Regrets? I’ve Had A Few

 

Events of the times are shutting me down.  For nearly three years now I have been spilling my story like a dental patient on nitrous oxide.  My not-so-easy childhood, my adventures as an adolescent and a young adult, my heartbreaks and heartaches.  I have tried to describe the most satisfying element, motherhood without creating toothaches and nausea for my readers.

I’ve bared my soul and gone where very few of you would dream of going. My writing, when it is applied to my memoirs, has been described as raw, brave, disturbing, authentic, disarming, and foolish.  But it is my story.  It is who I am.

The process of blogging my life has been enlightening and cathartic.  I have sorted through those things for which I blamed myself when, in fact, they were not within my power to control.  I’ve opened wounds I didn’t know were there and closed the ones I had refused to even acknowledge – until I started writing.

I’m not sure exactly what is happening to me now, but it feels as if I’ve said everything I have to say about myself and my life.  The rest has yet to happen.  It is rather sobering to think an entire life to date can be examined and documented in so short a time. 

Amid the technical frustrations provided by my blogging site of choice, I find myself disinterested in writing, unable to concentrate on the words of my blogging community and almost devoid of any creative ideas.  There are other places to blog, you say?  Yes, I know.  I have two of them. 

I believe I have succumb to sensory overload.  Too much information, not enough time to really process it, and a sense of unfamiliar helplessness have flooded my muse’s engine. I sit and play mindless computer games to pass the time while I busy my mind with worry about the world, the country, the state, the city, my neighborhood and, of course, my child.

Looking forward, something that has always propelled me through my eventful life, now only foretells more struggle, more pain, more worry.  And so I look back.

No Regrets

These are the things I’ve done in life that I will never regret, no matter how far off the rails the things around me skid:

• Being born
• Embracing education and owning my intelligence
• Staying my course, albeit with more than a few detours
• Having a son
• Nurturing seven dogs to the point of spoiling them rotten
• Rejecting the stifling, repressive and controlling tenets of not only my birth religion, but all religions
• Working hard enough to achieve what I though were relevant and honorable goals
• Taking care of the one and only body I will ever have
• Quitting smoking at age 28 and never, ever returning to the habit
• Rejecting alcohol and drugs as a means to escape reality

Regrets

These are the things it took me all my years to learn.  How I wish I could have come equipped at birth with this knowledge :

• Declining my admission to the University of Pennsylvania graduate school of psychology
• Marrying too young and too soon after meeting the groom
• Buying into the myth of the American Dream
• Equating success with acquisition of things and titles
• Suppressing my true feelings out of fear of losing things and titles
• Spending too freely and saving too sparingly
• Not having more children
• Wasting my time trying to control everything and everyone around me

I once believed, like the title of an old song, the best is yet to come.  Now, I just don’t know.  Oh, I will expound on the buffoonery of our esteemed politicians and commiserate with my writing friends over the silliness of humankind.  Something has already happened while I was writing this post that will probably spawn another post for the right-leaning readers to throw up all over.  It’s what I do,   But somewhere along the way, my heart stopped participating.