The Heart of a Family: Searching America for New Traditions That Fulfill Us

Book by Cox Meg

I wrote this book because I needed it.

When I finally decided in my mid-thirties that I wanted children, I was terrified that I wouldn't know how to be a good parent. I had fallen in love with my husband partly because I was touched by the way he treated his teenage daughter, so I felt sure that he would be excellent at this. But I felt so unprepared. We both were intensely independent, career-minded city people, and I panicked at how to shape a different kind of life. What did I know about making a family feel like a family, and not just a random collection of busy people living together?

One morning I woke up with the vivid realization that what I needed was ritual; if I could understand family rituals and knew how to create satisfying ones of my own, we would be fine. I was sure I could find plenty of information about how to feed and care for a baby, but I knew I wanted to be able to provide more than simple nourishment. Rituals seemed like protection, insurance, talismans. And the thought came to me, virtually simultaneously, that there was a book to be written about family rituals, what good ones feel like and how to start them. I was sure I wasn't the only person desperate for this knowledge.

I read what books I could find on the subject, but they didn't contain the wisdom I sought. Either they featured a laundry list of traditions without explaining how they fit into families' lives, or they were all practiced by a single family, one that had nothing in common with mine. Too often they were only sentimental suggestions, not actual rituals that had been road-tested in the muddle and stress of contemporary family life.

Early in 1994, when we discovered I was pregnant, I started my quest in earnest. Using my skills as a journalist, I set out to try to learn firsthand the secrets of families across the country who were really good at ritual. I also wanted to get the answers to such basic questions as: What is a ritual? Why does ritual work? When it doesn't, why doesn't it? I wanted to know why I felt this need so strongly, to find out how rituals really affect families. I read books on anthropology and sociology and ritual studies. I interviewed prominent psychologists and religious educators.

I quit my job and devoted my time to my family and my search. My son, Max, was growing out of infancy and my need for family ritual was becoming more urgent. My husband and I started trying ritual ideas out on him, and watching his reactions. Everything I was learning began to make sense.

I spent more than three years researching, writing, and interviewing more than 200 families around the country, and, in the end, found the answers to most of my questions.

I have learned that ritual and the craving for it are ageless and everywhere. There are rituals not just for celebrating holidays but also for waging war, falling in love, playing sports, and running governments. Rituals commemorate events and connect people, either to others in their family, or to history. In the Mescalero Apache tribe in Mescalero, N.Mex., girls still celebrate the beginning of womanhood by dancing for four nights in a row, while ceremonial singers perform up to sixty-four different sacred songs each night. And there are Titanic fanatics who get together once a year and eat an eleven-course feast just like the meal served on the liner the night it sank.

But the most important thing I learned is that people need ritual, and they need it for many reasons.
In a recent study of 90,000 teenagers, researchers tried to figure out why certain kids were less likely than others to engage in "risky behaviors," everything from drugs to sex. Only one factor stood out: it wasn't that all these teenagers had mothers who stayed home, it was simply that they felt emotionally close to their families. And what is it that makes families feel truly connected? Good family rituals.

Rituals not only help thriving families; they help heal the pain of life's greatest tragedies. Think of the ceremony conducted in Oklahoma City on the day that Timothy McVeigh was found guilty. Families of the dead and survivors gathered by a tree that had endured the blast and, in a ritual of cleansing and rebirth, together poured water onto its roots.

One recent United Nations study of Bosnian children whose villages were bombed and their parents killed found that standard forms of "talking therapies" were absolutely no use in helping these children rebuild their psyches. The only effort that helped was an attempt to re-create some of the festivals and other rituals that had filled their childhoods; having that continuity to hang onto made it possible for them to go forward.
If ritual can do that, imagine the difference it makes in the everyday lives of children. The power of ritual to comfort and heal and teach is enormous, and all parents have this power: they just need to know how it works. The basic principles are the same, whether a ritual is designed to help ease children to sleep at bedtime, celebrate a major holiday, or navigate the profound transition from childhood to adulthood. But in our technologically hypercharged world, we seem to have lost touch with our roots as ritual makers and ritual needers.

