“Woulda,
Coulda, Shoulda”
Sinatra sang, “Regrets, I’ve had a few.
But then again, too few to mention.” What bullshit! We all have regrets, some
decidedly more than others. He may not care to mention them, but I guarantee that
there were plenty. Now that I have reached a certain age, I can look back over
my youth and see, with absolute clarity, that I was an idiot. I made some very
bad decisions. Some were immediately obvious. A horribly short haircut I got at
age 14 comes to mind. It was not pretty. Sorry to be cliché, but it must be said. It
seemed like a good idea at the time.
It is difficult to narrow down my list of
“youthful mistakes”. My first marriage ranks high on the list of monumental
errors in judgement. I was a naive twenty-year-old. Why didn’t someone stop me?
I was content with living together, but it was expected that he would make an
honest woman of me. Once there was talk of a wedding, my twenty-year-old brain
went into overdrive. (Dresses and flowers, oh my.) Hind-sight being 20/20 and all that, I now
realize that if we’d lived together a bit longer than three months before
getting married, I would have kicked him to the curb. It would have saved me a
lot of heartache. (Like Granny used to say,”woulda, coulda, shoulda, too late
for excuses now.”)
2
That was definitely not the only blunder
of my youth. One college semester I had two male roommates. They were
unreliable, to say the least. One ran up a ridiculous phone bill making
long-distance calls to
his girlfriend. (This was before everyone had a cell phone and back when long
distance charges were a thing.) The other ate everything in the house. If I
bought food, it was gone the next day. The guy was a bottomless pit who never
bought groceries. Looking back, I see that semester going much better if I’d
lived alone.
Fear caused one great lapse in judgment.
My senior year of college, I was on track to law school. I had the grades,
finishing in the top ten percent of my graduating class. I scored well on the
LSAT and was accepted by my school of choice. Unfortunately, rising student
debt loomed on my horizon. I was paralyzed with dread of more financial
liability. Instead of pushing forward to hit the books at law school, I folded.
I took my Bachelor degree and moved to a tiny town where my first job was
waitressing for less than my student jobs paid. It may have taken many years to
pay off law school debt but it took many years to pay off the regular student
debt working at low wage jobs. I might have had a career in law instead of a
career in retail management.
The questionable decisions of my youth
were numerous. Some less tragic than others. Bad haircuts grow out. Bad
marriages leave scars. Lost opportunities rarely come back around.
I suppose that I’m an optimist. Looking
back through wiser eyes I see the benefits of a few of those foolish decisions.
The first marriage was traumatizing. However, I recovered and remarried. I
appreciate my wonderful husband all the more for the experience.
3
The unreliable guys stepped up and took
care of me when I suffered from a brown recluse bite. They waited on me hand
and foot for three days and helped me obtain crutches so that I could go to
class. Those terrible male roommates still keep in touch over 25 years later.
Skipping law school was foolish and
short-sighted. However, who can say if having a prestigious career working for myself
would have made me happy? And I am happy. I prefer not to dwell. Granny was
right. It is too late for excuses now.
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