Regrets? I’ve had a few

I don’t have many regrets in life, mainly because regrets are useless. What’s done is done. Besides, I am who I am because of all the experiences I’ve had. I’m reasonably satisfied with who I am (including the fact that there’s still room for improvement) so I try to accept everything that was part of making me me. That includes the mistakes, bad habits, detours, misadventures and the misspent youth.

But of course there are exceptions. I do have a few regrets I can’t quite shake. For example, I regret smoking that first cigarette. I regret one whole relationship, and I regret spending as long as I did in a few others. I regret killing my birds.

And I regret hating my sister when we were kids. We bickered and fought and pummelled and bit and tattled and lied and and got each other into trouble and wrecked each other’s stuff and gloated about each other’s misfortunes.

Maybe it was because we were only 11 months apart in age. Maybe it was because we believed there was a finite amount of parental love available to be split between us. Maybe it was just a deeply entrenched bad habit. Who knows?

But this was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill sibling rivalry. You want to know how bad it was? Once I stirred the unflushed toilet with her toothbrush. (What kind of diabolical mind would even think of doing something like that?)

I look back on our childhood now, and I am awash with regret. Not just about the toothbrush, either. I think it was a colossal waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We could have been best friends for that whole fifteen years we were living together. We could have had so much fun together. Instead, we wasted those years trying to get even with each other.

There was one memorable day when we lived on Oakridge Boulevard. I was eight and Debbie was nine. There were two girls our age who lived down the street. I think their names were Leslie and Allison Whittaker. I think Allison was Debbie’s best friend and Leslie was my best friend. Out of respect for their respective allegiances, Allison kind of hated me and Leslie kind of hated Debbie.

But this one day, something happened. I don’t remember how it happened. Somehow the four of us made up a game together that involved rotating best friends. Each of us would take turns pretending to be best friends with each of the others.

So I spent a couple of hours pretending to be best friends with Allison while Debbie and Leslie pretended to be best friends. And then we switched it up and Debbie and I had to pretend to be best friends while Allison and Leslie pretended to be best friends. Part of this game was that it was Us Against Them, but of course the Us’s and Them’s changed as we switched teams. There was a tent involved in this game too. A best friends tent. Maybe there were two tents, I can’t remember.

I’m sure boys don’t play games as complicated as this.

Anyway, I was not looking forward to the part where I had to be best friends with Debbie, because we couldn’t stand each other. But something happened. After a couple of hours of hanging out in our best friends tent and telling each other our secrets and being nice to each other and sharing our stuff, we didn’t have to pretend to be best friends anymore. Over the course of pretending to be best friends, we became best friends. REAL best friends. Us against Them best friends. I remember how surprised we were by how much we liked each other that afternoon.

Unfortunately it didn’t last. The game ended, and within hours we were back to our old vicious pattern of mutual destruction. It would be fifteen more years before we started to become best friends again for real. But by then we would be all grown up and living in different homes in different cities and raising children of our own.

I wish we hadn’t wasted all our living-together years being enemies. If I could go back and do it all over again, I’d be best friends with Debbie right from the very beginning.

Happy birthday to my big sister and best friend! I love you. I’m sorry about your toothbrush.