Ah, sweet mystery of life! There are an infinite number of things that gnaw at my mind, begging for answers. Mysteries both large and small, like what would my life have been like if I was born 50 (or 100, or 150) years earlier? Or if I had been a tall blue eyed blonde, rather than a dumpy brown eyed brunette? Would I have been a good elementary school teacher, if I had finished my education degree? Or would I have been a better concert pianist, if I had had the chops to enter all those competitions? There is one mystery that I try not to think about too much, but it occasionally appears in my subconscious like an ugly troll popping it's head out the cave, leering at me with an impish grin. I usually slam my hand down on it and shove it back into the hole, but sometimes I let it stay in the light of day for a moment and just consider it.
This mystery is about the children I decided not have. As a young woman, I was determined to have only one child. There were numerous reasons for this decision in my mind, and they don't matter now. In terms of life mysteries, though, that decision has left me with a pretty huge unsolvable one.
So, now I'm left with questions that just gnaw at my psyche. Would there have been a daughter (perhaps tall and blue-eyed like her dad and brother?) Would she have been a musician, an artist, a writer, or a mathmatician or engineer, becuase all those genes were in her pool? Would she be another perfectionstic control freak like the majority of us in this family, or would she have inherited some recessive, laid back, fun-loving gene from a relative I never even met? Would she be married? Would she have children of her own?
There are no answers to these questions. And maybe that's just as well. The pain that comes from not knowing, is probably also the salvation of not knowing. I guess some mysteries are best left unsolved.
