If dreams came true...

Last year the Oswego Reading Council's writing contest topic was "If dreams could come True".  I started to write a piece for submission but changed my mind since I am the president of the council, I didn't think it would look honorable so I filed it to finish another day.  I would like to share the start of my writing with you, never submitted and never finished...kind of like my sister's case - never found and no closure.

Written last March - prior to the 16th anniversary of my sister's kidnapping:
                I started my thought process and knew instantly the dream I would write about coming true.  This April 3rd marks the 16th anniversary of my sister’s abduction, eighteen years of age at the time.  Still missing, still lost.  I sat down to start writing and knew I would be sharing a dream of my sister calling in sick for work on that blustery cold Easter Sunday instead of going to work and all the fun and exciting things we would do as we both grew into adults.  Yet this isn’t the dream I will to share.  
               I shared my beginning with my daughter and without blinking an eye she said “Mom, if that dream was true we wouldn’t have met Dick and Stacy and all the people with the Ride for Missing Children or with the Center for Missing and Exploited children!”  Whoa!  Out of the mouth of babes…I hadn’t thought of how dreaming of Heidi never being kidnapped and growing into an adult right behind me would have changed the adult I have grown to be.  At eleven years of age my daughter recognized the importance of this event in my life yet viewed it as a positive in light of the loss she feels on some days for never have met her only aunt on my side of the family.  
                If dreams could come true I would dream of watching my daughter mature and make a difference for other children, families and communities affected by abduction while also preventing future abductions from occurring.   I dream of the day when abduction is something merely read about in textbooks and is an extinct occurrence.  We teach our children at home and at school about the dangers of cutting down the trees in the rainforest, of slavery and war yet we aren’t teaching them to protect themselves.

 If dreams could come true…children wouldn’t go missing anymore!

What if...we can't live our lives asking "What if?" instead we need to say "What next?"