The previous chapter, on opening myself to friendship with the adults around me, explored the power of habit and ritual. Social rituals like regular lunches with friends and weekly potluck dinners have strengthened my own fundamental capacity to connect and enabled me to begin addressing old, isolating habits of mind and body.
But there’s another isolating habit I’m trying to change—one that also undercuts my relationships with my kids.
I don’t look people in the eye when I’m feeling vulnerable. For example, I direct my gaze slightly down and to the side when speaking to someone, as if thinking hard about my words. I check in face-to-face only often enough to maintain (I hope) the impression of connection or when concluding a train of thought. Anxiety about my own vulnerability is the spur for this behavior, but until recently, I hadn’t thought much about how it might compound my suffering through lost connection.
Thankfully, two more rituals—pastoral singing and a spoken lullaby—drew me out, beyond my habit of looking away. I learned that the resonance of human connection, when cultivated and focused through ritual, is deeper and more mysterious than I ever could have imagined, and that my kids and I should be free to dwell in that wonder together.
Several years ago, an email announcement from my family’s Unitarian Universalist church caught my attention. A longtime member, who had recently become ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister and worked as hospital chaplain, had affiliated formally with the church as a community minister. As part of her service to the church, she hoped to establish a pastoral care singing group that would sing beloved hymns and other songs to church members who couldn’t get to church or were encountering difficulties or major transitions in their lives. The singing group would integrate the minister’s gifts as a hospital chaplain with her love of singing. (She and I had sung together in the Sunday choir years before.)
When the email arrived, I was considering what to do next to serve my church community. I’d left the Sunday choir when Sprout was born: I didn’t have the bandwidth in the early days of parenting for the weekly time commitments the choir demanded. But I missed singing with a group. I’d also recently completed two years of service in support of another community minister, also a hospital chaplain, and learning about the mission and discipline of her pastoral care work had been deeply rewarding.
So, when that email came, I immediately reached out to the minister and offered to help her get the pastoral care singing group off the ground. We met for coffee and clicked together, so we went for it. We borrowed from the practices of a similar pastoral care choir on the U.S. east coast and adapted them for our church context. The minister brought her gift for responding to the vulnerabilities of others and her deep moral clarity about the responsibilities that come with doing so, and I brought my attentiveness to how the people in the group could learn and grow together in service to that mission.
We soon announced the founding of our church’s new pastoral care choir and gathered the first singers for the cause. During the several subsequent years, the group has grown in membership and deepened in our connectedness and loyalty to our calling. We’ve sung to church members in living rooms, in common areas and hospital rooms, on patios, at the bedside, and more. And we’ve accompanied each other through song in our joys and our sorrows.
A covenant of confidentiality binds me from sharing specific details about either our singing visits or the joys and sorrows through which we’ve accompanied each other. But suffice it to say, singing to a living, breathing person as a form of care is intimate and vulnerable work. You don’t “sing out” as you might during a Sunday service. Rather, the goal is to bathe and embrace the person in song and allow the needs of that person to determine whether the embrace will be hushed and soothing or joyful and playful. The same song might sound different from one visit to another, depending on the situation. Because such responsiveness is at the core of our mission, we practice it during our rehearsals by taking turns singing to each other. This practice also teaches us what it’s like to receive a song—an intimate and vulnerable experience in its own right.
At first, I could not look the recipient of my singing directly in the eye as I sang, whether during rehearsal or a visit. Or if I did, it was typically for a fraction of a second, until a raw feeling of vulnerability and fear pulled my gaze downward or to the side. Mostly, I would close my eyes or direct them to the floor and focus on the atmosphere and intention of our singing, taking care to nestle my voice among the others.
But through scattered, furtive glimpses, I began to notice the effect of our singing on others: expressions on faces; tears welling in eyes; feet tapping or bodies swaying subtly. And I began to notice how freely some of the other singers could connect visually with the recipient of their singing, including when they sang to me during rehearsals. One face in particular holds a special place in my memory: I was in awe, my heart awash in warmth, that another person could sing to me and look me in the eye, smiling, with such kindness and no agenda other than wishing me well. I began to understand that my unwillingness to step into that vulnerability and hold it for another person’s benefit was keeping me back from a transformative aspect of our practice.
I tried to do the same, and I practiced. At first, I couldn’t easily bring myself to hold the look of another while singing to them. But when I finally summoned the courage to hold on and settle into that moment, I was startled by what I discovered: I was no longer singing merely to someone from across a distance. Rather, I felt a physical connection, as if the air between us were a ribbon vibrating, dancing on the waves of song, binding us to each other in the moment. I was a participant in the creation of this mysterious resonance, and I felt awe at the power of human ritual and connection.
This visceral experience of connection shone a bright and critical light on the rest of my life: how much such resonance do I turn away from every day through furtive habit? I began to notice instances, such as during lunch with a friend, when my eyelids would lower during vulnerable and revealing moments of speech, undercutting connection with the person to whom I spoke. My eyelids would rise only when the moment of vulnerability had passed. And I wasn’t just doing this when talking with other adults: I began to catch myself looking away from my kids, too. Though my face might turn toward them, my eyelids would fall or blink rapidly at the moment of rawest, most tender vulnerability.
Later, one night, Cub asked me to recite a poem at bedtime.
I’d written the poem when my older child, Sprout, was only a few weeks old. As a baby, Sprout had fought sleep—hard. Ragged with fatigue, I’d begun chanting, “Let go,” over and over, hoping my steady rhythm and hushed tone would bring relaxation. The chant grew over weeks, and a poem bloomed through the telling. Sometimes, I whispered it; other times, I sang. Eventually, the poem fell out of our nighttime ritual—until Sprout was in first grade, and we rekindled the practice.
Cub overheard the poem from the next room and asked for it. Kneeling beside Cub’s bed with the lights out, I intoned the words in a soft voice.
Let go,
sweet child.
Let go.
Let go of the day.
Let go of the night.
At your window,
a dream alights,
unbound
by crib or rocking chair;
by swaddle blanket or humid air.
I will be here
at your journey’s end.
Until then,
let go,
sweet child.
Let go.
May sleep
wipe smooth
your brow.
As the words left my lips with practiced ebb and flow, I noticed: I was looking down at the floor. The disconnected facing of my body contrasted sharply with the intimacy and presence promised in the poem.
I looked up, the words still on my lips.
Cub was looking back at me, smiling gently, deeply relaxed. My child’s expression reminded me immediately of the singer whose face I cherish in memory, who sang to me and held my gaze, smiling with such kindness, wishing me well.
Cub was offering me the same, if only I would answer. Had I not looked up, I would never have known my preschooler’s freedom in reaching out for connection and holding that space open without reservation—the very freedom promised in the lullaby poem I’d just recited.
That freedom is sacred, and Sprout and Cub deserve a father who is courageous enough to keep that promise. I do not know how the averted gaze became ingrained so deeply in my social repertoire that it could undercut even my most intimate and cherished relationships. But I do know this: I want to open myself fully to the resonance of connection with my children, and this requires mindful attention to my own feelings of vulnerability and the willingness to lean into that raw tenderness.
From this foundation, I look up.