Letters to My Daughter, Part 1 (of many)

Dear Kiddo: One night, while I was still a boy, I dreamt a dream of you. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and I certainly wasn’t in love, or anything that passed for love. It wasn't at all the thoughts of girlfriends or romance, or even the impulses of just-burgeoning adolescence, that caused me, asleep in my childhood bed, to be graced with a "vision" (because that's the only word I can think of to describe what this was) of someone whom I knew to be, without having to be told, my own daughter. In the dream I saw myself, as if in a movie, asleep on the sofa in my parlor. A small girl, with dark eyes and long dark hair in pigtails, a toy clasped in her hand, ran into the room, came up to the napping figure and threw her arms around him, and whispered in his ear. “Wake up! Wake up and play with me!” That was all there was; almost as if it was at her bidding, I awoke from the dream to the familiar darkness of my own room. I remember lying there, for a considerable while, awake and puzzled as to what it might mean. The dream neither frightened nor upset me; it just left me with a feeling I can only describe as an odd mix of contentment and wonder. I drifted back to sleep, and went off the school the next day, and thought no more of it for a very long time.


I had for several years known (or thought I did) that I wished to enter religious life, and to that end I entered the seminary only a few years later.  I had always figured I'd be spending my days as the beloved (and somewhat eccentric) Father Michael, dispensing sound counsel to all who came to me, delivering Sunday sermons full of trenchant theological insight and peppered with my trademark self-deprecating dry humor.  Well, like the old saying goes, we make plans and God laughs.  As you and Mommy well know, I did not stay, and at the time there were reasons, good reasons, for that choice, none of which had to do with being in love or wanting to marry. Perhaps, all those years before, I should have interpreted the dream as a sign; it seems to me that, if there is anything to the notion of an immortal soul, then it is quite possible that our souls are in existence long before it is time for them to incarnate. All I know is something that I have told you over and again from practically the day you were born and I first held you in my arms: the life I had chosen for myself was not the life I was meant to live; I was meant to be your father. So you came to me one night in a dream, when I was still just a child myself, to tell me that you were waiting for me. I carried that with me for many years afterward, not really understanding what it might mean or even thinking about it consciously, until the day you were born and I saw you for the first time, again, and with a rush realized that I had always known it was you.

I love you, Kiddo.

Daddy