If I Could Do it All Over Again...

For something new and different I decided to wake up at 7:30 a.m., and hauled Rachael and myself to the morning learning classes given by the Jewish organization I work for. I detest mornings, but the topics seemed interesting enough to drag my sorry butt out of bed. The subject of free will came up, and as the instructor began speaking in a mix of Hebrew and English, one question came to mind: If I could do it all over again, would I be here now?

This is not a new question for me. It’s something that has plagued me at various points in my life, usually when I find that my world has hit some sort of dead end. I am bothered by the fact that it has come into my head again, yet sitting in the folding chair in the basement of the Orthodox synagogue sipping Chamomile tea, I can’t help but to think about what my potential options could have been, and why I made the decisions that I made about my life.

I look back at my youth and wonder why I spent so much time trying to make my parents proud of me. I had been obsessed with working in the music industry since I was 11 years old, and my mother hated it. She wanted me to go to college, have a reasonable career (i.e. something that I could give up easily when I had babies), live in a big house with a husband who made enough money to take care of me, and remain in Idaho for the rest of my life. Is there a worse existence? If you’ve ever been to Idaho, you know there isn’t. Instead I spent three years at the local university, and dropped out. With the help of a sham first marriage, I got away from my control freak mom and moved to Seattle to attend art school. I went to work for a record company, flew to L.A. regularly, and loved my job. Best of all, I did a big “in your face” with my mom. I was actively working in the industry I wanted to be in, and was living in Seattle. Life was good until my record company was bought out in a merger.

I found myself back in Idaho working for a small, but ambitious concert promotion company. At this point, I get up and refill my cup of tea, wondering why I didn’t go to L.A. Oh yeah, I remember, my mother had instilled in me that L.A. was a cesspool filled with heartless plastic people. Sure, she was right, but maybe if I had gone I could have been a record company executive by now instead of a mommy trying to eek out the last 50 pages of a fiction novel.

I recall that during my stint in concert promotion it seemed so important for me to be professional. I obsessed on this to the point where I would never step foot on a tour bus or speak with the musicians unless we were in a public place all in an effort to avoid any remote speculation of impropriety. Why? What if I had thrown caution to the wind and wound up naked with someone famous. In the end, it wouldn’t have effected the outcome of my life, and it would have made for a good story during those play date gatherings.

I could see all us mommies sitting in a large circle on the floor as our chubby munchkins played. As the championship breast feeder would finish her critique of the available breast pumps and nipple creams at Babies ‘R’ Us, all the mommies would look to me to make a contribution. I would casually smile and ask, “Did I ever tell you about the time I fucked (insert rock star name here)?” Sure, some would gasp in shock, but I have a feeling most would lean in and want to know every detail, then I would probably come to find out that they, too, had been pretty wild in their pre-mommy days.

As the class draws to an end, the instructor wraps it up by telling us that there is a purpose for everything, even the bad stuff. This is a powerful statement coming from a woman who probably lost the majority of her grandparents’ siblings and cousins during the Holocaust. Previously, I had settled on the fact that if I had made the decision to go to L.A. instead of back to Idaho to do concert promotion, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I would most likely be married, but not to Jeff, and I probably wouldn’t have kids. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have lasted in L.A., since I hate the cutthroat environment that is prevalent in the entertainment industry particularly in LaLa Land. I would have ended up divorcing my first husband (which was always a given), and moving back to Seattle to work, where I would have met Jeff at some Jewish singles event. We would fall in love, travel the world, buy our starter home, get married, move to the ‘burbs, and have a baby named Rachael.

I leave the class resigned that everyone is where they are supposed to be for one reason or another. We have free will, but we don’t have the ultimate control over our lives, that’s left up to fate or G-d, which ever you believe in. All we can do is live for the here and now, and enjoy each day we get. I’m at peace with that idea. However, I still wish I had scored a rock star, at least once.