What Dreams May Come

What God has written for you will have you.

One of my favorite quotes from a movie is “What God has written for her will have her.” (Bend It Like Beckham) And God can and will communicate to you any way He sees fit. This portion of the story is just about that.

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In the five weeks I waited for an email reply, God gave me ample opportunity to recollect things that had happened with us so many years ago, the opportunity to view things from an adult perspective, to wonder how much I’d been persuaded (my favorite Jane Austen novel is Persuasion, always has been, Ann loved the Captain, he loved her, but she was persuaded to give him up so he had to go away…. But then came back!) I also went to the memorial service for Jerry. Texas (God) was taking care of me by taking care of unfinished business head to toe to fibrous tissue.

By the time I clicked the OMG only got your email just now email from Peter I was more than ready to take whatever was coming my way.

Now things begin to intensify, move at a faster clip, and stories diverge so they can come together again.

Also in those five weeks, I’d been attending mass. Learning about the mass. And wondering if this mass was something I might commit to more fully. All I knew was that it was right. I was glad to not have to search for a church anymore.

Some of you have expressed to me personally that you are worried about the fibroids (I was still worried about that too) and that though you are enticed by the long lost love  story, you are also concerned at this point for my health. After my least favorite doctor ever exited the room with a dim semi-glare at the belief that nothing short of ripping out my uterus would take care of my situation, I was back to square one. I was flattened with exception of my belly and really didn’t know what to do. One good thing that HAAM had given me was the ability to get the little bastards x-rayed and measured and saved on a disc with a full report of what was actually going on in there. I didn’t pretend to understand it all, but I knew the measurements weren’t good. You don’t want to hear that the lumps in your belly are being compared to fruit sizes.

Some other handy things that were going on – I was working as a music teacher for families with infants and toddlers, so I met men and women from all walks of life. Wonderful families and precious mothers – some of whom would regularly congratulate me on my pregnancy. (Yep.) And I got to say with a big smile “No, actually not pregnant. I have fibroids and they’re making me look like I’m “with child”. Okay, who has birthday today?” Or some such other comment to make them not feel bad but also stop them spreading rumors.

I even taught at a preschool where a little girl walked up to me and hugged my belly with a big warm smile like she knew I was expecting.

There are only so many flouncy blouses a woman can wear to cover up the inevitable.

As the classes were semester based and because I am an extrovert, I got to know families on a more personal level than just a stanza of Wheels on the Bus then out the door.

Early on I’d met Jane*, who I found out within a month or so of knowing her, that she was working on getting her PhD as a Nurse Practitioner and that her husband (who I’d met only once) was a doctor.

Who knows how long it took but in passing it came up that her husband was actually a surgeon for the Texas institute for Robotic Surgery.

All along they were just one of “my” sweet families that I had fun singing and dancing with weekly with their little girl.

You have to understand that these little points came up so casually in conversation as I got to know her and also fun facts about all the other moms and dads I began to love, that it didn’t overtly or in any obvious way occur to me at that time that they might be able to help me.

But for the time being we had weekly fun singing together. I went to mass.

And Peter not so slowly re-entered my life one daily email at a time.

What began was a digital pen pal system of long encyclopedia-like entries catching us up on each other’s lives for the last twenty seven years. Peter, I would learn, (but also already – kind of always – knew) needed to have his say. Because after the showdown with my grandmother – he never got that chance. Oh, and because I’d slammed and locked the door.

So I happily gave him that long awaited chance now. We caught each other up and remembering everything we could. In fact we wouldn’t talk over the phone for two or three weeks. We just wrote and read.

One day Peter brought up the topic of dreaming in his email. (Before you read on you must remind yourself of my dream about him. In a nutshell I’ll remind you that I’d dreamed he’d told me “You are my soul.” I woke up changed forever toward him. (I never told him I had this dream.) He told me that throughout the years he dreamed that he was trying to find me, running after me and that I was always running away. I never told him that over the years I dreamed he was always chasing me and I was trying to get away until he stopped and I felt his friendship and our relationship in the dreams changed.

Then he told me of a different dream, a recurring dream he had throughout the years of waiting. He said that sometimes I’d come to him in the dream and put his face in my hands and say, “that was a good thing you did.” And the dream was beautiful and angelic but then he’d wake up and feel a deep sadness that I wasn’t with him.

And what I read next in his email flipped my chair backward.

“ I came to realize that ‘you are my soul’ in the dream...”

You are my soul.

You. Are. My. Soul.

Peter had written verbatim to me in his email what he’d told me only just weeks before - in my dream.

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*name changed.