Living With Regret

In recent years I’ve found that one of the things that haunt me the most is regret. I made a lot of poor decisions in my young adulthood. Things I shouldn't have done but did, things I should have been more proactive about but wasn't, putting my faith in the wrong people, and walking away from what would have been my ideal life.

It just feels like I've never been responsible for making the important choices and decisions in my life. Everyone else did it for me, even if I disagreed with them.....which it feels like I often did. I didn't choose my college major; which is probably why I dropped out after the first semester. I didn't choose to be violated by the student ward Elders Quorum president while my boyfriend was on his mission. However, when the bishop sided with this man and would not remove him from his calling, I DID choose to walk away from the church.....so, maybe I shouldn't be responsible for making my own choices. Because it seems like I may have made the wrong ones.

While I don't for one second regret having my children, I regret the life I've given them. I regret moving a million times in their short lives, never giving them roots, taking them thousands of miles away from their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I regret that I haven't made sure that the church was a cornerstone of our family, that my 10 yr old son still isn't baptized and that my husband and I don't see eye to eye on why he should be. I regret the fact that their father is so much older and unhealthier that he isn't as active with the boys as he should be. I regret not being sealed in the temple. Oh.......so much more many things.

While it won't change anything, it felt kind of good saying this stuff "out loud". Now maybe I can work on my life so that while I may have lived with some regret, I don't have to die with it too.

Frost and Melancholia

There are so many decisions that pass us by almost unnoticed, leaving a lasting impression only because too late we can recognize them for what they were... quietly crucial moments that shape not only where we are, but who we have become.

I dislike poetry.. it's just never appealed to me very much. I'll read the occasional turn of phrase that sticks out because it's exceptionally clever or unexpectedly funny..but for the most poetry leaves me cold.

The one poem that has ever really hit a nerve with me is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". The first time I read it, it just felt true to me... how the smallest choices lead us from one point to another until we're so far from where we began that there's no way we'll ever be able to go back.

Anyway..... enough melancholia. I stumbled across the poem again earlier and wanted to throw it up on here.. so here it is.. Frost's "The Road Not Taken."



Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference