My carefully laid plans for my children's future seem to never reach the shore of my dreams. I imagine how each of my children will become who I dream for them to become, and yet they each find a small road I never noticed and choose to start their own, private journey on that obscure way. It is indeed strange to me how life can wrap you the gift of a child so perfectly and delicately just so, hand it to you, and the time comes that you are powerless as to the outcome of the fate of that gift. Training seems to have failed at times, and I often wonder if anything I have said in the past rests in any of the children's minds. I wake at night and seem to watch the years go by in the quick moment of a thought, and I see myself laboring for the good of these little ones. But now that I look up to the oldest, who's head is close to a foot taller than my own, and he looks down on me, lost in this world and unable to decipher where his road is leading him, it is strange for me to look up to my child and say the same words I have been saying to him all his life, but this time those words seem to roll off his mind and I am, again, out of touch.
I see life as being like a river that has its loops across the landscape of the years. I think in times when the young man seems to have forgotten the lessons learned in childhood, he must be on a straight, still watered, restful portion of the water. I am waiting for that loop to come into his life, where he can again remember those moments when the mind connected with the lesson and he will grow before entering the straight river's waters again.
A young woman has the wonderful power of capturing a young man's mind and leading him down any road she chooses, and he just follows, giving no thought if it is in his best interest. Her smell, her giggle, her energy and playfulness are enough for a young man to abandon his own dreams to follow behind. So often once matrimony is entered into, he then, too late, realizes what has happened and bemoans all his married life his dreams left by his road, sometimes never to be realized.
My dreams for my children that I so untiringly and faithfully worked toward seem to be crumbling more with each passing day. So now I am faced with a challenge. To let go of my cherished dreams I had for them, or to keep pressing those dreams on my child, driving him further away. It is strange how it never seems to be what I thought it would be. It keeps me flexible and in a state of just enough unrest that I can stay amiable in life, my life; strange how it is.
