Falling Into Rhythm with Rituals
It’s May.
Let me say that again.
It is May. May 1.
What happened to April?
If pressed to respond to the question "what is your favorite month?" (because isn’t that one of your FAQ?) I would resoundingly respond with April.
Why is this?
First of all, it’s my birthday month. Obvi.
Second, April brings so much hope. It’s a promise of better days to come. It’s smelling the earth and spotting colors other than brown and white. It’s a "high five you made it through winter." It’s even a "just in case you didn’t get all your winter fun in we’ll give you one last snow storm before we put it all to bed for the year." It’s "open the windows and enjoy the sound of those birds before they start to annoy you every morning."
And now it’s May. And I feel like I forgot to enjoy April.
Or did I?
I got one of those annoying error messages on my phone recently telling me I didn’t have enough memory space to save an image. Rude. Thank goodness for google photos. As I went through the upload and removal process, I couldn’t help but notice all the images I captured in a quick grab of the phone. Videos of the kids, sweet moments when my heart whispered "get this. You’re gonna want it later." It was like finding an old photo album. Awww. Remember that day when I did that really cute science experiment and the kids got so into it? Would you look at that. It’s our first day of distance learning! Oh remember when she was teaching him to read, just this morning? Such good memories. Where has the time gone?
It really is ridiculous how far away 7 weeks feels. And also how fast it went. How is this possible? How can life be both fast and slow at the same time?
Pandemics do weird things to time.
I say that as if I have never experienced the longest shortest time that comes with parenting children.
This is nothing new. Life is always speeding by too fast and never fast enough.
This is why we have the gifts of memory keeping at our finger tips.
I spend a lot of time crafting the perfect squares with the perfect words to share with my social media friends. It’s a portfolio of the best parts of life. But there are great parts that don’t always make the cut. I don’t want to lose those too.
If you read this title, you’ll be wondering why I’m talking about memories instead of rhythms and rituals. I suppose if you’ve read enough of my writing you wouldn’t be surprised that I spend 500 words rambling before getting to the heart of the story.
But there is a reason for that.
If you asked me about our routine and our schedule during this time, (which would naturally be the question following "what is your favorite month") I would have laughed at you. Schedule? What is that? Who even knows what day it is even more? ("It’s May 1," you would remind me and then I would be sad again.)
But as I scroll these photos I see a different story being told.
It’s not a schedule. I can never stick to those in the ordinary days of our lives not to mention within the parameters of a global pandemic.
No, it’s not a schedule, it’s a rhythm. It’s a flow. It’s a check in of rituals that ground us together. It’s the moments we all expect and look forward to. That’s what I see in these pictures.
I wrote about this before. A message to a newborn mom. She was exhausted and disoriented. She was asking when she could get on a schedule. Doesn’t this feel appropriate now too? Doesn’t this feel like those crazy, confusing, hulled up in our home days with a newborn baby? I told her the schedule would come. Just not yet. I told her that maybe she didn’t have a schedule but she did have a rhythm. Maybe we all need to hear those words again.
"In those early days of a new baby, the schedule and routine is the pot of gold we seek. But sometimes we forget to notice the rhythms.
Rhythms are different than schedules. Rhythm is the dance that synchronizes as mom learns about baby and baby about mom. It is the motions in our parenting that grow ever so slowly as confidence grows along with it. The rhythm as mom and child harmonize. But you don’t create a rhythm like you do a schedule. You fall into it. Ever so slowly."
Maybe that’s what we are doing. We are falling into a rhythm as a family. It’s a dance, a motion, a harmony we create in our days as we listen to what we need day to day. Maybe this is how you get through any crisis. You listen for the rhythm.
Our daily activities carry a rhythm, not a schedule necessarily with color coded time windows, but a flow from together to alone, together then alone. It’s how people that love each other so very much, and also are kind of sick of each other, learn to balance those emotions.
It’s the gradual start to our day, eating breakfast together, listening to classical music while one learns on a screen, another pours through board books, another colors his way through every available free coloring page the internet provides, and another bounces back and forth between each of these needs, reheating her coffee on repeat.
It’s the bike rides through the neighborhood, waving to our favorite spots and dreaming of the day we can play without fear.
It’s the lunch time report to dad, a check in of our morning, because we all need someone to validate our days.
It’s the afternoon quiet time where the introverts live their best lives, and the extroverts practice a new skill.
It’s snack and story time in the backyard, while we wait for Dad to emerge, to relieve, to pick up the mess, literally and figuratively.
It’s bedtime for one, reading aloud to two, and a much needed walk around the neighborhood for another, to breath and reset.
There are also weekly rituals, the touchpoint we look forward to, that remind us "yes time is still moving forward because look here we are again on a Friday!"
It’s the cocktail I look forward to making every Friday night. And then the pizza and movie we share as a family.
It’s the Saturday adventures with Dad while I go to work, pretending my office is the coffee shop where all the magical words happen.
It’s date night on Saturday night, putting the kids to bed, and turning our kitchen into Paris or New Orleans or Italy with a meal we make "together" (and by "together" you know I mean I cook and he cleans up around me.)
It’s Sunday morning reading the New York Times, with real scratchy newsprint in our hands, a ritual we always dreamed of but somehow a pandemic made it seem like the right time to start.
It’s going to church in our pajamas and hearing the smallest members of the family share the bread and the wine, like the greatest of the faithful.
It’s asking the question "where do we want to go today?" and thinking we couldn’t possibly find another place to explore in the tiny boundary our world allows right now, and then discovering adventure is limitless.
It’s the gathering together at the end of a day, a weekend, a month, and reflecting on the story to be told—how one family listened and harmonized with one another in search of a rhythm
And then continued to march on.
Into May we go.