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- karenaclark
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Hindsight is everything, but it is only good for a lesson learned. Nothing about the past can be changed. This excerpt from chapter one of my book Pros & Cons is about hindsight. #letsgetpublished 10/15/25
Pros & Cons of Family: Chapter 1 – Hindsight is Everything
I should have left the city and never looked back…
I should have remembered national news stories of drugs flooding inner cities. I should have researched the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. I should have had an inkling from my experiences with my late brother, a police officer in Northern California in the 1980s. He was taught that policemen are Gods on the street. I knew how it could be with cops and nasty attitudes; he had one, much as I loved the asshole. I should have remembered that Los Angeles was the same city that probation officers told me horror stories of after they had fled to Sacramento County, where I worked as a probation officer. I should have thought longer and harder about coming to the city full of street gangs that my late husband, Finley, fled at age 16 because of the violence in the mid-seventies.
We were married at the Sacramento courthouse nine months after we met in the fall semester at CA State University, Sacramento (“Sac State”). I gave birth twice before finishing my degree. Finley had no shame in wearing a baby carrier and taking Gara to class. He got lots of attention, they were both so cute.
Fast forward to 1986, Gara four, Naeem two. Finley had no shame in taking my precious daughter and son to a war zone without me to start his job. Pursuing his dream of becoming a filmmaker, Finley had landed a job at an independent film company in Los Angeles. I didn’t like L.A. as a residency choice. I’d rather have my family dysfunction in a smaller, familiar city with people I knew. But Finley had made two brilliant indie short films that gained notice. He had a promising career ahead of him and was going back to the city he had fled. I suspected he was under duress, something I knew little of before marrying him. Up until that point, I had had a pretty stress-free life despite my recreational drug use, which started in college. He was in deeper, but I didn’t recognize it.
Now Finley was leaving me with the kids in tow, in a U-Haul, because I refused to go with him. In hindsight, I thought that clever of him. He knew I would follow if he had the kids. He left a mattress, my clothes, toiletries, and our brand-new Honda Civic.
In hindsight, I should have stood my ground. I should have argued that the Los Angeles Unified School District was notorious for its terrible record on testing and graduation rates. I should have asserted that I would have no network; there was no Google, no social media. There were only reference books at Crystal Stairs and the yellow pages.
I should have never come here. I should been more aggressive in arguing that I would have no support system in Los Angeles. All of our family members in L.A. were young; even my in-laws; everyone worked. In Sacramento, I had friends I could call on in an emergency; I had a sister and two brothers nearby whom I saw on the weekends. My parents were less than an hour away.
How would I navigate working, being a mother, and pursuing my artistic endeavors with no one but Finley to help? He was not dependable; I had no reason to believe he would be different in a city with many more options to be wilder, more unpredictable.
Gara and Naeem, strapped into the big front seat of the U-Haul, waved goodbye with wide smiles, ready for an adventure. I called his bluff, knowing he would be back in a few weeks; another incomplete project.
But he did not come back.
Four weeks after their move, the morning after the wrap party for “Brixton Recovery”, a stage play for which I had been the female lead in a Sacramento playhouse, I packed up my clothes and toiletries, left the mattress, and drove south in the beautiful gold Honda that we had purchased a few months prior.
I should have never come to this place, me, a small-town and Air Force base girl. How did I plant myself in a life I hated, in a city I deplored, in a job I had fallen into, raising two innocent children whom I was ill-equipped to guide? And why did I stay?
Isn’t the answer to everything, so often tied to a thirty-six-year love story?... Yes. But hindsight is everything.
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