Sunday morning coming down....

I have this book, "List Your Self" Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery by Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick. Every page has a sentence at the top, and blank lines underneath. Every sentence is a topic for a list you are to make.
I randomly opened it this morning, and this is the list I got:"Suddenly you can re-create your childhood, List what experiences you would make come out differently."

I immediately thought of many things I would want to change, but most of them were things that other people were in charge of. My mother not wanting to leave her parents to move to a state with my dad where he didn't have a job yet. If she had been more courageous, my life would have turned out a lot different.
My mom not letting my dad ever see me. Knowing him as I grew up would have changed the way I perceived myself. My mother taught me guilt trips, the importance not of being yourself but of being who the world expects you to be, insecurity, and not trusting myself. My dad is the type who would have taught me that there is nothing I can't do, and that it is better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for who you're not.

When the boys in my class started teasing me about being fat, I would have looked in the mirror and realized that I wasn't. I look at the pictures of me then, and I wasn't stick thin like most of the other girls in our class, I had curves long before I knew what to do with them. But I wasn't fat. That one thing has effected me more than anything in my life. I have worked for 20 years to get rid of the feelings of inferiority that were rooted in those years of taunting from the boys.

I love my children, but when I was 17 and met their dad, I would have stood up and insisted that I go to college and become who I was meant to be, and then got married. I wouldn't have married so soon because I thought that R wouldn't want to wait for me. When I graduated high school I had the chance to study art in Paris for the summer, but I passed it up because I didn't think R would wait for me, and that he would have moved on to someone else by the time I got back. He loved me, I clung to that like a drowning person to a floatation device. I thought no one else would ever love me if I lost him.

There are so many little things that if I had to do over again, knowing what I know now, would have made me into the person that I really want to be, with the training, and experiences I could have had, but will never have now.