Wishes Do Come True

Since I became a mother almost four years ago I've had several moments where I've crossed parallels into the other universe, the one where I am not a mother, the one where I am single, working in the Peace Corps or living in the rainforest, the one I thought I was destined to live because my dream of falling in love with the right man and having a family seemed not possible for someone like me.

Today my oldest daughter found an old journal of mine from Costa Rica. Using the blank pages near the back of it she drew this

a portrait of my husband in his Navy uniform.

I got hit with a double whammy of shocks. The first, to see that my soon-to-be four-year-old could draw something so well. The second, that it was done on a piece of paper that I've held on to for over 10 years, paper from a journal that I wrote in when I was single and dreaming my big dream and crying at night because I was so lonely, so alone, and feeling hopeless that maybe my 'somewhere out there' wasn't really there.

It's happened many times, looking through the glass to the other universe... my daughters stepping into my old heals from college, my oldest tracing her finger over a leaf print I made of a Hasseltia tree that stood outside my casita in Costa Rica, my youngest pulling my 'going out dancing' shirt from college and asking me to wear it (even though I am four months, looking six months pregnant), my daughters trying on a hat my first boyfriend from Nicaragua gave me 11 years ago, my oldest putting a Bouganvilla flower from our backyard behind her ear like I used to do with mine when I was in my 20's...

In each of these miniscule moments I travel back in time in a flash. I never knew when I put on those heals that someday I'd have little girls wanting to wear them. When my fingers took a leaf from my favorite tree and made a rubbing of it, I never knew someday I'd have a beautiful daughter whose heart is as big as her fathers who would outline the veins of the leaf under her fingertips. And I never knew a flower behind a little girls' ear could connect me to her beyond time and space.

I want to tell my daughters to dare to dream those big and impossible dreams, no matter how you see yourself, no matter what people think of you, no matter if you are the loner, thinker, philosopher one in a sea of girls who appear more at ease with themselves.

I'm glad I never stopped dreaming that I'd fall in love and have children. But it's these little moments, like my daughter drawing a picture on a piece of paper, a piece of paper that long ago had no such destiny, that makes goose bumps race across my arms and my heart to skip a beat.