What I've Learned and What I Wish

With the ghost of bad decision past coming back to haunt me and Mr. Daddy in the last day or two, I finally figured out what I would write about for the meme that Colleen at Wine Please tagged me for ages ago. (Sorry it's taken me so long, Colleen, but you have two kids too so I'm figuring you're willing to cut me a little slack).

Without going into a lot -- okay ANY -- of the details of our bad decision or its repercussions what I've learned is this: When you make a decision and it turns out to be a bad one, you cannot beat yourself up about it forever. A little while, okay. But then let it go. This has been a hard one to learn. You make the best decision you can at the time with the information that you have at the time. Sometimes things happen that are beyond your control that send the train of your life off the track (Hurricane Katrina, anyone?). Sometimes it might be a choice you willingly make that makes everything go kerfluey. But done is done. To my knowledge, no one has yet invented a time machine so that I could go back and make a different decision. So, I have two choices. I can sit and wallow in my worry, my anxiety, my I WISH WE HAD NEVER DONE THAT. Or I can go forward and learn from the decisions I've made in the past. The wallow, the anxiety, the wishing does nothing but give me more gray hair. And trust me, I don't need that. And who's to say that if we hadn't made that decision that our lives would be so perfect? I don't have a crystal ball either, to see that alternate reality. Who knows what would have happened?

The tagline on Mir's (of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda fame) blog is a quote from Arthur Miller -- "Maybe all we can hope to do is to end up with the right regrets." I'm not sure that this "ghost" that's coming back to haunt me right now is a "right regret," but that one decision did lead to a myriad of other events in my life that have been good. Either way, all of these decisions have made me who I am today and right now I wouldn't change THAT for anything.

What do I wish? What DO I wish? Wish is not the right word for me. It implies too much wistfulness. I mean, I wish I could win the lottery. I wish it would rain. I would rather ask what I HOPE FOR. I hope that I can raise my children to be forward looking, not dwelling on the past, on their mistakes. I hope that I will raise them to be "glass half full" people when they need to be. I hope that THEY will be a positive influence on other people.

That is what I've learned. That is what I hope.