No Regrets?

This past summer, I read a book called No Regrets. A somewhat autobiographical semi-historical narrative, unexpectedly interrupted at times with poetry-related bits, it wasn’t exactly my cuppa.

Perhaps I’m not used to such a rambling, mish-mash of prose, and poetry that didn’t always appear to be poetry.

Personally, I felt it could have used editing, particularly for grammar, punctuation errors, and run-on sentences that interrupted the flow. I’ll leave the poetry to those more gifted in that art form.

But the theme of the book started me wondering: Can you live a life with no regrets?

I suppose, if you have a Pollyanna outlook, or you’re lucky enough not to commit any egregious mistakes along the way, it’s possible.

But I’m not that person.

Yes, there are aspects of my life for which I’m satisfied or even duly proud.

But I do have regrets.

True, mistakes are meant to be a learning experience. But when the same situation occurs over and over, what is the lesson to be learned?

For example, you meet someone who seems pretty nice, but after dating for a while – or sometimes only once – you discover what a jerk the person really is. It wasn’t something you could tell without a few dates. Sometimes the relationship might be very hurtful.

Okay, one such relationship would be a lesson to be more careful and discerning about people. Probably shouldn’t have dated that one.

But when it happens multiple times, you have to wonder why life is beating you up this way. How are you supposed to know nice-seeming people are really creeps when they give no sign?

This is particularly distressing when you meet nice people in-between, who actually are nice people, but simply aren’t for you.

I’ve often heard others say, “If I could live my life over…” This is usually followed by, “knowing what I know now.”

But no.

Realistically, some of the things I know now were not knowable when I was a child.

I wish I could re-do my entire school life, from first through 12^th grades. Not knowing what I know now, but being encouraged to work harder and do better. Since my grades were usually fine, I didn’t get much encouragement. Besides, I was just a girl.

It would have been nice to have been given reasons to do well, a bigger picture – like winning the medal in a particular subject, or preparing the way for an academic scholarship later.

Expecting me to do my best just because I should, when I didn’t see it getting me anywhere, didn’t work.

A word of encouragement, a smile, an expression of my parents being pleased when I did well would have gone a long way. Never mind the present-day habit of paying children for good grades.

Instead, when I earned a B, I was asked why it wasn’t an A. Or when the next grade was an A, I was asked, “Why didn’t you do that last time?”

I’ve been told this negative reinforcement is a particularly Irish attitude. I don’t know if there’s a rule among people of Irish heritage that it is wrong to ever praise a child for good work, but that was my parents’ philosophy.

While it’s true that my ADD and mild dyslexia got in the way of some things, “knowing what I know now” probably would have kept me from developing my own unique compensations. I might never have learned to think outside the box.

I suppose it would have been nice to have extra time to complete standardized tests. But most of the time, I didn’t need it. I did better on those tests than the ones my teachers dreamed up.

Social life was always more difficult for me than academics.

If I had it to do over, I would wish my mother hadn’t been so focused on instilling empathy – “How would you feel if someone said that to you?” (ignoring that someone had) – and had, instead, instilled a sense of justice and standing up for myself, something I’ve never been good at doing.

I wish someone had clued me in on what people didn’t like about me so I could fix it, instead of still having no clue how to make friends. It would have saved me from hanging around people I didn’t particularly like simply because they let me.

I wish I’d worked harder in school and gone to a better university. Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent 30+ years in a profession I didn’t like and wasn’t suited for.

I wish I were kinder. I try, but it gets difficult when people are pushing my buttons.

I wish I knew how to be more loving – or at least how to be more comfortable expressing it, other than on paper.

I wish my feelings didn’t get hurt as easily as they do.

I wish I had more patience. Some people think I’m very patient; I know better.

I wish I didn’t talk so much. I know people don’t want to hear what I have to say most of the time. Sometimes it feels like an alien has taken over and controls my mouth.

I wish I didn’t have so much anger inside me. People easily say, “Just let it go,” but can never offer a way to do that.

No regrets? I don’t think regrets are a bad thing. They show you where you need improvement.

Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about becoming your best possible self.

If you regret nothing, you never see the potential for improvement.

Yes, I wish I hadn’t had certain experiences and relationships or made certain decisions. Would that have made me a different person? Possibly. But I’m not convinced that would be a bad thing.

Things They Did Not Teach Us in School

I love to watch the expression on the faces of the students I work with when I tell them that I was never taught to print.

When they hear that I learned cursive in first grade, they generally want to know, “What about kindergarten?”

Then I tell them that my school didn’t have kindergarten, and my mother saw no reason to send me to public school to play dress-up, play in the playground and the sandbox, and take naps. I had all of those things at home; no reason to catch other people’s germs.

