[Ed.'s note: The following is a true story. Everything happened pretty much as described, even the dreams. The names have been changed, however.]
In her dream, Caroline Stewart, a young American mother of two sons, boards a plane and flies across thousands of miles to try to find her long, lost daughter. Unlike her sons, her daughter is blond and fragile and fair. She has a big red bow in her hair and wears an oversized red-and-green plaid dress. Her daughter is sitting, staring out of a frosted window waiting for her mother to come and take her home. "Where are you, mama?" the little girl cries silently each night, all alone in her small bed. "Don't you love me anymore?"
Caroline's husband didn't think they could afford another child, and the boys said they didn't want a sister. But the men in the family knew when mom was going to get her own way. After several failed attempts at an overseas adoption in the coming years, Caroline received a letter stating that a little girl was available for adoption in the Soviet Union. When she opened the envelope to look at the photograph, she saw the face of a seven- year old girl with blond hair tied back with a big red bow. This was her daughter, the child she had dreamt about for years. Nothing would stop Caroline from going to the Soviet Union to bring her daughter home.
Within a year after arriving in America, Marissa refused to speak Russian and had long since stopped calling her mother "Mamushka." Marissa was doing well in school, especially in art. She liked her older brothers, her best friend Amy, M&M's, making sand castles on the beach during summer vacation, and shopping. She didn't like cleaning up her room or arithmetic.
One night, after fighting with her brother, Ted, about whose turn it was to dry the dishes, Marrisa went into the living room and sat down next to her mother on the couch. Caroline thought she looked sad and asked her if anything was wrong. Marissa was quiet a moment, then asked, "Shouldn't sisters live together?" When Caroline asked her what she meant, Marissa told her she had left a little sister back at the orphanage in Russia. As Caroline cradled her new daughter and comforted her, she knew she was soon going to have two daughters. Many frustrating months later, she and Ted had adopted their second daughter.
Two years after first coming to live with her new family, Marissa was helping her mother with the dishes. As they finished, Marissa reached up and rubbed her mother's stomach. She said, "I like your round tummy. It's just like in my dream."
"Your dream?" Caroline asked, puzzled.
"Yes, my dream I had when I lived in Russia. I dreamed it lots and lots of times when I was waiting for you to come get me."
Caroline stood perfectly still for a moment and then slowly asked, "When you were waiting for me to come get you?"
"Yes," Marissa answered, rubbing her mother's stomach once more, "I used to dream about you. You could fly over the clouds and you were going to come and take me home. You had short dark hair and green eyes and a soft round belly.
"Do you remember the first time you hugged me?"
"Yes," Caroline whispered as she tried to fight back tears.
"Well, that's when I knew, Mamushka," Marissa said as she put her tiny hand on Caroline's stomach and rubbed. "This was my mama's belly and my dream came true. You came and took me home. I love you, Mama."
-- Dorothy G. Packer-Fletcher