Putting eggs back together

My Mom was a good mom; she held back the gates of hell for me, but in doing so, she unconsciously showed me where they were geographically; I can always find them without really even trying. She also gave me my love of reading and she gave me persistence and patience in trying to peacefully piece broken things back together. I have failed her.

Searching back to my earliest memories, I can see that I never felt like we were poor. We were poor compared to all the other people around us, but are you really something if you don’t feel like you are? We ate a lot of eggs; for example, egg-mayonnaise sandwiches were suppers on Tuesdays when my dad was away – we had a different routine when my dad was home. Wednesdays were my favourite, rice, Toppers-Meaty-Mince and boiled egg. Mom made all three at the same time on just one plate on the stove. She had these triangle pots that fitted together and made a circle, like when you cut a pizza into three. Mom called them her miracle pots because they could do amazing things, and all three worked at the same time on one plate, and that’s the way to help keep the bills down. Other people didn’t worry about that much, and I told my Mom that that made me cross because people should care about that, and she told me not to be so hard on other people; she said other people were not lucky enough to have three little triangle pots, that they mostly had bigger round pots so it was not really their fault for not caring about saving money.

I remember the preparation process of supper more than the eating. Mom said I should help because everyone loves a helper, and who doesn’t want to be loved. The preparation was the best part anyway; the food was always good, and when something is good, it’s easy to get used to it and take it for granted. So I’d help Mom make supper, and we’d talk about the book she was reading me at the time. We’d recap the story so far and then talk about why the characters did the things they did and we’d talk about the things we would have done instead.

After supper, and after we had washed and dried up, and I had taken a bath, Mom would read to me while I put the eggshells back into their egg shape. Every egg we ate, Mom kept the shells and carefully washed them and dried them and then died them in food colouring. She’d keep each eggshell set separately and then place it in the jars of food colouring. We had blue, my favourite colour, as well as green, red, and yellow. I didn’t like the yellow, so Mom said she could turn it into orange by adding a little red, and so I went with that. With eggs being on the menu, as Mom said, and although I knew what a menu was, I’d never seen one in real life – out and about – or the menu she spoke about at home. I don’t think we actually had a menu at home because I don’t think we needed one. We had such good memories that we didn’t need a cardboard menu; we always knew what was for supper that night. If you think about it, it really isn’t that hard to remember seven different things, especially when some of them were the same.

So after bathtime, Mom would be waiting at the dining room table with my egg puzzle ready placed out and waiting, ready with the book we had gotten from the library. She’d read aloud books like The Chronicles of Narnia, and did you know that is not just one book, it’s really 7 books, all with different titles that everyone just calls “The Chronicles of Narnia”, – and other books like “The Hobbit” and “The Borribles” and “Watership Down” and “The Duncton Chronicles”. I liked chronicles, and Mom said that was a good thing to like because it meant that I understood that things go on.

So, while Mom read, I would busy myself with fixing the egg. I had a little wooden stick and a tiny tube of superglue. I never understood why superglue came in such tiny tubes when it comes in big boxes of hundreds of tiny tubes. Why did we have a massive huge box with hundreds of them that Mom kept in the broom cupboard? Mom said they came like that in a big box from the factory so they can go safely to the store; she said that she had cut out the middleman and made it get safely to our home and miss the store.

I got lost in the stories as I did my best to glue the eggshells back together, and Mom said stories could fix the broken things in life and if I practised with eggs and listened to stories, maybe if I broke something important when I got big I’d be able to fix it. If I could do that with my life, then everything would be ok. But maybe my fingers were not good listeners because I was not very good at fixing the eggs; they never ever looked like new, like they had never broken in the first place, and I really really tried my best, but Mom said that that was ok, that trying and never giving up was the important thing.

I feel bad about how I have turned out now. I tried for so long to fix things in life with the silent peace of story, but it never seemed to work. Part of me trembles every time I snap bullets into a magazine; I’m sorry, Mom – you taught me to be better, but I had to try a different way.