Regret is not a constant. It comes and goes in pangs.
During deep dive conversations, my dearest of friends often ask, do you regret it?– not being a mother, closing my business, selling the house, dissolving a marriage, giving away my belongings, moving to India, etc. (Now that I think about it, even the not-so-dear ones have a way of getting around to this question as well.)
What a complex residual of longing, regret.
My usual reply sidesteps any true depth: a soft chuckle and ‘it depends on the day‘. Though it’s wholeheartedly true. Some days, for instance, I yearn for motherhood. To have a house that feels alive with youthful, chaotic energy. To have ritual like bedtime and bus-time and birthday parties and graduations. But other days, I’m brimming with gratitude for this particular path where I rarely feel tethered to the obligation of stability. I’m my own witching stick, scrying for the direction of each new day. I’m free to meander.
But there are a few forks in the road that haunt my memory more regularly than others. The pang that strikes most is not getting back into school for an MFA. I’d been accepted into a program, pulling out at the last minute due to a variety of circumstances. And then a year later, I was one of only two acceptances at another university, but it came at the exact moment my marriage was ending and fate seemed to say yet again, not now.
But this is life and that is how it goes for all of us. Some things work out. Others don’t. My days aren’t weighted by it, but when this one regret gets pressed, it still blooms purple like an aching bruise. And so a few tears fell recently when I pulled up the statistical reports for my website. Among the usual inflow from Google, Facebook, etc., I noticed a link directing to my site from the school where I first planned to get my MFA.
Those slender tears emerged from a place of regret for that life I didn’t get to live. But they also came with a wave of relief…or validation. Perhaps I never got to sit in that classroom or get that degree I yearned for for so long. But now there are students at that school who are sharing and learning about my work. I created something from this life worth folding into a lesson plan.
And while that isn’t a new phenomenon for me, it was this particular reference from this particular school that struck me with the recognition: I never actually veered off course. I only found another way forward.
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