No Regrets

I often say, if asked, that I have few regrets in life, but I do have them.  I regret not taking art classes in high school, not learning to play a musical instrument.  I regret not finishing college when I had both a scholarship and a grant.  I chose instead, to marry the love of my life and move to Alaska.  No real regrets there.

But there are others, subtle ones.  The biggest among them is that I didn’t take much time to write about the mundane and momentous events of my life.  When I learned I was pregnant with my oldest son, I began to write to him in a journal.  My initial thought was to keep this up and give him a completed book at a milestone birthday, maybe 18 or 21.  The book still sits on a shelf among many others, most unread, only half filled with thoughts of his very earliest years.  He turned 30 last month.

I began similar books for each of my other four children--each filled with progressively less words.  My youngest child has one entry, a reflection on her birth, months after it occurred.  She completed her last day of high school today.  Yes, there are the photos, yes there are the mementos and the odd clay figures and faded art.  Certificates and trophies and their own precious collections.

Where are my words, I wonder.  Why, at the end of what sometimes seemed like endless days could I not find the energy to find them, to write them down.  Was sleeping or eating more compelling than reflecting on my life so, so quickly passing?  Certainly I spent considerable mental energy reflecting, analyzing, agonizing of the major and minor details of raising five children, navigating a marriage, maintaining friendships and community, and struggling to keep faith as well.

Maybe there just wasn’t that much to write, I wonder, as I ponder the monumental accomplishment of guiding my kids to adulthood--at least “legal” adulthood.  What words would adequately convey an almost overwhelming sense of sadness for the loss of our childhoods, the concession of our mortality.  Perhaps it is this, this confrontation with the pain that accompanies growth and change that keeps expression at bay.

Still there is an immense joy in sharing the lives of these children which were entrusted to me years ago and remain with me still, and always.  There is tremendous satisfaction in admiring the fruits of my labor, mental, physical, spiritual.  To say they are in some profound way, the physical reflection of a cooperation with and reliance upon the One who created us all, leaves me in awe, leaves me humbled and grateful before and within that One.

So, as a new chapter opens in the saga of my life, I believe it is time to set both memory and present moment dancing in the elusive lilt of language, the wrested wrangle of words, no matter how poignantly or poorly wrought.  It is time to set aside the fear of the power of those words as they come through my consciousness, to yield to whatever agony or delight is reflected as I read them back to myself.

It is time, from this day forward, to live and to write, with no regrets.