A Letter to My Future Child

There was a time when I almost gave up hope for you. It was a quiet acceptance, the way one feels when summer ends, and the leaves begin shifting colours. It was not long before the tree branches were bare and the leaves became brittle brown crunching under my shoes. A quiet acceptance morphed into a loud echo that only I could hear. 

I wrote a goodbye letter to you in the dead of winter, when my cold hands bled words mixed with my tears onto paper. Each word felt like a sharply wielded knife delivering a painful stab to my chest. My heart was aching from the loss of something that never existed.  

If I’m honest, it felt wrong writing that letter. 

If you pay attention, your body will tell you when something is wrong. This intricate system of capillaries, veins, and arteries working hard to keep you alive. A complex highway of neuron circuits sending signals. It is there in the loud thudding of your heart and the cramp in your stomach. It is there in the tremble of your hand, the stinging of your eyes, and the restless tapping of your foot. 

Looking back now, I realize it was a foolish letter to write. Even the most misguided passion can be translated into anger, smearing words that feel so final as if we hold the pen of destiny. It saddens me that I may have disappointed our Creator for assuming I knew what is written for me. Those words were meant to be a release, but the ink became poison, bleeding through the paper, and seeping into the corners of my home, burrowing under my skin. 

The loss of prayer was like letting the disease spread, eating away the roots and leaving the gardens feeling barren. How do flowers grow on a ground that has not been touched by sujud?

I was called back to prayer the way a sailor finds himself stranded in a vast ocean with no shore in sight. I asked Allah for forgiveness and words that once spoke of loss were replaced by words that felt like a soothing balm and that is when I knew I had never completely lost hope for you to come into my life.

I liked to pretend I did but it was a farce. 

A self-preservation tactic.

Each day I tested the words on my lips, asking Allah for you to be part of my world. Strange things began happening once I became bolder in my prayers, asking for you to be pious and healthy. Random people began asking me how you were doing. How strange you must think, but it is true…

The waiter at my lunch spot asked me how my baby was doing, looking puzzled when I said I didn’t have a baby, “I could have sworn I saw you in here with a stroller.”

I laughed off the image that threatened to bring tears to my eyes. 

When I went back to an old place of work to offer a few extra hours, a coworker I’d never met assumed I’d been away for maternity leave. She asked after my “little one.” 

“I have a little one?” I joked with a smile big enough to hide the pain in my eyes.

A cashier asked me if I was a mommy on Mother’s Day as I bought a plant for Ammi. I broke down when it happened for the fourth time, crying in the corner, and making a dua for it to be true. 

I ranted to my friends and my mother about it and cried some more. Still, I can’t help but feel some hope in these assumptions made by complete strangers. The hope was faint at first, but each time I pray, the words from these strangers come back to me. 

I wonder if this is a sign that it will happen.

My whole life you were this dream that felt so real. I imagined what you would look like and what we would do together. I cried when I found your name in a book. I knew it in my bones that you would come into my life one day. 

Nobody tells you that being an adult means it will get very loud. The voices of others and the one in your head will shake your faith until you are on the ground trembling trying to shut everything off. That is when the pieces of your dream begin to break, scattered on the ground like glass shards. Every time you try to pick them up, you are cut, and blood is drawn. You discard the pieces and convince yourself it is a broken dream. 

A lost cause.

That it was never written for you. 

How arrogant we are to think we know Allah’s plan. That because it is delayed, it is not in our destiny. As if we know what the Almighty has written for us. 

Eventually I found my way back to the Quran and found comfort in Zakkariyah’s (a.s) prayers asking for a baby. Sitting down and making the dua again, I expected for it to feel like I was picking up shards of glass of my broken dream, but instead it felt like I was picking flowers. 

رَبِّ لَا تَذَرْنِي فَرْدًا وَأَنْتَ خَيْرُ الْوَارِثِينَ

(Surah Anbiya, 89))¹

Tranquility washed over my heart when I began praying for a child again at the age of thirty-six with no marriage prospect in sight. 

It’s like I am pressing those flowers into my chest and the fragrance lingers after each salah.

I pray for you every chance I get. It became easier to filter out the useless noises and focus on the reassembled dream cupped in my hands when I pray. 

I still do not see the way to you my dear child, but I know we will meet one day, either in this duniya or in Jannah, Insha’Allah. 

I know my Rabb is listening to my prayers. Afterall, He is the All Hearing. 

I will wait for you as I tend to my garden already filled with my Lord’s blessings. 

There are so many blooms here already.

Love,
Your mother

¹Translation: “My Lord, do not leave me alone [with no heir], while you are the best of inheritors.”
(Surah Anbiya, Ayat 89)