For when you don't think you'll have enough

Full disclosure:  I don’t have a back to school ritual for my child.  When I learned this weekend that all good mothers have these in place for their children, I was crestfallen.  To say that I find meaning in the ritual is an understatement.  Narrative and ritual give meaning to the contradictory nature of our lives.  Most who know me well also know that once for kicks and giggles, I took an Anthropology of Religion course and a class in the Power of Liturgy.  Currently I am re-reading Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals Weaving together the Human and Divine just because.  I guess it is apparent by now that religion or theology should have been my major, not nursing.  I don’t know how people manage to make a living teaching people about the power of ritual, but (and by now given my experience on LinkedIn, it should not be), you can be a ritual coach.  If I can ever figure out how to pay bills doing that, I would be living my passion.  Maybe that is why I like baseball so much.  Storytelling and ritualizing, construct meaning, build community and order experience.    So, when I learned on Sunday that I don’t have a back to school ritual, well, I almost need a grief ritual for all the ritual I missed incorporating. 

And I have also been known to once or twice dress to impress another mother, think twice about what my kid wore to school to impress another mother, and compare myself to other mothers.  This is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.  Just thinking I may have missed a great parenting moment; I had to quiz every mother I could think of about their back to school rituals.  Guess what?  They all had one or two.  Of course upon learning this, I perseverated about creating a ritual for back to school.  Probably starting high school is a little late to introduce a new ritual.   I decided that since Davis didn’t know he was supposed to have a back to school ritual, and then probably the lack of a back to school ritual would never be the topic of therapy.   My whole goal in parenting.  Not to be the topic of therapy.  Okay, not my whole goal, but at least in the top five.

And isn’t that at the crux of all our struggles?  Comparing ourselves to others and seeking approval or trying to prove we are more than the other.    Comparison shopping never works.  At least not in human and divine terms.   Approval seeking will always fail.   Because at the end of the day we are all still human and at the end of the day, I think we are all trying to do the best we can.  And that is enough.  We are all a mess.  We really can’t have it all.  I know you have all seen the woman on TV who says you can have a brilliant career, be mother of year,  selflessly volunteer in India four times a year, pray two hours a day, love your maddening husband who relentlessly channel surfs passionately every single day of your life, and wear a size 6, BUT you can’t.   I remind myself as I eat my third piece of brown sugar pie (yep-brown sugar pie, it has a whole box of brown sugar in it and that is another story for another day), we all get a slice of pie.  All of us have some thing not every thing to be joyful about.  Abundance is in all of our lives every single day.   There is always plenty of pie to go around.