the right to choose is also the right to regret

If It’s a Woman’s Right to Choose—

Am I just my mother’s enduring mistake?
A wrong choice of man, of time, of place—
Too late to turn back. With every breath,
Did I steal another dream from her grasp?
Is what I do meaningful if it should have never been?
Is it  mine if it should have been hers?

Even now, with her years gone,
I bear the weight of who they could have been if not mothers—
My mother, and her mother, and her mother's mother.
Quickly blame "a few cells," as if every body is a burden,
Not a person brimming with potential.
Can’t a bad choice become something good?
To believe mistakes can turn fortuitous
Is the only way I can carry on,
Since I am the mistake of a woman now dead.

If It’s a Woman’s Right to Choose—

What love will I never have in my lifetime?
With this bastardless womb, cause I'm always choosing
What’s deemed right—cherry-picking my desires
Instead of embracing what life naturally gifts?
What dreams linger, never realized, because
I chose myself every damn time? I mourn
The world we’ll never see, the people we’ll never know,
Their dreams lost forever because of me and my choice.

I will never know what is right or what is a mistake.
I will never know the mother I could have been.
I will never know the child I might have had.
Dare I admit I might rather no choice at all?
Too late to turn back. With every breath,
All I can do is carry on—
Carry on the regrets of what was or was not,
Just as women kin before me have done.
But no child after me will carry on — I chose none.

If It’s a Woman’s Right to Choose; It's a Woman's Right to Regret—