As I interviewed families, I discovered that many of the people who have vital, inventive rituals didn't have them when they were growing up: their passion came from a determination to give their kids something they didn't have, and they figured ritual out for themselves. I wasn't deprived of ritual, but I wanted more and different rituals from those I had known as a child. I grew up in a patchwork family of adopted and biological children (including me), and though I felt my parents' love and approval profoundly, we weren't big on family outings and events.

To be fair, I treasured many of our family rituals, including our holiday traditions and Saturday morning outings with my dad. The four kids took turns doing Saturday errands with him; I can still smell the gas at Howie's filling station and still taste the hot chocolate with fake whipped cream I ordered monthly at the coffee shop.

My bond with my mother was ferocious and I miss her desperately since her death, but she prepared me to nurture a career rather than a family. The great lessons she passed on to me were about pursuing only work I love. Her personality combined with her circumstances made copious ritualizing unlikely: raising four kids is challenging enough, but she also had to cope with a chronic illness. She was a loner rather than a joiner all her life. And though she spent her career as a professional artist doing everything from puppeteering to calligraphy, she never felt that she achieved her artistic ambitions. At home, she knitted matching sweaters for the whole family, and stitched Raggedy Anns with our names painted on their hearts, but family celebrations weren't her forte. I inherited much of her temperament, but I became desperate to learn how such things are done.

These days, like many in my generation, my family is scattered across the country and I'm lucky to see even my father twice a year. My husband's mother died long before I met him, and his father, too, lives far away. There's nothing nuclear about my own household, either. My family holidays include myself, my husband and son, my grown stepdaughter, and my husband's ex-wife. I confess that the ex-wife and I did not become friends on first meeting, but by now I can't imagine holidays without Anita, and not just because she's a fabulous cook. She adores my son and I adore her daughter and we share the same basic values. We may not seem like a conventional family, but the reality is that there is no such thing anymore.

Which brings us to another reason why family rituals are more important now than ever before. As Americans loosen their ties to organized religion, ethnic heritage, and even the commitments of marriage, what will bind families together?

We all know that the people who surround us by accident of birth and marriage, siblings and parents and the whole extended menagerie, often aren't the same people we'd choose as bosom buddies. So what will make them matter to us? What will provide the kind of emotional connection to them that lasts a lifetime? How can this group of people embrace and sustain us against all the hurt and grabbiness and pain of an intrusive culture? Rituals will, at least rituals that have meaning and depth. And the rituals of our childhood can teach us how to live all our lives in a focused and caring way.

It's no accident that interest in ritual is growing. It isn't just New Agers waving incense or men banging drums or teenagers dabbling in Native American spirituality. Educators across the country are creating rituals within school programs in an effort to provide meaning and teach basic values. Some juvenile justice authorities, having found nothing else works, are using the structure and sanity of good rituals to show young lawbreakers another path. Religious leaders from many different denominations are trying to renew and strengthen the formal religious rituals performed in their churches and synagogues, while encouraging families to personalize religious rituals at home. And more and more therapists are prescribing rituals to dysfunctional families, finding that the action and symbolism of rituals carry enormous power to heal rifts and forge a healthy family identity.

The rituals I collected on my search are of a staggering variety: some are religious, quite a few have ethnic roots, and many are just the sheer invention of thoughtful and attentive parents. I talked to families of four different ethnic backgrounds who all have an Easter tradition of cracking eggs together. A Yupik Indian in an Alaskan village described to me her tribe's "first catch" ritual, in which the families feast when a firstborn son captures his first fish or game. I have included an ancient Greek Orthodox naming ceremony, and, for the celebration of an open adoption, a wildly unorthodox ritual that includes the bi...