Nowadays, kindergarten has replaced first grade in the learning department, and what my peers did in kindergarten, children now do in pre-school.

I only missed out on the socialization part, and I’m not sure I ever quite caught up.

But those are not the only differences in schools of today versus “in my day.”

I still think I had the advantage, learning cursive and never having been formally taught to print. Our teachers assumed we were all intelligent enough to figure out how to print. It isn’t that hard.

I did.  Well, with the exception of the letters that I reversed until mid-high school. Even those, I figured out ways to fix.

 Z, for example. I reversed that. But I discovered that if I wrote Zorro (a popular TV show of my childhood) on the bottom line of the letter, if all of the letters came before the Z when I tried to read it, it was backwards.

Now teachers teach the children who reverse b and d to make two fists with their thumbs up. The one that comes first (the left) is the b, while the one on the right is the d.

I had my own way. Make the bed.

Huh?

Well, you need a headboard and a foot board. Then put the pillows (the half circles that make up the rest of the two letters letters) in the middle. Then let e jump on it (since monkeys aren’t allowed to jump on the bed.)

Okay, it’s a bit out there. There I go, thinking outside the box again.

But having learned to write, there were other subjects to master. While I know when to use fewer and when to use less – something many do not – and which to/two/too to use, as well as when and how to use lie and lay, there were other things I did not learn in school.

For example, when my husband, Blue Scream of Jeff, told me he learned about the Vietnam War in school, I thought he was joking. Yes, he’s younger than I am by about a decade, but still! We did not learn that in school.

We lived through it.

When I was a senior in high school, they had finally finished arguing about what shape the table should be – I thought at the time round was a no-brainer – and had started the Paris Peace Talks. We sometimes watched that on television in Social Studies class.

Years later, after failing to get a job in my field of study from college, I fell into teaching fifth grade quite by accident. While the school was still as white as mine had been, some color had been introduced to the history books.

“In my day,” African Americans – who were called, by the nun who taught me, Negroes and Nigresses – were not introduced into American culture until we studied slavery. Yes, it was mentioned in passing that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned plantations, and therefore slaves – although Sally Hemmings was never mentioned in Catholic school! – the idea that there were free blacks in any of the northern states was something we were not told.

Imagine my surprise as a teacher when, preparing my class notes on the Boston Massacre, I discovered that the first person killed in the skirmish was a man of color, one Crispus Attucks! And he wasn’t the only black man who fought against the British! It was a revelation.

While I learned all sorts of things about Russia, India and China in World Cultures I and II, I never learned word one about the French Revolution. The first time I ever heard of Trafalgar was when I bought a Bee Gees album of that name (With Barry Gibb dressed as Lord Nelson after his having been shot).

We were taught about the French and Indian War – a war not between the French and the Indians – but no one ever mentioned that was a portion of the 7-Year’s War in Europe.

Likewise, we were taught nothing of Spanish, Italian or Scandinavian history, other than where history had to do with the popes or Christopher Columbus.

Moving on to Geography, we were taught countries of modern Europe, Asia and Africa – well the African countries with the names they had back “in my day.” But while Egypt has remained Egypt throughout history, I was never able to locate places like Persia, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire in relation to places we have now, like Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, etc.

I only know Zimbabwe in Africa used to be what I knew as Rhodesia because it became Zimbabwe-Rhodesia while I was studying in the UK, and their news was full of that fact.

And what ever happened to Sparta? That was my favorite place in ancient Greece! I loved the story about the Spartan boy who stole the fox. You still have Athens, Thermopile and lots of other places, but just try to book a vacation to Sparta (or for that matter, Troy, to see the Trojan Horse.)

I suppose some years had too much jammed into them. Fourth grade was almost entirely the Middle Ages – which is probably why fourth grade was my favorite. Sixth grade had Greek, Roman and Ancient Egyptian history – which is probably why I absolutely hated sixth grade.

Seventh grade had Westward expansion and the Civil War, and Eighth grade covered the Reconstruction era, World War I (for about 5 minutes one afternoon), the great Depression (for a depressingly long time), World War II (forever, but without mentioning much of importance like the D-Day invasion or Iwo Jima), and the Korean War (which was only mentioned as having been a war).

While I believe in general I received an excellent education in my first 12 years of school, much of history was sketchy at best.

We learned about the wave of Irish immigration, followed by the Italian immigration, and then war and things, but we were never taught any reasons why those immigrants left their homes to come to our shores.

