No Good Choices

If I changed the one choice I really want to change, I'd end up right back where I was again. It was three years of my life, there and then gone; three years of insecurities, of tears that were brushed away and ignored, of feeling pathetic and helpless. Three years that ended when he went one step too far, when he crossed the line.

If I could change one thing, one choice I've made, it would be him.

They say that girls with bad fathers choose bad lovers. It would seem they're right. By "they" I mean social psychologists, of course. If I could change my choice, if I could tell him to get out the first time he snickered when I asked if he thought I was pretty (what a child I was then!), if I could stop myself somehow from being pressured at age 15 to make a choice I wasn't ready to make...I'm sure it would happen all over again. Maybe I would be a couple of years older, but I wouldn't know better then.

I was young and naive. I still am. Those three years of my life were a dark time, and I cannot pretend I don't regret them sometimes, but I know that they made me stronger, smarter. They made me into the no-nonsense woman I am. I will not repeat the mistakes of the past. It's over now, and I'm alive, and that's enough.

I'm grateful for it. I want to change that choice sometimes. But if I could, I wouldn't.