While making chicken soup for this year’s Passover meal, my wife and I debated whether to keep the actual chicken after the soup is made or to toss it away. If you have ever made chicken soup you know that the whole point of the chicken is to provide that wonderful flavor for the soup and that as good as the chicken pieces look down there in the pot, by the time the soup is done they have transformed themselves into a tasteless item that no longer tastes like chicken. In fact, they no longer taste like anything; they no longer taste. Yet, some people like chicken pieces in their soup. Therefore, my wife decided to add new chicken pieces into the soup towards the end of the cooking process in order to have chicken pieces that actually taste like, well, chicken. Yet any decent soup has a determination and mission of its own and will suck the flavor out of the chicken regardless of when you try to sneak it in. (which really begs the question of why soup takes so long to cook!) Anyway, I am not intending to write about soup, nor about chicken. It is just that in my mind, the soup conundrum suddenly became a metaphor for the way my wife and I parent and I think it may be this way for many couples. In my mind, parenting is similar to making a really good soup; you put tremendous effort into the preparation and keep a watchful eye on the process and give it all the hours it requires and stir and spice etc, except that in the case of parenting, me and my wife are the chicken and I can’t help but wonder whether there will be anything left of us by the time the soup is off to college!
Parenting is an all consuming event. You make your best efforts to bring home the proverbial bacon (yes, I am sticking with food!) and the rest of your time is spent making soup. In other words, your home time is spent raising the kids, and taking them to school and to sports and to doctors and helping them with homework. And, if you can afford it or if you can make the required sacrifices, mom quits her job to “be there” for the kids. (I think that is the equivalent of throwing in the extra chicken pieces.) You do it because you want to give even more for the children. Have I mentioned private school or semesters abroad or orthodontia?!? You get the point.
But, I think there is more to consider. Parenting can suck the flavor out of the previously giddy, about-to-have-a-baby couple. The decisions about parenting are, I have discovered, very different from previous decisions which revolved around spicy tuna vs. spicy yellowtail or Paris vs. Cancun or which of Dunn Edwards’ 600 shades of white to paint the living room. Parenting decisions can be very stressful and can take a toll on the couple in a manner from which they often do not recuperate. Sure, they CAN recuperate but they don’t because they are constantly PARENTING! Soccer, baseball, basketball, All-Stars, travel teams, orthodontist, Hebrew school, tutoring, school musical, school fundraiser, school book-fair, school this, school that…it never ends.
If your kids are REALLY lucky, you or your spouse are not just dropping them off but, rather, are coaching the teams or volunteering in the school or a member of the PTA or, God help you, chairperson of anything at all! Can you hear the screaming or am I the only one? Seriously, why is it that while the average human heart is so hard to hear that the doctor has to use a stethoscope to hear it and has to put the cold stethoscope under your shirt to hear it and has to ask you to be quiet to hear it, that I can hear the pounding of my heart just fine with no instruments and only wonder if it is disturbing people around me?!?
Anyway, I love my kids. I really do. And I love my wife. Seriously! But, we need to find a way for us to hold a little back and for each other. Otherwise, I will be chicken soup. Not soup itself. I mean I will be working in a restaurant serving soup because that might be the only job I get once they release me from the insane asylum to which I am otherwise most assuredly headed. Maybe soup is too hot an item to entrust to a former asylumee. Is that a word? MS Word is indicating that it is not but I like it, so there.
I have to share this with my wife. Thank God for Blackberry’s. Now, I can email it to her where-ever she is and she can actually multi-task (a trait God held back from the average man) and read it while doing the sixteen other things in which she is otherwise currently engaged. Back to the stove.
It sounds so familiar... Great metaphor!
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