LJ Idol Survivor: Final Immunity Challenge, Day 7

[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.

Comments

[murielle]

It's all about choice. It's always, been all about choice, and we all get to choose. That's the beauty of it.

I thought this was very well thought through and explained.

Not offended at all. *Hugs*

See you again, Sunday evening. <3

[alycewilson]

I feel the same way about my past and fate. I wouldn't mess with it, because it brought me to where I am now, and my son is so precious to me that I couldn't bear to have him not be a part of my life.

[brkfastatholly.livejournal.com]

You've explained this so well and written so beautifully, as ever! I have always felt the same way..like every single choice compounded on each other and my life wouldn't have turned out exactly this way if one single small thing somewhere back along the line had been different. It's totally mindbending to think about but also kind of fun. The potential multiverses are endless hahaha

[adoptedwriter]

This is so much my life outlook too! G-d or who-whatever created us, our kids, and their kids (in my case), wild and pet animals, our spouses, friends, etc. Forces of nature were put into motion somehow to create all these good things to appreciate, love, and enjoy. We can use Biblical "stories" as one way to explain and understand, but well, in my POV, I call it "salad bar religion". LOL It's a choice to pick and choose what works for the individual. Hugs

[adoptedwriter]

right on!

[gunwithoutmusic]

It's funny that I'm catching back up on the entries from over the weekend - I swear I didn't read this before I posted my day ten entry (which is very similar to this one, discussing religion and all)!

My parents re-joined the church a few years back, and then my sister and brother-in-law, and now my husband has just recently found the church again and wants to be more religious. None of them really care that I'm not religious (I wouldn't say that I'm "anti" religion, but it's just not for me and I'm okay with that), but it is a little awkward at times for me still, when my husband wants to pray before every meal and I just kind of sit there and watch him. I wonder if it's awkward for him at all.

It's a lot when you really sit back and think about all of the "what if"s. I managed to convince myself for a while that my life would have been so much better had I just made this choice or that choice instead of the ones I made. It took a long time for me to realize that sitting down and going over all of the choices and wondering how life might have been different is a futile effort and really only serves to make life as you know it seem worse than it really is. It's all about finding the good in the now and realizing that, yeah, maybe things might have been a little easier if I hadn't made the choices I did, but I have a life I'm happy with and that's okay.

[swirlsofpurple]

The what if question is always such an intriguing one.

It's so ridiculous when people unrelated/relatively unknown by the person who died get to have a say in funeral things. I'm sorry you went through that. I had similar issues when my dad died. It's so hard to balance what everyone needs for their grieving process, with both religious and non-religious family members.

Thank you for sharing.

[halfshellvenus]

I'm not a religious person at all, but I try to be respectful of other people's beliefs. I understand how important they are to those who do have faith.

I believe in the beauty of life, and in our connection to the living world and to each other. And in the importance of how we treat others, and how it affects them. Which is a lot to think about already, really!

And like you, I do go through "what-if", and I mostly worry about what if I had missed the chance to meet my husband, to have our wonderful children. I'm so very glad I didn't, and I understand your feelings on that completely! ♥