No Regrets

  
I find little to nothing in my life I regret. Regret would mean I was wrong. I've made mistakes, but I am not wrong. I've hurt others. I've made poor choices. I've taken risks resulting in tragic outcomes. These are moments like all other moments in my life. They hold no more or less weight or sway than the lovely decision to marry my husband or the exciting decision to publish my writing. In fact, these point shape who I am. I constantly look back on them and learn new lessons.

Take the seminary for example, something that could be a regret or at least regretful. While in it, my lesson was cut it of, let it go, break up with your faith if you want to live. After seminary, it was do whatever you can to disrupt the church including speaking ill of it and brining safer sex conversations into its walls. It was a reaction of pain, one I hoped to inflict in equal measure to the hurt I felt. There was no limit. Now, it is reflective still tinged with pain and anger but beyond it was well. It is a detachment that allows me to have conversations of faith without loud outbursts.

Regret is like being stuck in an emotional loop. It re-traumatizes you because your experience of the event never changes. Yes, the facts of the event don't change. I went to seminary for one semester, which can be imperially proven. But the story changes.

That is liberation. That is something beyond the initial experience. That is something others can never manipulate. That is why I don't regret anything or almost anything. If I did, I would lose my liberation.

And that is something I would regret.

Mirrored Perfection

 

She stood in front of the mirror fussing with hairspray hoping it would go just a little higher conscious not to look like a hooker. Suburbanites hate hookers.

Perfect hair signaled personal perfection reflected in daily dusting, hourly vacuuming, and unending cycles of laundry. Everything was a reflection of everything else, so nothing was supposed to be out of place. It was suffocating her. It suffocated me. 

It became more than either of us could handle. She'd cry downstairs in the unfinished basement behind the tiny bathroom hoping no one would find her. I rebelled with messy drawers that were easily closed and by hoarding discarded wrappers in school lockers and backpacks. It led to four or five years of silence.

Her hair is unkept as she looks in the mirror, so she throws on a hat. The dusting is sporadic; the vacuuming is only weekly; the washing machine is silent. She works downtown among the hookers and drag queens and dykes and druggies providing respite and care for those with HIV/AIDS. She breathes freely. 

So do I.

Indulgences and Drag Queen Divinity

  
She went on a crusade when I was in the fourth of fifth grade to ban all the Halloween books from the library. They were my favorite books and included the How to Draw...Monsters book that I checked out and tucked in my drawer. They were as Satanic as Aerosmith, which she also banned me from listening to.

I was stuck with the Disney records and Alvin and the Chipmunks spinning round on the Playmobile record player. Those and anything Charlie Brown. They were wholesome and innocent and weren't tainted with sexuality of non-conformity. Monsters and Halloween were just too scary.

It confused me because all the years previous Halloween was a celebration. It was the time I could finally put on a costume and make-up. I think that's what did it: I enjoyed it.

The effort failed. The Halloween Party was a money maker (although a small one) for the church and that overruled Satan. It is kind of the same thing as indulgences: pay and the church will overlook or forgive anything (except homosexuality).

She moved on to R-rated movies, rock and roll, and anything sci-fi or horror related. So many things were Satanic: Buddhism, the bastards who made fun of me at school and sent me home in tears, not playing sports, cigarettes. Candy-coated, rose-colored innocence was the only thing I was allowed to experience. I was not that. And counter to all her protection, I still found 1-976 numbers, Playgirls, Hellraiser, much older men. No matter how many boundaries and borders were constructed, I found a way around and between them. Nothing worked.

Time passed. I came out. She turned progressive. Sin evolved. It was no longer the black and white of righteous childhood. It became the murky gray of Daedalian adulthood.

Now, she's working as an administrative assistant at an AIDS hospice in Minneapolis. Spirituality is more than Catholicism. Drag queens are divine. And her most recent concern was her costume for Sci Fi Bingo starring Miss Richfield 1981. (I suggested 1950s sci fi chic.)

Times and people change. I just hope we don't burn our new found wings.