Shana and Friend

Under Mystical Pressure

by Shana Ogren Lourey

My newest fun trick is treating my two-year-old son, Quentin, as if he is the oracle. "What color is today?" I ask. "Who knows everything?" I question him. I hold back from really putting the pressure on, although I long to request the answers to my most philosophical and burning dilemmas. What is the meaning of life? What happens after we die? Am I pretty?

Poor kid. Who knows what will happen if he gives me the wrong answer? And by wrong answer, clearly I mean the answer that isn’t what I want him to say. Just like with my god, my expectations for my son are unruly, demanding, and selfish. I would love him to be a genius if he used his brain skills to help others and create positive things. But what if he used his skills in a negative way; and while yes, he became a master, he became a master of destruction? I would rather have a dumb child who kept the world as crumby as it is, rather than a smart one who made it worse.

Is that selfish? Were my children unaware upon being born that my expectations would not only start young, but be of spiritual descent? Is it too much for me to ask of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy and eight-month-old girl, to save the world?

Apparently, I do not have that much control over who my children will become. Damn. I never thought I would care so much about having influence in another’s life. It is the pressure that I feel upon my own moves that drives me. This child may become part of what I make him or her. Let it be good. Let it be God-worthy.

When I check to see if you are breathing
I cannot tell you apart from the oxygen in the air
or the wind as it passes through the branches
or the colors of the leaves on the trees.

How can your eyes capture the sky both
as it sets
and as it rises?

Not in a harried, overbearing way
But in a rhythm,
a kind of timeless fit.