This Is My Brain On Eggs

In which we eat the same thing over and over and over again.

Our first month’s photo prompt essay is here! If you played along, don’t forget to let me know. Just a reminder of the prompt and then let’s get into this!

My husband makes breakfast for us every morning. Three eggs each, scrambled. I can’t remember when he started, exactly, but I think it was when our kid was very young. Scrambled eggs aren’t my favorite. They rank third, maybe fourth in my favorite ways to consume eggs. Don’t worry. This isn’t breaking news to my husband. He knows. My ranking would be fried (over easy), soft boiled, hard boiled, poached and then coddled and scrambled and omelets with heaven only knows what belching from its middle bringing up the rear. But, despite this, every morning I eat my three eggs, scrambled. On days I feel like elevating the scramble to second or third in my ranking, I make toast and with a light coat of Miracle Whip and ketchup, turning our normal breakfast into a delicious, scrambled egg sandwich, which is an absolute favorite of mine. I don’t understand why, really, the addition of toast and a light coat of Miracle Whip and ketchup elevates the ranking of eggs so significantly in my mind, but it does.

I don’t take this breakfast making lightly. I’m acutely aware of the good fortune I have in a partner that not only does his fair share in our home, but understands that it is our home, to be cared for together. And because I’m acutely aware of the good fortune I have to be married to a partner and not a man-child, I eat his favorite and most convenient way of preparing eggs before he heads to work every morning and am almost always pleasantly surprised when he has a little extra time and goes to the trouble of frying my eggs for me instead. And that is when I’m extremely aware that his love for me comes in the form of my fifth favorite way to eat eggs as well as my first favorite because he knows I’m extremely unlikely to make food for myself, finding it a chore and bore and can’t I just grab any old thing that is easier to quell the grumbling stomach every morning?

But isn’t that the way of love that is stretching into its third decade? That love comes in quiet forms, usually, and grand pronouncements almost never?

Every week, when our kid was still home, we’d buy five dozen eggs. My husband, grabbing the stack of cartons always at the ready to reuse on the top of our fridge, would transfer them from the larger case in order to be more user friendly and fit on our shelves. We still buy that same five dozen, just less often, now. Lately I’ve wondered when that will stop. When we might simply buy less. I’m grateful the price has dipped, regardless.

Our kid texts a picture and I notice his own five dozen eggs nestled in their cardboard box sitting on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator. Why does such a thing stand out, being completely beside the point of the quick snap? I know in the past few months I’ve been on an almost scavenger hunt of traits we may have passed on that will long haunt long after we’re gone.

But isn’t that the way of parenting? Quirks, oddities, family lore, family legends, family jokes. That one thing we did that one way that one time and it’s suddenly being done by people who only know us through stories, and all of our eschewing tradition seems for naught.

Sometimes when we can’t come up with dinner, after a long day at work for my husband and a long day of writing and deleting words for me, my husband is back at the stove, making eggs for dinner. Sometimes it’s just easier than trying to come up with anything different. Sometimes it’s just easier than having to think. Usually, those times the toast and Miracle Whip and ketchup are a guarantee, better to demark the meals, at least in my head. We sit down in our spots in the living room, the dining table long ignored and eat between favorite shows and conversation and a comfortable silence that can only be achieved when people know one another in long and quiet ways.

Eggs for dinner rarely scratch any sort of ‘foodie’ itch that lies dormant in me, but it gets the job done. It’s handled, taken care of and I don’t have to think about it again until the next day and there is a certain relief there that rises above anything else - especially whether it’s my first favorite or fifth favorite or no favorite at all.

But isn’t that the way of a family tradition? An oddity. A quirk. A thing that is done every day, out of love.