We only regret what we don’t do in life

“We only regret what we don’t do in life” is Margie Mularkey’s advice to her daughter, Kate Mularkey, when Kate is struggling to imagine that other people might want to know her. The expression recasts risk as a safeguard against future regret: a life can change only if someone acts, reaches outward, and accepts the uncertainty of trying.

The Advice in Context

Margie begins by touching Kate’s hand gently and challenging her habit of spending her time reading and doing homework. When Kate says people do not want to know her, Margie refuses to treat waiting as a solution. She invokes Gloria Steinem and women marching on Washington as an example of people acting rather than sitting back for the world to change on its own.

Kate asks whether this is meant to help her make friends. Margie answers on a larger scale: she wants Kate to understand that she can become what she wants, but that possibility requires taking a risk and reaching out. The advice therefore meets an immediate teenage concern while placing it inside a broader claim about agency and choice.

Kate’s Response and the Phrase’s Tension

Kate does not immediately accept the lesson. She hears sadness in her mother’s voice, particularly around the word regret, but dismisses Margie’s wisdom as irrelevant to the battlefield of junior-high popularity. Her resistance preserves the gap between the adult’s hard-won perspective and a teenager’s urgent, narrower predicament.

Margie’s formulation is confident, yet the sadness Kate detects complicates it. The sentence presents action as a way to avoid regret, while Margie’s tone suggests that regret is not merely an abstract possibility. The advice carries emotional weight without explaining its source; the scene leaves Kate unconvinced, even as the words offer a principle she may understand more fully later.

Meaning and Narrative Role

The expression joins friendship to a larger ethic of choosing rather than waiting. In this exchange, reaching out is not promised to produce a particular result; it is presented as necessary if Kate is to discover what her life and relationships might become. The maxim’s significance lies in that distinction between controlling an outcome and taking the chance to act.

Margie ends the exchange with a joke that Kate will recognize her mother’s wisdom around the time she wants her to babysit. The teasing return to their everyday future softens the serious counsel without undoing it. The phrase thus functions both as direct advice about making friends and as a compact statement of Margie’s belief that possibility requires participation.