'I Wouldn't Change It For The World'

It’s a common phrase, ‘live with no regrets’. It’s the kind of saying you can easily picture encased in a white frame, strung up on the wall of an upper-middle-class kitchen. The kind of saying you might see in slanted cursive, tattooed across a stranger's ribcage. You could liken it to ‘be yourself’, ‘never give up’ and ‘always have faith’. These sentiments are wonderful in theory. In practice, however, people are flawed. Throughout our lifetime we make countless mistakes and take many wrong turns. I find it difficult to imagine that anyone on this earth lives a life truly free of regrets. Though if there was one person I could say has come close, It would be my mother.

This is not to say my mum has lived a life free of failures and adversity. That would be far from the truth. My mother failed high school, she has lived with abusive men, she has cheated and has been cheated on. My mum has laid out in the sun for hours without sunscreen, her face and chest are now pocketed with dozens of scars where the damage has been cut from her skin. My mum has been bitten by a red-bellied black snake. The venom stole her sense of smell and wreaked havoc on her immune system. However, when asked about these unfortunate events and foolish decisions, my mum maintains she wouldn’t change them for the world.

Her ability to focus on the positive aspects of every situation is almost absurd. She would not go back in time and finish high school. ‘Because then I would have never joined the navy when I did, and might not have met your father’ she said. I asked her if she had regrets about tanning when she was younger. ‘If I didn't understand the consequences of sun damage, I wouldn’t have been so strict about sunscreen when you were younger. I’m glad I made the mistake, so you can learn from me’. I was astounded by the positivity of her attitude. I’d expected she would at least have regrets about the run-in with the redbelly. But again, I had underestimated her. ‘I’m glad I've experienced being so close to death,’ she said, ‘it gives me a greater appreciation for my life.’

My mum is a religious woman. She is a Baha’i, but accepts and acknowledges all faiths. At the age of fifteen, the time when Baha’i children are expected to choose their faith, I decided I was not religious. My mother never complained about my choice. When she would talk to me about the ways of the world, she would simply replace the word ‘God’ with ‘The Universe’. ‘The Universe is sending you this challenge for a reason,’ she would say. Sometimes this was hard for me to understand. How could I be injured for a reason? How could I lose a loved one for a reason? What is the purpose of pain and suffering?

In 2002, my mum lost the love of her life, and I lost my father. He died of a heart attack, suddenly and without warning. My mother called the ambulance and tried desperately to resuscitate him, but he died before he made it to the hospital. It’s been nineteen years and her heart is still broken. The other day she saw my younger sister wearing his shirt. I heard her scream from my room and found her sobbing on the kitchen floor. I sat her down on the couch and wiped away her tears. She told me she had made the shirt herself. She had been nervous to begin the project. My dad was a very particular man, and my mother hadn’t made a shirt from scratch before. She spent hours deciding on the perfect fabric to use, and many more hours perfecting the finished product. She told me how she cried when he tried it on. It fit perfectly and he loved it. ‘He wore it everywhere because I made it,’ she said.

She then said something that has stuck with me to this day. She turned to me and told me that my father could never really be ‘gone’. She told me that God called him back for a reason. Most importantly, she told me that she wouldn’t change a thing about the past, in case that change made her children different than they are today. In case it caused me to be different than I am today. Nothing could have prepared me for the pure selflessness of her mentality.

This is the most important lesson that my mother has taught me. Maybe there is a purpose to pain, or maybe there isn’t. But I could choose to find the bright side of any situation. I could choose to accept pain, to welcome it, to treat it as a necessary and beautiful part of life. Last week I was bed-bound with chronic shoulder pain. My labrum is torn, and the injury becomes inflamed from time to time. I couldn’t use my right arm for over ten days. This morning I woke up feeling a little bit better. I thought of my mum, looked to the sky and thanked ‘The Universe’ for giving me a chance to learn how to write left-handed. And then I thanked my mum.