If you had the chance to do it all over, what would you do differently?

This is my post for #memoirsmonday hosted by @erivvancewalton

If you had the chance to do it all over, what would you do differently?

This is a question that I have thought about in the past, I have thought hard about it, too, and for most of my life, the answer would have to be nothing.

If I had told my Dad that I wanted to stay in Florida with my Mom my whole life would have changed, he moved us from Florida to Missouri and I am sure he would not have let me stay.

At 15 I met a boy in Missouri and at 16 if I had not given in to him I would not have the daughter that I have, and if I had not married him, I would not have my son. I am sure I would have still had kids but who would they be, not the people that I know and love? I chose them the way they are, so I would not want to do this differently. What would I do differently? I still would have divorced him, this has to be yes so there is no difference there either.

The same goes for my second marriage, I had two more children and I can not see them being anyone else, I would not want to have any of them being a different person and this would have changed my grandchildren who I love. This husband I did not want a divorce but in the end, I am glad we did because I married again and have been with this one for 40 years.

I would have changed the day before this picture was taken, it was the day after my wedding, I would not have insisted on driving my car home after drinking the day of my wedding day and crashing into a tree. There was no wedding night.

Even though being a commercial fisherman has been hard on my body, I would never want to change this, I can remember my fishing mistakes and would like to change them. like the time I set jacks and my net was too close to the channel and the rings of the net floated over each other, I do not remember how many times I had to cut it to get it back in the boat, what a huge mess and mistake that was.

There was the time I tore the disc in my back, in the ocean I was leaning over the side of the boat for 45 minutes or more trying to get a hammerhead shark that had rolled up in the end of our net, it was so big that we could never see the entire thing at once, we could get it's head up but not see its tail, then get its tail up but not see its head, its hammer was over 4 feet across. It had to be over 15 feet.

The time I was getting my ice before daylight and I heard mullet jumping but could not see them so I went on, only to find out later the old man who never caught anything came to the fish house right at daylight and saw them, he had close to 2 thousand pounds, only if I would stayed there and waited for it to get light enough to see. My husband calls these things 40-40 hindsight.

The day at the creek when I was setting my net around mullet and picked up the mike for the CB radio and told my husband he better get there, only later to find out I had it on scan and I told the entire fishing fleet, except my husband who was on our secret channel, I had 4 thousand pounds and he never caught any. That was a big mistake on my part. The photo is of that "set", a friend got on my boat and helped me pull my net in.

And the day we were fishing in Salerno which is 2 hours from home, the fish house down there shut off on buying mackerel and two friends down there asked if we would bring their fish back with ours and sell them for them at our fish house. We had a huge fishbox in the back of our truck and they filled it. It was dark when we got on I-95 heading home and my husband asked why are the headlights shining in the trees, then he tried to switch lanes and the front tires felt like they were floating and he tried to straighten it up but the truck kept drifting. He got it under control and did his best to stay in one lane, I prayed the entire 2 hour drive. They put so much weight in the bed of the truck that the front tires were barely on the ground.

These are the two things I wish I could go back and change.

I would have insisted my Dad to stop being stubborn and go to a doctor and maybe I would have had more time with him.

If there had been a way I could have known my Mom was going to have a major stroke maybe I would have checked on her, one of my sisters was there but did not find her until the morning, she had her stroke at night.