Regrets Raising My Daughter

It’s complicated.

I’m always confused when people say they have no regrets. The definition of regret is to “feel sad, repentant or disappointed over something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity.”

By that definition, I’ve had plenty of regrets.

I don’t regret having my daughter, but I regret all the things I couldn’t do for her.

Not providing her a stable home till she was in high school.

There are some days I regret being awarded full custody of my daughter when she was 13. Not exactly the custody itself, but what it represented. It meant that I had failed to create even an amicable relationship with her mother. And even though that was a challenging task, there are some days I feel like my daughter paid a steep price for us to be together.

Maybe we couldn’t have predicted this, but winning full custody meant my daughter never seeing her sisters again. They both were on her mother’s side, but she had already combed their hair, kicked them out of her room, bathed them, put them to sleep, made them breakfast.

All of that ended the day the courts handed me those papers. And again, it wasn’t an outcome we anticipated, but it happened, and I regret it. Sibling connections are priceless.