I'd like to take a moment now to write to you, because I know that on the day I meet you, I won't be able to neither write nor talk to you. I want you to know that I've been waiting for you. And it’s the good wait, the one you plan. The ‘all-in-good-time-wait’. Am I anxious to meet you? No. But I do know that the moment I do – everything will change. I've heard about you or at least ‘your kind’ and the conclusion I reached was that children (that’s you guys) will always be much harder, more trouble than expected and more wonderful.
I want you to be a part of my life; I don’t want to simply watch you grow. I don't want to watch you grow, I don't want to teach you how to grow and I don't want to carry your hand through the way. No. I want to watch you fail. I want to see you fall down. It is only then that I watch you grow. I don’t promise you a fairytale and I can’t provide you one; not that it exists. I want you to grow and leave me. I want to be the person (don’t call me father) that made you whoever you will be. I will teach you things about life by actually showing you life. Letting you live the way you were born to live it, and not by how everyone wants you to. When you’re with me, you forget about everyone. I really don’t want you to host me a perfect dinner and put a smile on, when you’re dead inside. I don’t want you to give speeches and have perfect social manners when your heart is made of stone and your way of thinking is molded by society. I don’t expect that from you. And I don’t want you to. Never. I want you to be real. Have an open heart, an open mind and open arms. I want you to be powerful, fearless, independent and passionate. I don’t expect you to make me proud, that is too much to ask from you, because what makes me proud doesn’t have to make you proud. It is then when you are not real. I only expect you to have free souls. Don’t let life imprison you. You are truly a child of this world. Not mine. I was only the messenger. You belong to this world and not to me. So I only ask of you to have free souls. If I ever have a message to send to this world and to the generations that will come after me, you guys are the only way.
I get goose bumps when I think that you are now inside me. I am forming you. And as I grow you grow with me. But the more ‘I form you’the more I know that your father and I are only a transit. I am only waiting for your father. Will he understand? Or will he expect to have you under his wings forever? He won’t. Anyone with a free soul understands that as Gibran K. Gibran says “your children live with you but do not belong to you, you may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts, you may house their bodies but not their souls.”
I do wait for you. And the more I think about it the more exuberant I get. Yet I know that there is a time for everything and the moment we meet, rivers will flow and flowers will blossom. I will be waiting for the day to come to hold you for the first time, watch your first steps, bring you back from school and set you free to the world. But what if I never get the chance to?
-Maya Mansour and Ameer Daou
