“If I knew then what I know now…”

Regret can be a terrible burden. One doesn’t always know that they will grow to regret an action when they are taking it. I have three failures, together they make up one, large regret. I had failed the seventh, eighth and twelfth grades. It is not easy to admit failures let alone the regret of these failures.
My mother had regret too. She regretted marring my father. This became apparent one day when my dad told her he was quitting his job again for a better one and we would have to move again for the seventeenth time. That is when the screaming and yelling started and the throwing of fruit. This event has been labeled the “Peach War” because when the smoke cleared, my siblings and I found decimated peach parts all over the kitchen. But wouldn’t you know it, my mother stayed with married to my father for four more years for the kids, she said.
The new town my father moved us to was the very rural two street coastal town of Nehalem, OR: population 126. I went to school there from fifth grade to the end of ninth. It was near the end of seventh grade when my mother had had enough of my father and kicked him out of the house. Later, she had my father tell my siblings and me that they were getting a divorce. When I heard that word I could only thing of one thing, a promise made to me long ago by my mother. She had found me drenched in my own tears after my parents had a huge fight when I was still very young. I told her as best a crying child can that I was afraid they were going to get a divorce. To ease my pain she bent down and embraced me and looked into my eyes and said, “I promise, your dad and I will never get a divorce.”
Suffice it to say when I was told that my parents where divorcing it hit me hard, very hard. To say I was devastated still wouldn’t explain how I felt. My world collapsed on me and they only way I survived was by building a shell around my self and creating a world of my own in my head. My imagination ran wild and paid little attention to anything other than my comic books and my own short stories. My school grades began to suffer and by the end of the year I had achieved one of the strangest report cards in history: three A’s and three F’s. I stopped caring about the subjects I didn’t really enjoy and focused only on those that involved art, writing and crafts.
When my mother saw this, she knew right away I would fail seventh grade if she did not intervene. Intervene she did; she went to the principle and convinced him I only failed those courses because I was depressed about my parents’ divorce and that holding me back would only hurt me. And so I was moved to the eighth grade through no effort of my own. If only my regrets ended there.
The strained relationship between my parents increased when my mother, in a classic divorcee move, refused to let my father see us if he didn’t pay up, like he was renting us or something. This strain affected all of my siblings and I asked to see my mother’s “shrink” needing someone outside of the family to talk to. I wish that had helped but by the end of eighth grade talking to someone didn’t raise my grades and my report card looked the same as the last year. My mother, ever the heroine, stepped in to save the day once again and the next year I started high school feeling very lucky I had such an understanding mother.
That’s about where my luck ended. My mother began having economic problems that left us homeless for a week right after school had ended for the year. However, she cleverly disguised this by taking us camping until she could arrange a place for us to stay. For the next seven months she moved us from her friends’ house to an apartment and finally back to her hometown of Albany, OR where we stayed. I was in the middle of the tenth grade and had failed every single class so far but something happened in Albany, kids liked me there. They found my dark and mysterious posture attractive and I became very popular in my clique, the drama geeks. My grade point average rose and I made it all the way to the last month of twelfth grade without any problems, or so I thought. I came to discover that my habit of choosing an equivalent elective to cover my required course had left me shy of graduating by one credit. Come graduation I found myself in the stands rather than walking across the stage with my peers…
I was eighteen now, and master of my own destiny. My mother could no longer protect me from my mistakes. So I walked away from school and never looked back. I joined the work force moving from one job to another, just like my father, always looking for the better deal. Then I married a woman who showed me my own worth and I tried for a job I thought I was to dumb to get. Working at Hewlet & Packard gave me a great pay check and a huge boost in self esteem. It was because of her that I finally broke down and admitted I dropped out of high school and then earned my GED which let me join the Army National Guard, in turn led to a life changing experience in Iraq.
When you are faced with death on a daily bases it really makes you think about your life. I looked back on the last ten years and I did not like what I saw. So little accomplishment on my part in such a large space of time but, I had learned that if I had the courage to live under fire then I could face my greatest fear and return to school. Here I am. I am completing my education and moving forward in my life for the first time. I am finally making up for my failures. I am going to reach for the stars and refuse to pull back until I have changed them and in the process alleviate a great regret.