Achievements and Regrets

Let me first establish that my mother is a very strong and brilliant person, and I love her dearly (though I have never been able to vocalize that fact without crying). She certainly has her flaws, mainly with impatience, anger, and unwillingness to put up with temporary emotional indulgence. However, she is still my mother, and regardless of what she says or does, I will never want her to be anything other than that, and bear her no ill-will.

That said, she recently put me in a position which I am not sure any child deserves to be in...namely, the unspeaking audience of a confession which can be nothing but awkward and upsetting for me.

My mother has gone to great lengths to do things for me, and I am unbelievably grateful for how much she has done to raise me well and get me what I needed. She holds 3 degrees--a bachelor's, master's, AND Ph.D., all in English. However, her student teaching was very brief, because as far as I know, she never wanted to teach. She married my father as a graduate student and for 12 years they established a life together before they ever had my sister, and then I was born 4 years later. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for a good deal of my life, and only in the past several years has she taken up substitute teaching and then work as a tax specialist at H&R Block. I've never complained through any of this, as I think it has been nice to have a very accessible parent who was available when I needed her and not ever stressed about some kind of office deal or whatnot.

But... the other day as she drove me home from where the bus drops me off, she just kind of stopped talking and was silent for a while. Then she burst out about how she has three advanced degrees, and all this intellectual potential, and she has been spending her time raising daughters, fixing up houses, and finding the best prices for things like carrots and cat food. She talked about how there was so much that she gave up because of me and my sister, and how tired she gets of all the little things. ....So what am I to do with all this? There was nothing I could say--what could I have said?
"Sorry I ruined your life, Mom. It's a little hard to stop existing at this point."
"What did I have to do with any of that? "
"Why are you telling me? What do you want me to DO about it?"

Exactly. There is nothing I can do about the dreams my mother abandoned to become a stay-at-home mom. I see this kind of regret from people every day--from my bus drivers who are mind-numbingly bored with life, to my teachers who see their hopes dying a little more each day that they have to deal with irritating teenagers, to my own mother. And all I have to say is.....WAKE UP! This is my message to the world...

Find something in your dreams that you can achieve, and then actually DO it! How much time can you waste doing something you hate? FIND A WAY. Write the novel. Find the time and money to make the trip to Rome, or Finland, or China, and then GO. Sing your heart out to someone, somewhere. Just stop letting all your little dreams fester and die in your own heart and regretting everything you've never done! Life is tenuous, at best....at any moment, you could die. Everyone knows this, but how many of them actually practice it in their lives? If you know that you'd regret not doing something if you died in a year's time, find a way and DO it, and grow and live and prosper from it. Sometime in the next few months, I'm going to find a way to tell my boyfriend that I love him and also confess my love to a classmate whom I've secretly loved almost since the day I met him, but in a very platonic way. (Yes, you can love two people at once; don't knock it until it has happened to you.) If you don't feel like you're really living....DEFINE what you think is "living" and then LIVE it! Achieve the things you want and can achieve! Don't let yourself get sucked into the cycle of "if only I could have done this" and "I've always wanted to do that". That's almost all that the old people in nursing homes talk about, what they didn't achieve. Don't be one of them. My mother already is. But you don't have to be.