Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing

by Allison Winn Scotch

I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one. —Calamity Jane

How can you drive away from your past without even glancing in the rearview mirror? That kind of focus took effort.

Cleo suspected he was lying about his teeth, but he was right: he wasn’t eight anymore; he had to learn about consequences. This was part of her parenting strategy: consequences. Unprotected sex led to unplanned pregnancies; abandoned best friends led to op-eds twenty years later. Choices are made, regrets are managed, consequences arise. She’d learned all about them too.

Women in politics didn’t have the luxury of ending their sentences on an upswing, as if they were asking permission, as if they couldn’t find the answers themselves, as if they were waiting for someone to guide them. Actually, Cleo thought, women everywhere couldn’t afford this.

People should be allowed their secrets. People should be allowed their scars.

When you lose your parents young, there is simply a blight on your psyche that becomes part of your being. Really, it had become background noise to Cleo: she knew the loss was there, but if she paid too much attention to it, it would override everything.

Besides, she added, both when he was twelve and anytime he raised it after that, we are not the type of people who chase down others who spurn us. We never will be.

Women who were constantly apologizing were at a disadvantage in any negotiation and, of course, taken less seriously, because who wants advice or counsel from someone who is sorry before they’ve even convinced you of anything?

But like so many regrets, once you’d set those actions in motion, they felt impossible to undo.

Cleo thought about how tangled up it can all get, love and ambition and life and sex and doubt and acceptance and loneliness and, yes, regret. And how sometimes, in the mix of all that, you no longer see yourself clearly and instead you start to view yourself through someone else’s lens, for better and also for worse.