My favorite line from the movie City Slickers is “Your life is a Do-Over.”
Buddhism teaches much the same thing: Every moment, we begin anew. Each day, each hour, each breath is a do-over.
But regret is different. There are things we wish we could have done differently, times we may have hurt someone. We can make amends, but we can’t simply declare a “do-over.”
I try not to dwell on the things from the past that I cannot change. I try to accept what is.
But…
“If I could go back and do something over, it would be…”
I would be nicer to my parents as a teenager.
I was a “good kid” – I worked hard and got good grades, but I was surly. Angsty. Moody. {Weren’t we all?}
A few years ago, my family watched a clip of a summer vacation to Napa Valley. We were riding in a funicular overlooking gorgeous vineyards on a sunny day. My parents and younger sister commented on how beautiful it was. My angsty-sixteen-year-old response? “It’s so depressing.”
WTF? Seriously? Your parents take you on this amazing vacation and all you can say is, it’s depressing??
I did a lot of eye-rolling. And I said some nasty things to my parents. I remember one Sunday afternoon watching football with my dad. I was chattering away, and he asked me to stop talking so he could concentrate on the game. I was offended. Certainly I had graced my family with my presence, emerging from my den of teenage melodrama, and, hello!, I was actually talking to my parents! I said something that contained the phrase, “Go screw yourself!!” to my dad and stormed out of the room.
I honestly don’t remember what happened next. Probably best for all concerned.
Now that I am a parent, I am horrified at the ways I treated and spoke to my parents.
My parents are awesome. My dad listened to New Order for the entire 1980’s, and took me to cool concerts like Jesus Jones and Liz Phair. My mom organized the senior class party, helped direct the 3rd-grade play, and did hip things like rocking out to Bruce Springsteen and protesting the Gulf War. And I always thought it was so cool that they let us swear.
Clearly, I didn’t have much that I needed to be so angry at them for. I want to take away that walkman blasting “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and shake some sense into sixteen-year-old me. But I know it probably wouldn’t do any good.
I think it is so fitting that at the height of our teenage melodrama, we are “sophomores” in high school. Wise idiots. (Soph=knowledge; moron=duh). We are learning so much about the world, but we are also ignorant and ego-centric in the truest senses of the words. We think primarily of ourselves. Psychologists tell us we are seeking to find our own identity {our ego}, and a primary way of doing that is separating and pushing away from, and sometimes hurting, our parents.
At the same time, Buddhism teaches us that we all have Buddha-nature within us. Innate goodness and love. When we don’t act from goodness, it is not because we are “bad,” or “mean,” it is because we are ignorant. Tara Brach, in Radical Acceptance, describes this ignorance as ignoring “the truth that we are connected to all of life, and that … hatred create[s] more separation and suffering.”
As teenagers, we realize that our words wound our parents. We don’t realize that they wound us, too. We don’t realize that our disdain for and embarrassment from anything parental isolates us from the very people we can’t admit we long to connect with. We are becoming so wise, yet remain so ignorant.
My daughter, only 6, is years away from adolescence, but she already knows how to wound me with her words.
“I don’t want you to be my mom anymore!!” she’ll yell, but then quickly add, “…..Well, actually I do, but I’m really mad at you!”
I dread the days when just the rage comes out.
So our lives may be do-overs, but I think parenting is really a re-run.
Our children will go through the same search for identity and push away from us. I hope I have the wisdom to realize that when my daughter reprises my role in the upcoming season, her actions stem from ignorance and not hatred. I vow to see her innate goodness, her Buddha-nature.
Parenting is like watching a show we’ve seen before. We know some of the jokes already, and we know we’ll want to clap our hands over our eyes to avoid watching the scary parts. Provided we’re watching wholesome re-runs like my fave, Beverly Hills, 90210 {as opposed to Criminal Minds}, we also know there will be, if not a happy ending, at least a meaningful resolution. We cannot control our children in their search for themselves, we cannot change the script, but we do see things differently the second time we watch the show {this totally happens to me when I watch 90210).
And then some day, my daughter will be blogging {or doing some uber-cool, 3-D- telepathic-hologram form of communication that will make blogging look like a vinyl record} about how her meditating, Rick-Springfield-loving, Bachelorette-watching, laughing-at-life mom was actually totally cool and she never appreciated it.
So mom and dad {I know you’re reading this :)}, I am sorry for the mean-spirited words, the eye-rolling, and especially the unappreciative moments on family vacations. I know how much love, thought, and effort go into not only these special events, but the everyday practice of parenting.
I wish I could “do-over” Season 1. Now that Season 2 has begun airing, I’ll be on the receiving end of childhood ignorance. But I trust that when the reunion episode airs in Season 3, we’ll all be the wiser.
*****
This post is part of the Finish The Sentence Friday Blog Hop! Click here to read more posts about : “If I could go back and do something over, it would be…”
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