Regret Is Poison

My guilt over the childhood I gave them is sometimes like a bundle of cinderblocks I drag behind me.

Recently, I went to the ER with sciatica so bad I couldn’t stop howling from the pain. My left leg felt like it was in a vice from my hip to the top of my foot, the result of weeks and weeks of lower back spasms and pain that I get whenever I’m stressed. Eventually, those spasms irritated my sciatic nerve severely enough to put me on the bed, wailing and writing with pain.

When I later described this miserable episode to a friend, she asked, “Why did you wait so long to go to the doctor if you’d been in pain for more than a month?”

Without thought, I responded, “I deserve the pain.”

I’m not always aware of it, but there’s a part of me that believes that I deserve to suffer.

Pregnant with my first child in 1993, I dreamed of all the ways I would give my baby a better childhood than I had, free of the emotional turmoil and traumas that impeded my own parents’ desires for a peaceful, happy family life.

I can’t possibly overstate the naÃ¯veté of my 22-year-old pregnant self, going for long walks in downtown Albuquerque, meditating on the wonderful life I would create for my family.

Now, as my three eldest children round the corner out of adolescence and into adulthood and my youngest is just a few months from becoming a teenager, my guilt over the childhood I gave them is sometimes like a bundle of cinderblocks I drag behind me on chains.

When I descend into this nasty spiral of regret and shame, therapists and spiritual advisers and friends urge me to focus on the good parts, the things I did well, and of course there are memories like that. There were hours and hours spent cuddled together on the couch reading books; the mornings they came into my bed and enjoyed talking so long that we had to rush to get to school on time; the fancy lunches out we had every year after school registration. There were happy Christmas mornings and joyful birthday parties and jokes and games. There was my advocacy for my youngest child’s educational and healthcare needs, my efforts to co-parent effectively with my eldest children’s dad, and my presence with a cool cloth and soothing words when any of my kids was ill or injured.

But often, the damage done by my many poor decisions, mistakes, and missteps looms so large that there aren’t enough kitchen dance party memories to drown them out. They clatter noisily in my skull, paralyzing me emotionally. For every backyard picnic, there were mornings when I was too depressed to wake my kids with anything but the most cursory interaction. For each hour I lovingly tended them when they were ill or injured, there were more hours when I emotionally neglected my three eldest children because I was overwhelmed by their youngest brother’s special needs. For all the depth of love I felt for them, there is the agonizing fact of my two eldest kids’ alienation from me, and my inability to break that stalemate for years.

Sometimes, the guilt and regret bring me to my knees, begging for another chance, a rewind, a do-over.

The universe never grants do-overs, of course. It is a terrible truth of time that it moves ever forward, impervious to human sorrow. I can no more fix what I’ve broken than change the course of the ocean tides. The curious thing is, among the painful experiences of my children’s lives, there were things I did wrong and things that happened to us over which I had no control, yet I feel equally guilty for all the things that hurt them.

I know my regret is worse than useless. It is emotional poison, and the more I punish myself for the mistakes of the past, the less effective I am as a parent in the present, exacerbating problems instead of easing them. Whatever I may or may not deserve, allowing myself to be emotionally incapacitated and physically damaged by my own regret does nothing to help anyone, my children included. However much I flagellate myself, the past is apathetic and unmoving.

Ultimately, in these episodes of pathological retrospection, I reach a place where my regret is so destructive that I regret my regret, sort of like emotional compound interest, a thing that can only grow.

My task now is to give up all hope of a better past because time is relentless, and while some deep and ugly part of me believes I deserve suffer, I know that’s not true. In any case, whatever I do or don’t deserve, my kids still want me to show up for them, to be my best self in my relationships with them.

My friend, after I told her that I deserved the pain (and after I cried for a long time) asked me, “Is there anything your kids could do that would make you think they should just hurt like hell for the rest of their lives?”

“No,” I said, “nothing.”

“So?” she said.

So indeed.

