A Family Without Rivals
Families are a weird idea and even weirder in practice. A grouping of people that live together under one roof, eating meals at the same table and sharing chores, who may have no natural affinity for each other. Families try to balance the needs of all the members, when most of the members had no say in their creation or in the creation of other members. Families have shared goals and values but most families couldn’t articulate what they are.
There are a lot of families don’t really fight anymore; they share so little in common that they have nothing to fight about. The family leaves the home for separate work and individual activities. Homes are so big that, in many families, children never share a bedroom, a toy, or a screen. A false harmony takes over in these quiet homes where interaction is formalized, infrequent, and often unnecessary. The family devolves into roommates who buy each other presents on the agreed upon days.
That’s not to say the opposite is better. Children who never have anything of their own often become hyperaware of scarcity. They take the little available, taunting their siblings with their treasures, unable to share out of fear that there won’t be enough to go around. This has little to do with material wealth, it seems to me, and much more to do with a lack of generosity in love. Achievement (or a purposeful rebellion against it) becomes the best way to get the limited spotlight. Harmony has no place in the family at all when your most fierce competitors for the things you need share your home address.
I don’t want to fight with my family, but I do think my family is worth fighting for, which means doing things like having uncomfortable conversations, sacrificing individual fun for the sake of getting the everyone’s needs met, and finding common goals.
I have a weird family. It’s kinda amazing. I have biological sons and adopted daughters. I have had kids in therapy. I have a child with lifelong physical disabilities. I have a kid with a crazy high IQ. I have a child who was a victim of crime. I have made business cards with a list of every food one of my children was allergic to written on them so that we could eat at restaurants safely. We’re a motley crew. It’s fair to say that at one time or another, every one of us has needed all the collective resources of the family in order to thrive. We have made tremendous sacrifices for each other.
I pray about those sacrifices a lot. I ask God to show me who needs support in our family and how best to meet those needs. Although that often means thinking about who needs new shoes or a haircut, I try to regularly focus on their hearts. Two years ago, we made one kid’s school schedule the linchpin around which everything got done. Last year, when another kid struggled academically, we made big changes which affected everyone. In the last five years we’ve gotten particularly good at bracing for impact when someone’s having surgery or suffering with their mental health.
In the midst of that, my children almost never begrudge each other in their need. Their stance, when someone else needs help, isn’t resentment but service. For us, it’s not in spite of the sacrifices that the fruit of harmony keeps progressing but because of it. And, at the same time, no one carries the family’s burdens as the surrogate scapegoat while others “win.” Harmony comes through our mutual self-gifting as servant to the greater good of the family and through that, somehow, everyone seems to get what they really need.
My family’s harmony comes through work and prayer. It’s a free gift. It’s also something each of us individually and our family as a whole has sacrificed to prioritize.
Lately, I seem to be having a lot of real-life conversations with other moms I know about fighting in families. We’ve discussed discipline tactics and patience for transitional seasons. We’ve sympathized over a child who determinedly harbors a grudge and debated bedroom configurations. Over and over again I see that mothers want harmony in their families and they’re willing to give it their all to discover that fruit growing in their homes. A well-ordered mother cannot find contentment when her children squall, no matter how old they are.
These conversations have left me asking myself about the state of my family’s harmony. It’s made me a little paranoid, actually, that I had missing something. Have we tipped into a false harmony? Are my teens having secret fights that I don’t know about? No, my husband reassured me when I asked him, our family is doing well. Harmony lives in our home.
All this week, as I’ve thought about today’s Gospel, my mind has been a blur of memories of arguments and family rivalries and finding the servant heart that produces harmony. Then one memory rose to the surface that I wasn’t expecting – my three teenagers when they were little kids smiling in the pew at church.
When my three big kids were my three little kids they were enrolled in our parish school. The parish asked each family to commit to serving in a liturgical ministry. My husband sang in the choir (which was not considered a liturgical ministry, unfortunately), so I volunteered as a sacristan because I could fulfill the duties without leaving my children alone in the pew during Mass.
Many Sundays my children sat in the pew reading and talking while my husband sat with the choir and I set up for Mass. As I put out purificators and checked candles, I would look over at where my kids were sitting to confirm they were behaving well.
“You know,” I told them, “I only get to do this because of what you’re doing. Your good behavior makes what I’m doing possible.”
So, maybe it started there, in the little sacrifice of letting Mom be a sacristan at Mass. And it’s still true that our collective effort makes all the good things in our life possible. What I’ve been realizing is how much more important having something worth fighting for has been than all the ways I actively extinguished arguments over the years. Harmony grows from service much more than from having a fear of parental consequences, even if that service is just sitting still long enough for Mom to lay out an altar cloth. Harmony is as harmony does, I guess.
I don’t have a family without rivals. We for sure step on each other’s toes. We get in each other’s way. We are not always as kind as we should be. But we keep serving and putting each other’s needs before our own in this unending dance that somehow gets us further than if we served our individual needs alone.
Readings for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) on the USCCB Website