By Summer Crawford
Staff Writer
“In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.”
Author Lisa See is completely right. Each individual makes conscious decisions 365 days a year, every year, until they are no longer with us. These decisions hold the capacity to make or break one’s life, both in the short and long run. It is inevitable for one to walk a thousand steps without faltering a few times, and even when mistakes are made in life and regrets are felt, there is always a second chance.
My second chance came this year.
In the 17 years of my life, there have been countless times, like every other teenager, when I have not done something and have felt the consequences of my decision. I felt regret when I held my tongue and did not say something in an argument, I felt regret when I thought I knew best and would not accept wise words from my parents. But at one point I concluded that instead of beating myself up about what I should have done and wondering “if only,” I started to take on a new mindset. The words “if only” have the psychological power of ruining one’s life, but I was not going to let my life be directed by two little words.
A large part of regret deals with relationships with people we hold dear to us. Whether that relationship be friendly, romantic or family, it is still a bond between two people needing to be cherished. Everything that made me see that relationships, no matter how broken they may seem, can be fixed, was actually my family and cousins.
Last year my aunt was going through one of the worst times in her life, and I did not even know. I did not know until Christmas what was truly going on because my parents and her had wanted to shelter me and all my cousins from the truth: she was getting a divorce after 20 plus years of marriage.
My reaction was devastation, and if mine was that severe, I can not imagine how my three cousins, her sons, felt. Every time I looked at their faces trying to hide their pain behind their male bravado, I could see that the loss of their father’s presence hit them hard. At the beginning, I told myself I would never forgive my uncle for leaving my aunt and her sweet boys. I did not understand how she deserved this, or why those boys, two of whom were in college and left the third one behind in high school, had been deserted at a time when she needed him most.
I held onto so much anger and my heart was bitter just visiting that house. Before this had happened, I had never known how my friends whose parents were divorced felt, or how it had impacted them. Although my aunt was not my mother, and her now ex-husband was only my uncle, this still hit home as if it were my parents who were getting a divorce.
Yes, I should have taken time to understand where both my aunt and uncle were coming from, but I stubbornly took my anger and tucked it into a corner in my heart. My moment of forgiveness was not until this past Easter, when I realized it was not doing any good whatsoever to act like this crazy person who was angry all the time. Sitting with those boys and my aunt and seeing how far they had come made me see that was what important was right now, right here with them. It was not about the past months. It was not about anything that had occurred in the past.
You see, holding onto anger is a dangerous thing, because that kind of negativity can go all the way to break a person completely. Luckily, my family made me realize that in order to keep on living the rest of my life, I would have to put a bandaid on my wound. I kept thinking, “Let. It. Go,” and that is what I did.
This was anything but easy, but mending my relationship with my uncle was for the best. I learned to cherish the relationships with people who were alive and well, just 30 minutes down the road. I was no longer a person who let hatred rule their life. I came to realize that I had to stop and want to live in the current moment, with my family, with my aunt and her sons. As singer Sheryl Crow would say, “it is not having what you want, it is wanting what you have.”
