, because they have not lived long enough to have gathered any regrets. They have. However, they do not recognize them yet. When you are young, everything seems like a worthwhile endeavor.  Studying hard to gain acceptance to a good college is obviously a wise choice. However, staying up all night and skinny dipping in the lake with your friends while imbibing illegal substances can also be an excellent decision in the mind of a teen.

After all, they need to make memories. Someday they will be middle-aged, worrying about interest rates, cholesterol levels, and their own irresponsible teens, so now is the time to embrace everything.

My younger sister once confessed that she and her best friend walked on the not-very-frozen ice of our pool one winter because they wanted to "make a memory." I admonished, "You're lucky you didn't make the memory of your best friend drowning at your slumber party!"

Naturally, this was not a consideration before they skated across the dangerous ice. Skating on thin ice is the preferred activity of many a teen, and if you honestly recall your own high school years, you were either skating all the time, going for an occasional skate, or wishing you had the nerve for such daring-do. I fall solidly into that final category. I never even bothered to put on skates.

At forty-eight years old, I see my regrets more clearly than my students or younger self ever could.
Despite rapidly deteriorating eyesight where I need to slide the novel closer and further away until the words swim up clearly, my vision grows ever clearer. I see my goals, relationships, and purpose with growing clarity. Regrets exist far back into my childhood--choices I made that I wish I had not, or rather, choices I did not make that I wish I had.

In the brief six months when I broke up with my high school boyfriend, I regret inaction. I found myself dancing to Human League's "I'm Only Human" in a dark gymnasium on Homecoming night.  My ex-boyfriend was three hours away, and I wish, even now, I had kissed the boy I was dancing with that night. I had a secret crush for years, but with the nervous contemplation that marked too many moments missed, I chose inaction.  I chose thinking over feeling. I also chose to return to the aforementioned ex a few months later.

The missed-kiss regret was tiny, like the shadow of a candle flame on a wall. The return to the boyfriend was a shadow that would hover darkly over twenty-eight years of my life, but I would not even see it that way for quite some time.

I regret ignoring the meek voice inside my heart that whispered to leave him so many times. She was whispering

at the panicky moment when he said he would move to Sacramento to be near me.
on the first night at college when he threw up in my friend's dorm room.
on the many nights when he was too drunk or stoned to call me.
on the weekends when I wanted to stay in my own apartment but drove to see him instead.
on that terrible day when a marriage proposal was a fait accompli instead of an ardent declaration of love.

I regret not kissing the boy on the dance floor my senior year,
or when he made Chinese food for me,
or when we giggled uncontrollably at the atonal contemporary music performance we both found absurd.

I regret not getting to know another boy who sang these lines from a country song each time he passed me in the halls at St. Mary's College:

"Amy, whatcha gonna do/ I think I could stay with you/For a while, maybe longer if I do."

I regret not even knowing if it was friendly banter or actual flirting. Because my romantic default has always been timid inaction, I still do not know the difference.

These regrets are not fueled by some misguided notion that either boy would have been more than a flirtation, a momentary distraction. There is no alternative timeline of my life with a Disney soundtrack and a romantic panoramic end shot of the couple melting into the perfect kiss.  However, my inability to embrace desire over constant caution, or to trust my own voice? These traits became the foundation later for a long, lonely marriage.

Why did I stay?
I stayed because I did not go.

I tied myself too young to someone who may not even be psychologically capable of love at all. I bound our two lives together with a cord braided with youth, idealism, and naivete, a cord strengthened by my Catholicism, by my sometimes strangely distant relationships with my family. The commitment was stubbornly blind, so the subsequent compromises just became part of my daily life, so mundane and pervasive I did not recognize them. In those moments, they were necessary sacrifices, resignation, surrendering my sense of self.  Now, they are the regrets that fill my memory.

I accepted I would no longer watch certain television shows because he didn't watch them.
I stopped eating foods he didn't like and started learning to cook the foods he did like.
I avoided cutting my hair because he preferred it long.
I allowed my political beliefs, my essential values, to alter, distort, and eventually change entirely.
I abdicated my voice in too many parenting decisions.
I moved away from the place where I had built a strong career and beautiful friendships because he convinced me it was the right choice.

It was not. The most painful realization about life-altering regrets is that they are only clear in the rear-view mirror.  When a therapist once said to me, "You should lead a support group for survivors of domestic abuse," my stomach lurched. My face flushed, and I wanted to flee the office. I am not a victim of anything. I am a successful, college-educated woman raising five children. I am not the face of domestic abuse; that's some other weak, timid, uneducated woman who is too afraid to stand up for herself.

Except that is not how it works. Despite all of my advantages, despite my public power and confidence, I began to tiptoe and enable, sublimate and rationalize.  Slowly, almost imperceptibly over time, I was lost.

When I made these choices, I was supremely confident they were the right ones for me, for my marriage, for my growing family. I used a million tiny decisions to pave a permanent path away from everything I wanted, away from the woman I longed to be.

I regret allowing myself to be defined by someone else.

This sounds like a trite topic for some talk show where the next segment will address self-care and the importance of date-nights in marriage, but I mean it in the most tangible way possible. I allowed myself to become what he needed me to be, and the transformation was so confident and complete that I believed it all. I became unrecognizable to myself. Those closest to me accepted this new person, even while they mourned the loss of the woman they knew. No one questioned me then.  It would not have mattered anyway. Having placed myself in such careful self-delusion, I did not recognize any changes had taken place.

Self-Delusion and Regret have held hands and skipped through most of my adult life while I waved from somewhere far off, not seeing the damage and life-delayed they created.

It is only now, at that mythical middle of my life, where, like Dante, I find myself "within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost." Only now am I reclaiming the self I lost, the self I gladly and stupidly gave away. I could be permanently paralyzed by my regret, but I am not. Rediscovery is the most exciting, fulfilling, and loving process I have ever experienced.  I am a new creation, and there are memories to be made.  I may go buy some skates.