I’ve often thought of my future daughter, and I’ve had a few dreams with her. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I never dream of having a son, just a daughter. The worst dream came in November 2009, while my husband was in the hospital with a then-undiagnosed medical issue, which it took four and a half years to fully solve. Since the doctors couldn’t figure out immediately what the problem was, they did all kinds of tests for all kinds of diseases, including cancer. The scariest was the HIV test, which would take 48 hours before we got the results. Mark and I were scared, and our discussion turned toward our future children. He was worried that if he had HIV, he would pass it on to our future children. I tried to calm him down, but that thought plagued me as well.

That night, alone at home, I had a dream. I was in the hospital and there was a mother with a very sick little girl. The girl was probably about four or five years old, with long, straight, dark hair. She was vomiting into a bucket her mother held. Her mother looked exhausted, and I knew she deserved a break. I went to them and offered to watch the girl for a while, so her mother could get some rest. In an instant, the mother was gone and I was holding the girl on my lap, no longer vomiting but still tired and weak. As I held her, my heart broke for her, and suddenly we were at home in our living room (in the dream it was our living, though truthfully I didn’t recognize it from “real life”), and she was my daughter, and she had AIDS. I loved her so much, and I wished I could make everything better.

Thankfully, the results came back negative, so we don’t have to worry about this dream coming true.