A Boy is Raising

He sleeps instantly, his eyes are soft and sometimes sad as they dream through every night. He sits up randomly, awake in his sleep something similar to a flower, alive and standing and very much a reality, but unable to understand anything around it. I imagine he dreams of his mother, now in Heaven or reincarnated as a hawk’s flight pattern circling beautiful some field mouse prey, or of a different kind of life, one where families full of kings, crowns and princesses sit full bellied around dinner tables never unhappy, never apart.

His math sheets are nearly flawless, his pictures drawn with realistic fantasy, his reading quick and the words each understood all through his brain. He’s merely 8 years old but what wisdom and understanding, what culture and vision he has is enough to overflow the gray matter cups of many whole families. He’ll be more than I am at my age, more than I’ll ever be by his death.

Still though, he’s a child now and while I’d love to see a companion in him for travels and tribulation, he craves his fellow children, wishes for playgrounds and a dog for a best friend and routine. I am not aware of the appeal of routine, personally, but if we are alive and conscious, and consciousness is the ability to determine right from wrong through self-awareness and the realization that others exist in the same manner, then my pursuits as a parent are the struggle triangular between teaching through example, minimizing tears in his biggest blue eyes, and not trading one life for another.