Photo: Blake Verdoorn

Dear children with your sharp elbows and poor depth perception,

I’ll forgive you birth, because that was supposed to hurt. “A necessary evil,” I think they call it. I’ll even forgive you your freakishly large heads, disproportionate as they were to my slender, girl-like hips. I never expected a baby the size of, well, a baby (with a head the size of, well, a cantaloupe) to emerge from one of the orifices of my body and leave it unscathed. But those were the war wounds I was prepared for, at least in theory: the contractions that sent me into a fit of curses through the epidural; the stitches and swelling and stinging in what used to be a happy place; the three-inch incision across my abdomen, still numb to the touch.

No, what truly took me by surprise was all the pain that came next.

Like the time I first put you to my breast. I looked into your wide, grey eyes and smiled serenely as I shoved your face into my inflated balloon of a boob. And then almost shrieked out loud as you clamped on with gusto. Ah the beauty of Mother Nature! I couldn’t feed you in those early weeks without curling my toes and digging them, fiercely, into the fibers of the carpet, so as to concentrate on anything other than the throbbing, sandpaper-against-silk sensation emanating from my red-raw nipples. Before you, would I ever have guessed that the words “blood” and “nipple” could sit together in the same sentence, without a hint of irony or metaphor?

Breastfeeding was when the shoulder and neck pain started. The hunching, the 45 minutes cramped in an awkward position, because I’d rather endure the discomfort than run the risk of breaking a decent latch. All the while that pesky hormone, “Relaxin” (I mean: who’s relaxin’ here?), is coursing through my veins, the one that makes a lactating woman’s joints loosen up and essentially turns her body into a ticking time bomb of injury. Injury sustained from, oh I don’t know, carrying the weight of a sack of potatoes around for 14 hours a day. I won’t name names here, but I’m talking about you, baby number two, who spent at least three months of your life taking “naps” whilst strapped to my chest in a contraption that made me feel like a kangaroo, except without the benefit of such an ergonomic design.

And then you got bigger and heavier and there was the lifting, all the lifting. Into the crib, out of the crib. Into the high chair, out of the high chair. Into the car seat, out of the car seat, which requires that lethal twist of the spine at the end. My lower back has never been the same. (Shout out here to my twins, because doing everything twice took an extra special toll on my lumbar region). I would try to bend my knees for support, the way the massage therapist coached me, but how exactly do you bend at the knee as you yank from his playpen a prostrate, spaghetti-limbed toddler the heft of a small elephant? Oh I longed for the day when I wouldn’t have to lift you so much and then it came and I offered a silent prayer to the attachment parenting gods.

Happy times, you could climb into your own car seat now! But you could also climb all over me. I became, at once, a human jungle gym. Little elbows dug themselves expertly into my boobs, an ideal spot, apparently, from which to gain enough leverage to smack your forehead against mine. Fat feet planted themselves on my lap, bouncing up and down, up and down, and, whoops, that’s my pubic bone you just landed on with your heel. No, no, my shins are not for tightrope walking. How, oh how, was it always that the sharpest, boniest bits of your body would magically find the most vulnerable bits of mine?

As you got older, the games became more sophisticated. “Let’s play hairdresser,” you squealed, raking sticky fingers through my hair and pulling it out at the root along the way. “Let’s play doctor now,” you cried, as you thrust the thermometer into my ear and it occurred to me that maybe I would actually end up in the Emergency Room after all. “Let’s look at a book,” you suggested and I exhaled a sigh of relief. But how quickly I learned the cardinal rule of parenting young children: never let your guard down. For in your hands, even reading could become a contact sport. Like that time you caught me in the corner of the eye with Goodnight Moon. The “Goodnight mush” page still has a smear of my blood on it.

Over time, darling children, I’ve come to see that your affection for me knows no bounds. And I mean that quite literally. Sometimes your eager kisses are accompanied by teeth. Sometimes your sweet caresses leave scratch marks down the side of my face. And sometimes your hugs, your wonderfully enthusiastic hugs, Knock. Me. Over. The old clichés are true. Love is an assault on the senses, they say. Love hurts, they say. You know what I say? Some people’s love hurts more than others.

(Gentle) hugs and kisses,

Mom

Illustration by Christine Juneau

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Regret Is Poison

Who Knew Having Young Children Would Hurt So Much?