​5. In the Never Was

I get so mad sometimes because I don’t know if you know this, but it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

There are different versions of the same dream. They vary to the point of morphing into different dreams entirely. Ones where I know the outcome each and every time: I. WIN.

But here’s the thing about other people: you can’t control them. And ultimately, they’re woven into the fiber of each of these dreams. They know their parts but won’t play.

Because they don’t have to. They’re the stars of their own stories.

My daughter. She lives a whole life I can’t control. And as someone who’s naturally battled anxiety since she was sixteen, this is a real bummer. She was supposed to be a brainiac with a penchant for writing and a horrible superiority complex quite like...well...her mother.

But no. She’s a wild heart. She has empathy for others where her mother doesn’t. She lives in a beautiful world made in her own mind and has a gentle mastery over animals. She is willing to work out her blind spots, those dark stains in her being that sometimes cause others to approach her at arm’s length.

She’s not quietly judgmental. Again, like her mother.

She is loudly compassionate and is willing to still love an aging woman who is treading water in the never was.

She is the mirror God granted me to peer into the face of my own soul.

She’s the dream I would have never thought to dream.