Marking Time: A Family Creates Ritual
Submitted by sagemama on Mon, 11/07/2005 - 05:00.
This weekend marked an occasion
that brought me almost to tears. Tears of joy for certain, but tears
all the same. My daughter stood on the cusp of beginning first grade.
Truly a new world, a new journey, her own life opening before her. And
yet it almost passed by unnoticed. You see, because we homeschool we
didn’t have a need to participate in any of the few remaining rituals
of this milestone. In this day, somehow shopping and buying have become
substitutes for true cultural ritual. She needed no new special clothes
requiring a trip to the mall, no supplies that could be bought anywhere
locally, she didn’t need a fancy backpack or the latest Trapper Keeper
(oops, I am quite sure that dated me terribly!). She isn’t even going
to ride the bus or need to be walked to school. So what is a mother to
do? I simply could not let the day go by unmarked.
So I sat and pondered exactly what it was that my daughter was about to
do. Was it about her age? No, not really. She could just as easily have
been unready for this for another year or so. Was it a new skill she
needed to acquire? No, she may go all this year just singing, dancing
and feeling her whole self come into being. But there it was… she was
taking a journey. Her own journey, on a path that would lead her to a
place that I could not predict, and could not follow. To a place that
only she will choose. She stood on the edge of a bridge to her own
path.
A plan began to form. As the weekend went on, the plan came into full
flower. I offer it to you here as an example of one family’s creation
of a ritual that filled a beautiful space in our lives.
A neighbor has a 50 foot long suspension bridge in his backyard
crossing the river we live on. I gathered all of our playsilks in a
myriad of colors, our family blessing candle, matches, a long rainbow
colored silk, the rose her father bought her and the words to a song I
wrote to the tune of All Through the Night. I left the house a few
minutes before my husband and prepared the bridge. When our daughter
arrived with her father and siblings a few minutes later the bridge had
been transformed into a
Right away Sage asked what it was, and I told her that it was a
rainbow bridge, her rainbow bridge into first grade. She asked what to
do and I said that she could cross the bridge alone and go under the
silk rainbow draped over the end. She had crossed the bridge before,
but never alone and her face lit up at the idea. She bravely stepped
firmly and quickly across the bridge with no sign of trepidation. Under
the rainbow silk she called out to us, “Look, I did it myself!”
The rest of the family walked across to join her and I gently wrapped
the long rainbow silk around her like a cloak, knelt down and lit a
candle. Then we sang this tune:
To a land of new and old secrets all revealed and told.
Journey now the path your own adventure will unfold.
We both told her how much we loved her and what a special day this was.
She blew out the candle and took off the silk. Her dad gave her the
rose and I gave her a scroll, simply made with crayons and colored
pencil that said that she had now crossed the
Then we went out for ice cream- before dinner! That of course is probably half the memory!
The whole car ride to ice cream and for the next whole day, she
said thank you to us several times. She felt honored; you could see it
in her eyes. Something as simple as a few minutes (the whole thing took
maybe five minutes) and a tiny bit a preparation created a memory that
will last her lifetime. She knows now that she is in a new adventure,
and she walks a little taller for it.
On our way home from ice cream our three year old son said, “When will
it be my journey?” And she quickly replied, “When you start first
grade, you’ll have a big journey to start too.” He too understood that
something special was happening.
I am so glad to have the chance to share this tiny bit of our life as a
family with the world; it is still giving me goose bumps to think about
it two days later. In your preparations for your children’s milestones-
homeschool or public, coming of age or going off to preschool there are
chances everywhere to create these family rituals and in turn feed the
soul of our families.
If you have created a family ritual that you love, please consider sharing it with the community here at AmityMama.com