Witten by Melpomene
Choices. Our lives are filled with choices, decisions that we must make. Regardless of where we live, of who we are, there are always choices. What to wear, what to eat, when to sleep, who to love… It’s what makes being human such a marvelously wonderful experience.
Eight years ago I made a choice.
It was five in the morning when my doorbell rang and I stumbled out of bed to see who in the world would be calling at such an ungodly hour. The man I saw through the peephole was someone I had said goodbye to several weeks before. David had decided to work on his crumbling marriage, he had told me, and I had bid him farewell and wished him sincere luck. I made a choice when I opened that door and let him in and I made a choice every morning that he returned over the next six months.
When my mother called me one day, distraught and asking me to return home for a time, I made a choice. I gave two weeks’ notice at both of my jobs, said goodbye again to the man I had been engaged in an affair with, and bid my friends a fond farewell. I made a choice when I threw out all means I had of ever contacting him again. I had made a mistake and was not about to continue making that same mistake. I left Austin with a clearer conscience than I had had in far too long.
It was almost a month later that I sat on my best friend’s front porch floored by a sudden revelation and desperately doing some very fast math in my head. “I think I saw David one time too many,” I told my friend when he stepped outside to join me. I was right in my math. The doctor confirmed that I was about a month and a half along in my pregnancy.
I made the choice to keep the baby and love it no matter what might happen. That was probably the hardest choice I have ever made. Abortion was never an option, I had already lost a baby girl some five years earlier and I could not bear the thought of “getting rid” of this new baby. I also made the choice to give the baby his father’s name so that he would at least have some tie to the man who had helped to give him life.
During that time, I made another difficult choice. I chose to keep silent about the baby as far as David was concerned. I had many reasons, some of them very real and others just out of desperation, to remain quiet. Only my closest friends and my mother knew the truth of my son’s father.
It was a few months ago that I made another decision. My life has thrown me for many loops over the years and I have found my peace with God and through philosophy. I refuse to leave questions hanging, I want answers even when they seem impossible. I never want to grow old and sit around and wonder “what if…” I don’t want to have to work through bad karma that has been left over from this life if I should find out that reincarnation is in my future.
I chose to contact David. I chose to tell him about his son. I chose to leave the major decision of what he would do about it to him. We’ve done the paternity test, David should have received the results a week or two ago. I do not know what he will decide.
When I first told him, David stated that I had made all the decisions; I had chosen to have the baby, to keep the baby… He’s right, I did. I made those decisions just as he made the decision to sleep with me while he was still married to someone else.
I don’t regret any of the choices I have made in my topsy-turvy life. To regret the choices I made with David would be to regret my wonderful son, something I could never do. To regret the lessons I have learned from my poor choices would be to regret all that I have learned from those lessons.
I will continue to make choices throughout the remainder of my life; I will refuse to regret any of them. Life is far too short to fill it up with regret and wishes. I will look to the future, anticipating with great pleasure the choices I have yet to discover waiting for me around the next bend in the winding road of my life.