(No) Regrets Only

February, I used to say, is a gypped month.  It was my birthday month-- the Presidential birthday month-- the home of Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday.  So many expectations for a mere four weeks; anyone who pays monthly rent feels a little resentment. But I was always a little sad when it ended; the probability of childhood snow days nearly disappeared... and the coming of spring brought with it expectations and celebrations that felt premature.  I wanted to hold onto the 'youth' of the year... 

In winter months I traditionally interview prospective freshmen for my alma mater.  Generally I am finished by January, but this year they piled on some stray incomplete applications.  It's becoming a little more awkward as I age; I can't imagine many highschool seniors want to speak to a chronological senior about their future.  My 'class of...' tag betrays me; since Covid I find doing a blind telephone interview has its advantages-- less judgment, fewer visual cues. While much of the process is more or less a formality, I try to engage students in a real conversation-- to sample their insight, curiosity, intelligence.  I actually enjoy most of them, although there are some who are obviously over-prepped, steer the discussion to a sort of script they have maybe written out.  Some even research me on the internet and say things that will resonate with my career or my interests.  This is downright creepy-- a boldface violation of privacy but inevitable in this internet culture.  

At the end of the interview I often ask if they have any questions for me.  Most of these are the kinds of things eager students raise their hands and inquire in class-- canned or generic queries that seem predictably rhetorical.  But this year-- one of these last-minute girls asked me if I had any regrets.  Regrets, I asked her?  You mean pertaining to my education?  My life?  A film strip on high speed played in my head-- ex-boyfriends... should I have gone on tour in 1990?  More children? My blogs and poems are well stocked with my naked mistakes and failures-- past loves, apartments, residences... people.  Do 17-year olds think about regret-- was she reading some introspective novelist who woke her up to the complexities of life? Was she already beating herself up for not having taken AP chemistry or skipping varsity practices?  

At 70 now, I am as old as her grandmother.  Maybe she figured the topic of nostalgia was appropriate.  But the short answer, I explained, was No, I regret nothing; I have valued and loved my life.  She seemed content... although after we hung up I had flashbacks of my own first year at college... whether I had considered the concept of regret in this first year of independence, of responsibility.  My mother had taught me to write formal 'regrets' to invitations I turned down.  I knew the word in that context.  She had notecards with little doves on them;  the word reminded me of a bird. Egret with an extra 'r'?  I also remembered how I was convinced by a series of painted valentines and notes a sophomore boy put into my mailbox.  They were beautiful (there were also birds and flowers painted in)-- they were evidence that he loved me, and I turned away from another and began to love him in return.  Did I ever regret our relationship?  I didn't marry him, I didn't follow the obvious narrative.  But I didn't really regret that. 

Did I regret not taking a course?  Not doing well enough?  Wasting time at college, failing to accomplish one thing or another, quitting ballet, dropping out of choral singing?  Not really.  I tried hard to conjure my college-girl psyche and regret wasn't really any part of that.. nor could I imagine asking such a question of an adult. It seemed vaguely disrespectful, like asking a middle-aged woman if she missed not having children. 

My first year at college I was housed in a suite of women.  One of my roommates had an eating disorder.  I used to wonder what was in her head-- she began meals with healthy salads and finished gorging on stacks of desserts and cookies.  Then the inevitable in-house vomiting.  It was time-consuming and counter-productive. A form of actual, physical regret... and maybe a lesson that you can't really erase your actions-- you can  stick your finger down your throat, but the way in and the way out seemed equally punishing. I wrote a story about her, but it felt sort of invasive and I never published it. She's actually successful, despite all that wasted time.  I wonder if she regretted her nutritional drama.  I avoided the bathroom and eventually moved in with the boy who drew the hearts. No regrets there.  Life went on.

Recently I went to dinner with the younger brother of an old highschool friend and he blurted out during the meal that his whole life was a string of regrets.  It's sort of an unbearable thing to hear-- and how does one respond, except that it is a point of view, a judgment... obviously there were decades of going to work, getting paid, accumulating security.  But maybe not much besides a pension to inspire him in old age.  I also have friends who had many children, who regret not taking time for themselves.  There is now, I always tell them-- this is still life-- going forward.  Don't regret the present and forego the future, I say, but it seems self-righteous and annoying. We have what we have.  There are 'reins' if we can find them.  Some are hidden, some are difficult... but you can steer things.  Or you can regret.

I have another childhood friend who spent most of her life drowning herself in some of kind of family dysfunctional soup.  It existed, I will attest, but you get up and leave the table... you don't eat it over and over, every day, like my bulimic roommate.  I can't imagine what her response might be to the question of regret.  I regret her wasted life; no one was more talented and interesting, but she cooked it away with her incessant self-absorption and acidic resentments. 

Of course I waste a ton of time; maybe a little less because I don't use a cell phone.  These have eaten up disproportionate hours of creativity, I think.  People post their creations constantly but nothing seems to rival the output of say a Shakespeare or Milton or Mozart. And these people did not have tools for recording work... it was tedious and time consuming.  Having just finished a book, with all digital tools, I am a little overwhelmed with the process and marvel at these older artists and writers.  

