Grandma Henke

Remember the first time you saw this Xeroxed picture floating around?    I liked it way back then and I like it now … Never Give Up!   That frog is squeezing for all its worth hoping the bird will pass out before he does.   His choice to hang on or let go is a life altering choice.   There have been a few things in my life I wanted to give up on or change but couldn’t, and a few things I didn’t want to give up on and I did.    Do you ever wonder what would have happened if things had been just a little big different in situations?

I got thrown from a horse while I was just starting out my first pregnancy and subsequently lost the baby.    I was riding up in the foothills above Draper and the big horse I was riding stopped suddenly, kicked up his back heels and dumped me head over heals in a pile of sage brush.    I was probably a good five miles from home and Chief left me in the dirt while he ran back down the mountain.     The motorcycle neighbor saw the horse run past without a rider and immediately got on his big motor cycle and came to save me.    It was later that night that I realized I was in labor and the pregnancy ended in the early hours of the morning.      I wonder how different the next 40 years would have been if I wouldn’t have ridden the horse that day.    Interesting thought.    But what wouldn’t have happened in my life, too?

Some big events in life happen because you are at the right … or wrong … place at the right … or wrong … time.    My career was actually like that.   Before I started with The Arc I was working at the Health Department a few days a week as a receptionist.     One day some people with cognitive disabilities who all lived together in a group home were brought in for flu shots.   I had such a fun time talking to them I decided to call and see if I could be a volunteer on Friday afternoons.   It turned out they offered me a full time job because of my book keeping background and before the year was over both of the two top director’s plus the secretary stepped down from their positions and the board of director’s offered the position of Executive Director to me.    It all happened in such a way that I felt it was meant to be … that it was more like a calling than a job … and I ended up staying with them for over twenty years.    What if I hadn’t been working at the Health Department that day?   I wonder what would have happened different in my life after that point.

I always wanted to go back to school and earn a degree but I never actually made the decision to sacrifice what it would have taken to do it.     I don’t think I would have had a better job, but I missed out on other experiences that would have made a difference that would have possibly led to different decisions.    But on the other hand, what would I have had to give up?    

It’s kind of a silly question to throw at yourself, really,  because there is no way of knowing what would have happened with a different choice.    We talk now and then about the “deals” we passed up at one time or another.   The property we could have gotten for such a good deal and the people who did get it turned it over and made a huge profit on it in less than a year is one we manage to regret now and then.      If we’d bought that property we wouldn’t have moved to the places that we did later on … and our children wouldn’t have married the people they married.  

I’m grateful for the life we’ve lived because of our choices, both the good ones and the not so good ones.    We’ve learned a lot of lessons and grown in ways we needed to … but sometimes I still wonder.