QotD: Time for Change

If you could go back and change one thing you've done in your life, what would it be?
Submitted by Devinoid.

What is with these questions?  They're big on the deaths and regrets lately.  I've never understood this particular type of question.  If I changed something I had done in my life--anything--I would be a different person than I am today, in a different place.  Why would I want that?  I like who I am, I have a fantastic marriage, great friends, a lovely extended family, my own house with two unteachable hounds living in the backyard, a good relationship with my parents, and a son who is a really terrific person whom I enjoy spending time with.  So, if I went back and changed something that I've done, any choice I've made, I wouldn't be here now.  Maybe the alternate ending in that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure would be nice, too, but I like this one.  Besides, you never know when you're going to end up in the dungeon of some evil lord.

I do, however, often wish that my dad had lived long enough to meet his grandson.  Nothing would have made my father happier--or it might be better to say that meeting him would have been the only real happiness in my dad's life, since he felt he fucked things up with me pretty badly, and he would have had a second chance with his grandson.  And my son would have loved my dad's singing and bizarre sense of humor.  I sing a lot of crazy songs to my son, but I can't remember the words to "One-Eyed Flying Purple People-Eater" which my dad used to sing to me all the time.  My stepdad is a fantastic grandpa, too, absolutely, but my son and my father would have really hit it off.  Admittedly, I kind of all around wish my dad hadn't died, but I never wished so more than when I had my baby.

But, see, there again.  It is possible that if my first husband had not been a completely self-absorbed prick when my dad died and we went back for the funeral and everything, I might not have divorced him when I did (oh, it would have happened someday, but to be a self-absorbed prick at the funeral of your wife's father is just unacceptable and kind of pushed me over the edge)--and if I hadn't divorced him when I did, I wouldn't have flown off to Japan just when I did, and I wouldn't have been in that street in Numazu that sunny day in March, and I wouldn't have met the T and had this gorgeous son...

I'm going to stop short of saying something cloying like "everything happens for a reason," but you can't go back and change anything.  The bad choices and mistakes had just as much influence over where I ended up, so we have to leave them in there to get here. 

Or, as Rascal Flatts says, "God bless the broken road that led me straight to you."  Yick.