“I’ve told you the story of how your dad and I met, right?’
‘Only a couple dozen times.’
‘But do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember,’ I said. ‘You saw him and you left the bathroom and you knew you had to be with him. You just knew. From that moment on. It would be the two of you.’
‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘What I knew was that if I walked out of the bathroom and said good-bye to him, I would be fine. I would go to the play and meet someone else—if not that afternoon, then another afternoon—and I’d have an entirely different life. I’d be married to this new person or I wouldn’t. or I’d rekindle my romance with my first boyfriend, Neiman Mortimar, who happens to be the biggest distributor of women’s prom dresses anywhere in the Northeast, now. And I’d have these big, wonderful Shabbat dinners. And I’d like my mother-in-law very, very much…What happened the day I met your father,’ she said, ‘is that I learned you have to choose. For better or for worse. You have to choose what your life is going to look like.’
I tried to swallow, tried to think of what I wanted to say, what I was really thinking. ‘I just don’t feel like I have good choices yet,’ I said. ‘It makes it hard to give up the old ones.’
She waved me off. ‘Well, you’re behind all that anyway,’ she said. ‘You’re still stuck on the same part you were stuck on at seven.’
‘What part is that?’
‘The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren’t anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You’re still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.”