I remember it so clearly, that day I regret. I was seven years old sitting in a lawn chair surrounded by the poor Hispanic family from down the road.

The Mendozas didn’t have much, but they had each other, and were always together like a pack of puppies in our neighborhood. I don’t remember their folks ever being around. Perhaps their parents were away working night and day to feed eight kids in that single-wide trailer on a hill across the road.

The Mendozas taught me how to make tortillas on the stove top without burning my fingers. Salt, tortillas, and butter, that’s all I remember eating at their house. At our house, I sat in my lawn chair with a bag of Doritos. I was handing out the chips one by one, making the poor kids do tricks for their treats.

My dad was working in the yard when he noticed me in my lawn chair conducting a circus with those kids. Daddy strode right over and jerked me out of my chair, snatching the Doritos out of my hand, and giving the whole bag to the Mendozas. Then he hauled me into the house and used his belt on me.

“Who do you think you are?!” He fumed during my beating. “If someone doesn’t have enough, you give them what you have! We help poor people. We aren’t better than them!”

Daddy’s anger left welts on my legs and backside. I will never forget that painful lesson. For the rest of my life, I’ve never thought myself better than poor people. And since that day, I’ve shared what I have. This is how I live with regret. I help the poor.

Another regret is I never graduated college. Two classes short of a diploma, I got married and left school. To this day, I now finish what I start. I’ve written seven novels, four of them just for practice. Halfway into these books, I wanted to stop writing, but I didn’t. I finished the manuscripts because I didn’t finish college.

When I became a believer, I deeply regretted that Jesus paid for my sins with his life. So when I got saved, I saw it as a life for a life transaction. I owe the Savior my life so I live for Jesus now. But there have been times I’ve not wanted to obey God. Like after giving birth to our fourth baby, I never wanted to be pregnant again. All my pregnancies involved bed rest and plenty of sickness and sacrifice. But my husband desired more babies even though I was pushing forty. My friends said, “Just tell your husband no!” But the Bible says, “Obey your husband,” so I said yes to more pregnancies. Thank the Lord I did! I can’t imagine life without all our boys.

I’ve spent twenty-five years raising little ones. This wasn’t because I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom forever. The truth is, I’ve always longed for a career outside of our home. If it was up to me, I would have pursued journalism and put a lot more time and energy into becoming an author.

I nearly chose this career road in my twenties. When our second child was only two-years-old, I put her and her four-year-old sister in daycare and took a job writing for a newspaper. I will never forget the day I went to the daycare after work to pick up our little girls. Our youngest daughter was crying uncontrollably. She’d lost her scrap of a blanket that was her security.

The daycare lady didn’t seem to care. I was mad as a mother hen and not about to leave that daycare without my daughter’s blanket. I was so out of control, I was digging thorough the daycare’s giant sandbox trying to find Lacy’s blanket. The daycare lady walked over to me at the sandbox and said, “Look, I did you a favor. She needed to get rid of that blanket.”

Never have I been so mad at another woman. I seriously wanted to throw that daycare lady on the ground and make her dig through the sand with me until we found my daughter’s blanket.

But you know what? That daycare lady truly did me a favor. The day we lost my daughter’s beloved blanket, I realized I was the only one who could give real security to my kids. My daughter didn’t need a blanket. She needed me.

So I pulled our girls out of daycare. I kept writing for the newspaper, but I worked from home until our first son came along and put the kibosh on that. Luke was such a handful and my marriage was hard in those days so I stopped writing altogether to just be a mom and a wife for a number of years.

When I sit here mapping my regrets, I realize the regrets I carry have made me who I am. Yes, I live with regret, but I’ve learned to put a saddle on regret and ride the hell out of it.