flipflop_diva

Sometimes, late at night, when my thoughts travel back in time to years gone by, I start to wonder. When I was standing at the crossroads, when I was making that decision, what if I had chosen differently?

What if I had stayed in Massachusetts after grad school instead of coming back to California? What if I had picked a different college in the first place? What if I hadn’t gone on to match.com the exact week that I did? What if we’d tried to get pregnant before the wedding, like David had wanted?

Would my life now still be as it is? Would Ellie be here? Would her baby brother be inside me? Would I know David?

So many what ifs. So many ways it could have gone. So many other choices I didn’t choose, paths I didn’t walk.

But isn’t that what life is? A series of choices that ultimately lead you to where you are now, to who you are now.

I could go back forever. To the choices my parents made and their parents before them and their parents before them. Down and down the line of ancestors, everyone’s choices eventually leading to now.

It’s a lot to take in sometimes, a lot to think about.

I’m not religious. I never really have been. My parents were a bit. My grandparents were a lot.

My grandma would leave the Bible on the coffee table and want to pray before every meal. My parents had Bibles on the bookshelf and prayed over holiday meals.

When I was twelve years old, my parents decided we needed to be more religious. They found a Presbyterian church a few miles away they really liked. It wasn’t a very fancy church. Plain brown buildings with a few stained glass windows here and there. But they liked the pastor and the people.

They decided my sister and I needed to go to Sunday school. So we did.

I didn’t love it. None of it ever felt authentic to me. It was like listening to stories I didn’t believe in and had a hard time connecting with. I didn’t like being preached to, and I didn’t like feeling like I had to believe things I didn’t.

But I went because I was a kid, and my parents wanted me to go. Sometimes, they would let me sit out with them for the church service instead of going to Sunday school. I liked that better. At least I could happily daydream for most of it, and I liked the songs.

When I was in high school, I joined the colorguard team. We had competitions almost every Saturday for six months of the year. A lot of times, we wouldn’t get home until way past nightfall.

Luckily for me, my parents liked sleep more than early morning church services, so our trips to church became less and less until they stopped altogether. We’d still go for Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, but I could live with that. I at least never had to go to Sunday school again.

The last time I stepped foot into that church we went to was for my mother’s memorial service. She and my dad had talked about what she wanted before she passed away, and she wanted the service to be held there.

My dad, my sister and I went in to the pastor’s office a few days before to get everything set up. At one point, the pastor had us all hold hands and repeat how we knew God would take care of all our needs.

I was awkward and uncomfortable, and I felt like a fake, but I did it, because it’s what my parents wanted.

We asked the pastor if we could play a song in honor of my mom. We wanted to play “The Dance” by Garth Brooks. We had played it for her over and over when she was dying in the hospital.

Growing up, my dad loved country music, my mom loved her oldies and my sister and I loved pop music and boy bands. But when Garth Brooks released “Friends In Low Places,” we found something we could agree on. So we bought the CD and listened to it in the car over and over and over. And then we bought more Garth Brooks CDs. “The Dance” was always one of my favorite songs.

But the pastor told us no. He said we could only play songs that honored God. We agreed, but secretly I was annoyed. God was the one who let my mom die, wasn’t he? So why should he get the honors instead of the person we were there to mourn?

In a way, saying goodbye to my mom at her memorial service also coincided with saying goodbye to organized religion. It took me a long time to realize I didn’t believe in it, but I didn’t.

I do believe in something. I don’t have a name for it. I believe in the beauty of the world that can be found around us. I believe that maybe sometimes things happen for a reason. I believe that not everything can be entirely coincidental — how the earth formed for starters, how humans formed.

I know it’s not what most people believe — especially not my husband’s family, who posts prayers and memes about God all over Facebook — but it’s enough for me.

It makes me appreciate the choices I made. It makes me wonder about how they would have been different otherwise.

I look at my daughter, asleep in her bed. I think about how she completed my world when she came into it. And I know that every choice, big or small, I made in life led me to her.

Whether it was choice or fate or coincidence, I’ll never know. And I don’t need to know. It’s enough for her just to be here, for me to be where I am (even if I still like to think about the ‘what ifs’ every now and then).

Non-fiction. I know religion is a very sensitive topic, so I hope none of this came out as offensive in any way. I only meant to show my experience with it.

Thank you for reading! This was written for

therealljidol: Survivor Idol! We're at the final immunity challenge now, so there's no voting. We just write an entry every day until only one person is left standing.

That said, if you want to read the entries, you can find them all here.