AN OPEN LETTER TO MY
UNBORN GRANDCHILD
Dear Grandchild,
I received my 1st picture of you in the mail
today(11-6-2012).A lot is going on right now. Today is the day that America is
going to find out who will be the President of the United States for the next
four years but in the midst of all of the excitement and nervous anticipation
about that decision, my mind is preoccupied with thoughts concerning you and
what your birth will mean for my future.
See, my life has been a series of both smart and not so
intelligent decisions up to this point in time but the one thing that I know
that I did right was the choice that I made to have your mother despite all of
the obstacles that I was facing at the time that I found out that your
Grandmother' was pregnant with her.
There were people on
both sides of our family that thought that me and your Grandmother were too
young to take care of a baby because we were both very young ourselves but I
instinctively knew that your Grandmother and I were both participating in the
production of someone great.
I didn't know the exact words to articulate what I was
feeling , but I knew that it was bigger than both of us and that my job was to
insure that things stayed on course and that the baby was born. In April of
1994, I finally got the present that I had been waiting for. I was even lucky
enough to be there and cut the umbilical cord that gave your mother the same
belly button that she has to this day.
I was very young and reckless with a lot of potential but I
lacked patience and discipline so eventually I became a statistic in the belly
of the prison system on multiple occasions. I missed the little things that
others take for granted like waking up with your mother, taking her to school
and the little things that real Fathers do. Over the 18 years since your mother
was born, I changed a lot just like everything else governed by time.
Physically, I lost my hair, I gained 25 pounds that I have to work out
constantly to prevent from getting out of hand and I am currently serving a 20
year prison sentence In Ohio's Dept of Rehabilitation and Correction.
It is from this position with 10 years of that 20 year
sentence completed that I am looking at the events of both of our lives unfold.
It’s as if I am a spectator on the sidelines watching my life unfold from an
objective point of view.
When I look at you in this sonogram, I see more than just a
picture. This sonogram represents the future of our bloodline and the next chapter
of my life. I know I'll be a much better Grandfather than I was a Father
because I've grown as a person and I've learned a lot more about myself. Even
though I missed so much of the beginning of your mother’s life it just makes
these last years that I've spent reacquainting myself with her more meaningful.
She has a lot of my qualities and she is a strong woman with principles and
integrity which amazes me and makes me proud that I'm her Father.
As I sit in my cell looking at your picture, I am having an
epiphany at this very moment as I write this. I am realizing that everything
that I thought was a priority wasn't and that my entire existence and all of my
experiences up until this point have been a link within a chain of events that
were put in motion in order to produce -the exact conditions for your mental,
physical and spiritual arrival.
It is only now, that I am finally able to see that it took
your presence in my life for me to, be able, to grasp the bigger picture. I
want to thank you for giving me the gift of clarity and for guiding me toward
my true purpose which was to first experience myself from another perspective
and then to rise to the task of unlocking my full potential with that knowledge.
Last but not least, I want to thank you for giving me another good reason to
fight harder for my freedom which is.... To be there for you.
LOVE ALWAYS
GRANDPA .
