If you’re using a GPS for directions, step by step it will give you the best way to get there.

Instead of following those directions, if you decided to veer off a different way, your GPS will give you a re-do.

Mine says “recalculating.”

I hear that often, since sometimes I know a shortcut or prefer a route with less traffic.

Lately I’ve been thinking it would be nice if life gave us the ability to re-do our actions and decisions - to change the course we follow.

But the sad truth is the past is the past.

There is no alternating what happened in the past.

Life doesn’t offer us that re-do.

Many of us wish it did.

I often hear someone say, “I would have done it differently if I had another chance.”

One friend says she can pinpoint the exact time when she fell into a deep pit of miserable existence.

After carrying on a daily correspondence with a guy she knew in college, he invited her to visit him. She came back glowing, saying they were soul mates. They were going to live together.

At his urging, she quit her job, packed up her furniture and moved to his place where she had no job and no support system.

Life was a downward spiral from there on, ending when he ordered her to move out because he was going to marry someone else.

At that point she had no money to move again and no job. Crawling out of that financial hole and the hurt of his abrupt rejection took a long time to get over.

“If only I could do it over again I wouldn’t have made the foolish mistake of believing his promises,” she said.

If only.

If only we could have a re-do.

Most of us have something we would do differently.

During a lively discussion at lunch with several friends I was surprised when they said they wished they could re-do their child raising years because there was so much they would do differently.

I thought I was the only one who felt that way.

I loved every single bit of motherhood and I poured everything I had into being my version of a good mother.

When I was growing up I hated the way my mother screamed whenever she was displeased. And it didn’t take much to displease her.

I vowed when I got married and had children that there would be no screaming in my home.

While I never screamed or cursed, what I didn’t know was that I was doing something as unsettling as my mother’s screaming.

When I was upset with my daughters I held it all inside. I simply didn’t talk. My daughters called it giving them the silent treatment.

Shame on me.

As someone who thought she was good at communicating, I sure didn’t use those skills with my daughters. While I thought I was being virtuous, I had no idea the harm I was doing.

Now that my daughters are grown with children of their own, they both say they have emotional scars from my silent treatments. They don’t mind disagreements or expressing strong feelings - anything except silence, they say.

They both are superb at communicating their feelings. Now, I am too.

The “older me” is much better and much smarter than the young me.

I just wish I had a big re-do button so I could wipe away my past transgressions.

I think a lot of us wish they had that button.

When a close friend of mine was getting married for the second time, he and his fiancé went to counseling to get their marriage off on the right foot.

He didn’t like when he was told he had to come to grips with what he did wrong to cause his first marriage to fail. He had to accept responsibility for his role in that failure, the counselor said.

“I can change anything but I can’t change the past,” he said.

What he didn’t grasp was that we all have patterns of behavior. By changing any behavior that helped end his first marriage he was insuring a more secure second marriage.

When I was at that luncheon with friends and we were talking about what we wished we could change about the past, two women wished they could re-do their years with their young children.

One said she wished she could have been more loving and less strict. Another woman said she wished she would have realized how fast her children would be grown and gone.

“I fussed too much,” she said.

Oh, I can relate to that too.

Last Sunday was First Communion in our church. I enjoyed seeing the big smiles and excitement of the youngsters.

I noticed during the service the mothers kept fussing with fixing hair and smoothing dresses. A little girl with the world’s sweetest smile was told to stop smiling and pay attention.

I saw my old self in all the fussing.

I know now why they say we grow “too soon old and too late smart.”

With age comes more wisdom about what is important and what’s not.

Too bad all of our later-in-life wisdom doesn’t come with a reset button to wipe out the parts we wish we could do over.

Contact Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net