At church, we had a Mother's Day Celebration and a lady in our church asked me to speak. The following is what I had to say on being a new mom...
When Ms. Mary Kay asked me to speak about being a new parent, specifically a new mother, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say.
My first thought was to compare parenthood to what I imagine living in a frat house would be like... There are bottles strewn about the house on a pretty regular basis, the laundry is mountainous, overflowing the hampers daily. We sleep pretty much wherever we land and vomit is a real possibility at any given time.
My second thought was to talk about how parenthood, for me at least, has been rather instinctual. I can attest that becoming a mother has brought up some pretty primal urges in me that on recent occasion has given me great pause and stirred up some emotional reactions that I was not prepared to feel at all. Just the other day, at a family reunion of all places, I had to seriously fight the urge to claw a little girl’s eyes out because she was getting a little too 'handsy' with Elizabeth, either that or hide Elizabeth under a bush... At the end of the day I’m not much better than those ill old ‘Mama’ cats we had growing up after they had had a litter of kittens.
But when Ms. Mary Kay asked me to speak about being a new parent the only thing I could think about was this quote by Paul Reiser that I recently stumbled across in an email... that and an Oreo Cookie.
Reiser says, “People often ask me, "What's the difference between couplehood and babyhood?" In a word? Moisture. Everything in my life is now more moist. Between your spittle, your diapers, your spit-up and drool, you got your baby food, your wipes... your leaky bottles, sweaty baby backs, and numerous other untraceable sources--all creating an ever-present moistness in my life, which heretofore was mainly dry.”
I love this quote, not only because it is true... on any given day there is some sort of baby-by-product covering me in some capacity... but I love this quote for its deeper meaning. Which brings me to the Oreo Cookie.
As we all know, an Oreo Cookie has three parts-- two dry cookies and one creamy (moist) center.
Before Elizabeth, I like to think of my life as the cookie part of the Oreo. For this metaphor to make sense, I need you to pretend with me that you’ve never had a fully intact Oreo cookie. If all you’ve ever had was the outside, dry cookies of the Oreo without the creamy center, you’d probably find the cookies to be a perfectly lovely and an adequate snack. And if you’ve never had the fully intact Oreo, then you’d probably be perfectly happy with eating just the plain cookies for the rest of your life. And that was how I felt. I was perfectly content being a plain, dry cookie... And being a plain, dry cookie was good stuff too.
But since Elizabeth has entered into our lives, I can’t imagine just going back to being just a plain, old dry cookie. Elizabeth is our creamy center and I’m just going to end the debate right now, the creamy center of the Oreo Cookie is the best part of the cookie, it’s what makes the Oreo an Oreo. It’s what’s makes it special. And after you’ve experienced the creamy center of an Oreo Cookie, you no longer think so highly of just the plain cookies anymore. In other words...my old life was great, but my new life as a parent is so much more fulfilling.
So to sum up... parenthood can be compared to a countless many things, but in the end, being a parent has added a degree of moisture that changes the components of life from ordinary to extraordinary.
