I have so many things to write but I just woke from a floaty Sunday nap remembering something I haven’t thought of in years.
The memory is from back when my Mom Eve was still my Aunt Eve.
During this time, Eve was still married to her first husband and I had come to stay for the night at her house. I was maybe four years old and was visiting from Kansas City staying with my grandparents on Chicago’s far South Side. Everyone was taking turns caring for me to give my mother April a break. April and my father had recently separated and her mysterious illness was just about to be diagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis. It had been a grueling and trying time with everyone struggling to figure what to do for me while my mother was worsening with strange and complicated symptoms many states away.
Aunt Eve was the most fun I had ever had. She was beautiful and funny with no kids of her own, and she loved me mightily. All day felt like play with her back in those days. She delighted in me and was so creative and energetic that we picked strawberries all morning, made a shortcake for lunch, put our hair in curlers after we splashed in the kiddy pool by the late afternoon and ate dinner playing go-fish. She was the best sort of adult – indulgent but not lax. I wasn’t over sugared or put to bed late, in fact bath and night-time wind down were the most fun of all because she made pink bubbles overflow in the bathtub and read soothing stories to get me into bed before a less thoughtful adult would have managed to do so.
This particular night though, I wasn’t having it.
As she re-told it to me every few years, this night I sobbed harder and harder until I was gasping between hiccups saying:
“I. Want. My. Momma.”
The story goes that after consoling me for a long time, she thought I was soothed. Then, I appeared at the top of the stairs once again, just outside the guest bedroom, “in my little bunny nightgown” (that she had probably sewn!) is how she could still see me years later. Her husband Mac was getting angry because of the constant interruptions to his Saturday night so he told her: “She’ll be fine! Let her cry it out! Come back downstairs and leave her.”
Eve reluctantly told me to go back to bed and then listened to me weep while she sat back down in the rec room a flight below. She was so angry at herself years and years later saying:
“Why didn’t I tell him to screw off?? You were without your mom and it was so pitiful. All you wanted was someone to reassure you…I didn’t even stay married to that asshole!”
I woke slowly today, remembering how tender this was for her, even decades later.
I floated towards clearer consciousness thinking:
“How do we avoid doing all the things that we regret for the rest of our lives?”
The more my thoughts reached the surface of waking the answer that came was: “We don’t.”
This woke me up fully.
We don’t avoid making mistakes we regret, I thought. We just don’t.
When Eve became my mom years later she struggled mightily to parent me and her own son.
She was often fully consumed by regrets.
She regretted both of her marriages, especially the next one after Mac. It seemed that there were parts of the mechanism of regret woven into how she functioned. I watched that regret fueled existence – and I can say it is like watching someone in a form of survival/function-forward mode, just getting through. Honestly, it most often felt more like just FORWARD, FORWARD instead of the function part as a client of mine once insightfully identified for himself.
What I know now is that Eve powerfully taught me so much by re-telling that simple story. It was important to know how much she cared and in the end, I am certain it has informed my own adulthood and parenting in very important ways.
What I think she taught me was that one of the biggest things we can do about regret is stop believing we can avoid it.
What we can do is examine the regret stories that go through our heads – how they happened, why they happened, what we can learn to do differently because you think differently now that certain things have happened and you are looking at them, not endlessly regretting them.
I think it is powerful beyond measure to speak honestly about those regrets and demonstrate how to live with the determination to not be consumed by the fear of future ones.
I know that my mom Eve’s regret taught me so much about vulnerability and truth. How it is so completely possible that the very thing that has happened, that causes such shame and regret, when said out loud, is more powerful than avoiding the whole thing that caused the regret to begin with.
What I also know is that we often create regret because we tell ourselves the story that we are the whole of a problem – that way we can soothe ourselves into thinking we are the one who can also fix it all. We take it all on in an attempt to have some sort of control. Ultimate responsibility equals some sense of power, even if it causes deeply painful feelings of shame and regret.
My kids have heard me tell many stories of my own regrets. My hope is that they are both bolstered by this, as I was, and have learned by my willingness to both honestly convey something AND look at the learning available from the scenario that was painful.
To regret is to live as a human – but to demonstrate the learning available is life changing, for everyone.
“When we know better we do better.” as Maya Angelo said so beautifully.
What if we aren’t supposed to avoid mistakes?
What if we are only supposed to pass on lessons we learn with great love and truth?
What would it be like to live in a world where we learn for ourselves first, come to a healing acceptance, and then are available to teach others from our knowing now that it is no longer unspeakable or unforgiven shameful regrets?
This photo! From the right: My Grandmother June, my Grandfather Jug, me at age 8, Aunt Eve and Mac who she cut the hell out of the photo!