Eggs

Posted on March 4, 2005 in Childhood Eating PTSD

They look so fluffy chopped up and laded in the stainless steel salad bar bin. Almost sweet. Lemon candy mixed with white chocolate. Maybe hard, with powdered sugar clinging to them. That’s the flavor that I expect of them. But they betray me every time.

I don’t know when I started to hate eggs and egg salad most of all. My mother tells me that I used to gobble them down when I was little. Then, when I was four or five or six, I took a disliking to them. Perhaps it was the sucrose in the cereals that I ate which changed my concept of what a breakfast should be. I yearned for pancakes which my mother never made. They dripped and spattered the stove. So did eggs, but she made those. I disliked them hard boiled, poached or fried. If I had to endure them — as my mother sometimes insisted that I must — I wanted them scrambled. She never made omelettes either. They were too much like pancakes, needed too much of a mix with baking soda and water. She wanted to do it all in one pan.

Fried eggs horrified me. That yellow eye that bled if you cooked them soft or or that turned into a pasty lense when you turned them before serving caused me to turn my eyes away. I didn’t like the smell. It wasn’t not rubber or paste or napalm or plaster. They possessed a repulsion all their own. I didn’t like the consistency: that was more like rubber except rubber had a strength to it that held, that squeaked when you set your teeth to it. And the flavor — which was in truth part smell — caused me to close my mouth when I was forced to chew on them.

My mother kept trying to get me to eat them. I remember one morning, probably a holiday from Catholic School, when she put a plate of poached eggs on toast in front of me. They dribbled all over the browned white bread that she bought cheaply from the store. She bought white bread because it was cheap and for many years I could not eat a sandwich because they were tasteless and boring. The eggs ruined the toast. I protested. My brother, who was seated at a right angle to my left, picked up the plate and ground it into my face. The grease and the goo worked its way into my eyes, my nostils and the corners of my mouth. I sickened.

My mother scolded my brother lightly, then dragged me into the bathroom to wash my face. She blamed me for provoking him, for being a bad boy who would not eat his breakfast without comment. The stink mixed with the mucous in my nose. After that, when I smelled or saw egg salad or poached eggs or fried eggs, I would stop breathing through my nose, close my mouth and strain the air through my teeth so that I would be afflicted as little as possible by the disgust-laden odor. If I could I’d flee from the room. If that was all there was to breakfast, I would forsake it. I shunned kids who got egg salad sandwiches for lunch. When my mother tried to send one along for me, I threw it in the trash. Soon, I didn’t eat any of her heartless sandwiches. She kept using white bread and mustard which was too acidic and yellow.

I lost a friend thanks to eggs. We went down to visit my aunt and uncle. My mother told my uncle to serve up a breakfast of scrambled eggs. He made them horribly, without the little bits of bacon which could have saved their flavor. They were thick, repacked and congealed into a mass too much like the ammunition my brother fired that morning. My friend laughed because he knew how I hated them, shouted at the top of his voice, celebrated my humiliation and my misery to the smiles of my parents.

Then we went to church and my uncle took him out to the garden. He bragged to me that he’d been eating sweet carrots while I had to kneel and stand and feel the itch of my suit which was wrong, all too wrong for the warm summer morning. My parents laughed, too. Only my uncle realized his mistake in serving me eggs. I pouted and soon afterwards, I stopped seeing the friend. Like all the friends who my parents liked, he sold out to my parents and my brother. He’d joined their their ridicule and coercion. My mother and father loved those who put me down. And they noticed, after some time, that I stopped having friends.

I made my own shell and protected my soft insides.