I've failed, I've missed things and people; I spend way too much time watching films and listening to things...  In the mail today was a formal invitation to participate in some public ceremony-- a sort of stage...  Regrets only, it said.  I will not attend;  I don't really need extra slices of someone's enormous pie, or I may end up like my poor overstuffed roommate.  But it occurred, sending back the reply-- besides this final last attenuated February week, the  never-ending piles of unfinished songs and poetry-- I will not take on the burden of regret.    

Valentine's Day Postmortem

Valentine's Day always provokes a little reminiscence-- some wisdom-seeking, since true love for me has been more of a temporary phenomenon... or an impossible quest, punctuated by death or tragedy.  And things linger... the scent of it, the absolute certainty of what evaded me-- what I gave away or abandoned. 

There were times, of course, those 'pinch-me' moments, when things seemed ultra-perfect... even during marriage, I was happy.  But I always return to a moment in London in the 1980's... where I'd moved to make my young husband equally happy... hearing him, his terrible voice singing in the shower a Smiths song... Stop Me... the lyric which paralyzed me: 'Nothing's changed...I still love you...only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.'  The 'my love' at the end of the line is the chilling blow.  I can remember I was making the bed, that wonderful bed in the Acton Lane flat, where I  had felt consummated, celebrated, wifely.  But suddenly I began to doubt. Whether the song like a curse oozed onto the windscreen of my vision, or like theatre foretold an impending disaster, it was the moment I began to squirm.  

Maybe I looked for cracks in our perfect wedding portrait and our little romantic life, but there they were... not just the seeds of some discontent, but the evidence.  'Only slightly' would perhaps have been forgivable. In the end there was full-on infidelity.  Of course, as many of these rogue lovers and husbands insist, it is you that created some insecurity-- you, your touring and your band-intimacies and gracious audiences.  It set him off to find his own solace-- with the help of alcohol, and friendly divorcees at his office who were more than happy to accommodate his insecurity, his alleged loneliness.  

No one in this world ever wants to accept 'less'.  Whether it's a smaller tip, a briefer kiss, five times a week instead of seven, it is no longer enough.  We are such fragile creatures-- we speculate, we personalize, we suspect. It is evidence we have been demoted.  To be demoted in love is unacceptable.  It is painful and one step away from rejection.

The inverse of love is not hatred, but the absence of love. Indifference.  Elie Wiesel wrote of this-- the pain of neglect, the sense of abandonment; in this culture, to be 'unseen'.  It damages children, pets... deflates egos and hurts people.  

Our culture is fickle and harsh.  Celebrity can be a flash in the pan. It's not easy to be the best selling artist or most sought-after actor... it's a height from which you can only fall... and even these perfect couples-- well, they sometimes break apart.. or one stops loving the other, or finds someone else... it's difficult to go from #1 to #2.  

I've watched my son over the years go in and out of relationships-- doubt himself when it seems things are optimal... cause things to derail, then regret and try to put them back together.  The Prodigal husband-- it's a thing.  A couple I know divorced, remarried and then divorced again.  

Occasionally I dream about my husband, the one who swore it was just a song... who'd also sworn no one would ever love me the way he did, no one had the capacity of love that he had. Similarly I dream about a dog I had years ago-- that I come home and I've neglected him-- he's unfed, emaciated... My psychiatrist friends say dogs are dream-substitutes for our own selves.  But when I dream of my husband, he's not a dog or a substitute-- he's at a bar talking to someone... or he's walking away-- it's the devastating feeling that whatever peak of emotion you both managed to scale, you are on the way down-- it is 'less'--- he is leaving you... and there is nothing quite as difficult.  I've had affairs where you sabotage-- you anticipate and you ruin things, you 'fold' before the game is played out.  It's a kind of cowardice.   I know many single men who claim to love their bachelor status.  It's hard to trust people.  Nothing makes us more vulnerable than love.  We can lose money, lose our home, our job-- but finding your partner with someone else is the deepest wound.  It is a kind of death.  

In New York City where supposedly single people outnumber couples, Valentine's Day is still a looming silliness with which we tend to measure ourselves-- our relationship health, our single-ness, the admission of envy of some of my friends who have no romantic partner and feel diminished, or the ones that discredit and malign the day.  Coming as it does just days after my birthday, it was always sort of a denouement day for me.  I've been to weddings and received heart-shaped guitar picks engraved with the names of couples who went on to despise one another.  

My ex-husband championed the band My Bloody Valentine which debuted about the same time as The Smiths.  Ironically, they broke up, got back together, etc.  Personally, I'm just relieved it's over.  I never really liked the color red...  and while I cut out paper hearts for my friends and co-workers, I'm relieved to have not slightly less but no expectations.  I love those whom I love.  Some of them are still alive.  Things seem to work out.   Or not.