Even our shameful treatment of Native Americans was well hidden with excuses such as the idea that they were savages, most of whom refused to accept Catholic Christianity. No mention was ever made of small-pox-infected blankets being given to these people, or the fact that the US government violated every treaty it ever made with the Native Americans.

What I learned of the Potato Famine or Native American history came from my love of reading, well after I had finished my schooling.

All I know about the French Revolution came from reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

I suppose I could have been a history major in college, although I can’t see that as a good route to a career, especially since most of the history I did learn didn’t much interest me.

I loved the Middle Ages, but my parents refused my request to stay two extra terms at Penn State to earn a minor in Medieval History on top of my dual bachelor’s degrees.

Who knows where it could have led? I could have really been something at the Renaissance Faires!

Writing

To those who don’t write, writing is a mysterious process – at least, that’s what people have said to me; I’ve had stories floating around in my head all my life.

“It must be really hard to write a novel,” they say. But it’s not.

In general, characters comes knocking, and I hope they will go away. When they  don’t, I sit down and write about them.

My earliest creation happened when I was three or four years old. My favorite bedtime story was one my mother hated. Truly, the story was boring. But the pictures were great.

So, when my mother started reading, I told her that’s not how the story went. She told me to read it, then.

Not knowing my alphabet as anything but a song, I couldn’t read. But I proceeded to tell her my version of what was going on in the pictures. I even had characters with names, which the book did not.

My mother was startled by my creativity and ability to tell a coherent story. She told me I’d be a writer when I grew up – not an exciting idea to a three-year-old.

However, my elementary school essays gave no indication of writing talent.

Since my family never took summer vacations because my father didn’t like the beach, my, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” was less than a stellar exercise.

My grades were good, since the grammar and spelling were appropriate, but there was little room for creativity. (The nuns would have had a fit if I’d written about traveling to another planet for the summer.)

Not until seventh grade, when the English – Language Arts  – nun believed 13-year-olds should take responsibility for creating two pages a week of whatever they had to say, did I find my voice.

All we had to do was fill two pages. She wouldn’t even read it unless we requested that she do so.

And I did.

Every week.

My condolences to her for the hours she spent deciphering my handwriting and suffering through my attempts – always more than two pages – at poems, plays and essays.

And endless thanks for the words of encouragement she gave me in response.

That exercise taught me to just write and see what happened.

It informed my first university experience, which resulted in dual Bachelor of Arts degrees, one in creative writing.

I tried all sorts of writing, some successful, some not.

My poetry teacher gave me an A, not for talent, but for sheer volume of attempts handed in. He made me promise not to try to become a professional poet because I wasn’t any good at it.

Because he hated Hallmark cards, I would occasionally tease that I was considering applying for a job writing for Hallmark. I’d still like to see a line of humorous sympathy cards, since that’s the time you most need cheering up.

Similarly, biography writing turned out not to be my forte. When I interviewed a friend and wrote a piece based on what he told me, my instructor accused me of making the whole thing up, and gave it a very low grade.

If he was going to assume fiction, that’s what I’d give him.

For my final biographical piece, I invented a character, and wrote his biography. My instructor loved it, having no idea it was complete fiction. For that, he gave me an A.

And so my biographical fiction was born, no research required.

While most of the time characters come to me, I have, on occasion, written a story on request.

Dark Faery was created because a young friend was enamored of Twilight. She suggested that I could write a vampire novel.

 I told her my vampires would not sparkle, and the story would have to be something unlike anything I’d read before. No witches or werewolves to muddy the waters.

Hence, Vampyre Faeries.

Ironically, despite all the telltale hints, as well as Irish and Welsh names of the characters and references to druids, one reviewer wondered where all of this took place, since I never named a country.

Hello.

Faeries know no country.

But here’s a clue for you all: Wales and Ireland, folks.  Wales and Ireland.

I guess I should have drawn a map.

I’ve also created series on request. Both Dark Faery and my Unicorn series were supposed to be one-off ventures. But at the request of readers who wanted more, I turned them into series.

But how to get people to notice?

Write blogs, they said.

It’ll get you an audience, they said.

Well, that hasn’t happened, really. I haven’t had an increase in book sales because of my blogs.

In fact, my blogs are often only read by two or three people. And rarely do I even get comments on the blogs to know what suggestions others might have.

Blog writing is very different from novel or short story writing.

I thought it would be difficult.

I hoped it wouldn’t be as uninspired as my elementary school essays.

It has turned out to be as much of a creative venture as my stories. Ideas come unbidden in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep. Whether or not they’re inspired is not for me to say.

The main difference is that my stories are fiction, whereas the blogs are my thoughts and opinions on a particular topic, no characters required.

How’s that for how I spent my summer vacation?