You Shouldn't Have - Julie Farrar

You shouldn’t have let Dad bring home that dog that went against everything the allergist had said we might try. It wasn’t small, it wasn’t short-haired, it didn’t stay off the furniture. You shouldn’t have given in so quickly to the pleadings of “We’ll take care of it. We promise” when your mom-intuition told you that you would be the one sitting on the floor all evening brush brush brushing her and cutting out the mats from that cotton fine underbelly hair.

You shouldn’t have gotten that job at the high school office that had you the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night. You and your other female office secretaries (not today’s glorified “administrative assistants”) were paid nothing and respected less by those men who ran things. You shouldn’t have stayed there as your illness progressed and your energy ran down. But your presence brightened the days of so many and my only path to glory and recognition in my dweeby days of high school came when kids said “Mrs. Farrar is your mother? Cool.”

You should have been in charge of something much more significant than the switchboard. But maybe you shouldn’t have done that job as well as the job at the department store dressing models for fashion shows to put extra money aside for our wonderful Christmas and birthday presents and to make sure that at least your book-crazy youngest child got to go away to college if she wanted to. Your only reward was when designer Bill Blass told you he liked what you were wearing as you crawled on your hands and knees backstage looking for lost shoes and accessories.

All of your hard work should have enlarged our tiny ranch home with the family room you had sketched on a stray piece of graph paper one evening or bought you that lovely bungalow in Bedford Oaks with the fireplace that Dad said no to because he always said no to spending any money unless it was a dog for the kids or a school trip to Washington D.C. or a car for his girls to run around in.

Maybe you shouldn’t have said no to those doctor visits when you first started having trouble breathing. You could have taken a couple of days off of work to check it out. You know the other ladies in the office would have covered for you without complaint because they knew that you would take on their load when it was needed. Someone else in the family would have made sure to get to the nursing home to see Granny on the days that you would have been in treatment. No one would have begrudged you that little bit of selfishness.

Yes, you should have stopped smoking long before it got to this. And Dad should have stopped after the diagnosis – you should have insisted – but by then there was not much left that could change the course. But mostly you shouldn’t have given away everything that you had to everyone else. You should have saved just some small corner inside for yourself, with a little energy to follow your own dreams. You shouldn’t have been you because maybe you would have still been here with us.