I’m surrounded by a dozen eggstories that capture my son’s imagination. We collect them from the library and snuggle up with a strange little book about a boy who places a large, unknown egg into a nest. A nervous Mother bird is baffled. A curious Father bird says, hey, it must be ours. The couple sits on the egg, and one day a baby alligator is born. The couple feeds tiny creatures (ladybugs, worms) around the clock. The gator grows, and grows, until bulging the nest, and the birds must teach it to fly away. Of course an alligator has no wings, so it tumbles out of the nest, into the water below – and happily swims away.
I don’t remember that story as a child. I also didn’t happily swim away from my youth. But the read cracked open memories…delicately stored fragments, sharing something of life’s beginnings.
me, by the Urubamba River
My mother was vivacious, a dark-skinned hippie with a professional job and the longest black hair – as strong in her will as her words. She was fierce in her warnings of life’s possibilities. Age 14: don’t get pregnant.
I read a lot as a kid. My first books were a collection of Dr. Seuss; the same folks who published that bird tale. I relished biographies. Wrote poems. I rode my bike throughout the city, and once snuck into a nunnery. Kids teased me.
My mom and I shared the breakfast table with the man who molested me. A strange kind of family unit, as uncomfortable as that may be to say. My mother wore bruises. I wore shame. And it wasn’t until reading that silly book that I remembered my mother’s tears, and me listening.
Memories are selfish by design, but communal in their workings.
It was a big deal when my mother taught me to cook, and the first thing I served up was eggs. I cannot recall if I made that man scrambled eggs, but I remember each day waking up, heading to the kitchen, and feeling the hiss of his presence in our lives. For such a short period of my life’s journey, the memory has imprinted my association with the egg.
It’s embarrassing to share things that are uncomfortable, especially now that I’m a mom. The veil of appropriate looms large and I question my discretion constantly. Especially when pressed up against the nature of the stories we tell children. The way we hope to protect them, encouraging them to live in the magic. Reality is such a burden. And in truth, the alligator would have eaten those birds as soon has his head poked out of the egg. But then again, the birds might have fled the nest, made a new home, and left that little ol’ gator to rot inside the shell. I think eggs show up so much in kids books because they are a symbol of the beginning, pointing to something intrinsic in life.
My son opens up An Egg Is Quiet
A lot goes through the mind watching my son live out childhood. The year he was born, I sat by the Urubamba River in Peru on a journey to climb Huayana Picchu. The river of power and torrent…a land pulsating…me on an awakening. As I lay by the water, three weeks before he would form in my womb, I thought about all things heavy and what it would mean to travel lightly. Lightly like the memories that float into focus. I thought about how the simplest act in the present can point back to a significant time. Today, life seems like a strange collection of connections. The sweetness of life, the exploration of meaning in kid speak…a chance to bridge my own childhood with now. A beginning of something that could in time scramble the memory enough that all I can remember is what it feels like to share silly eggstories.
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Publisher’s note: The book about the birds who find the alligator egg is Flap Your Wings
