How to do eggs

As children we used to love having fried eggs for breakfast. I remember one summer spent with cousins in Baguio when we had a contest to see what the best sauce was for fried eggs. First, it was ketchup. Then it became a mixture of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. Then someone added soy sauce and calamansi. How did that end? We all got old and now for me breakfast eggs are generally sunny-side-up with ketchup. That’s the way I eat them now when I have fried eggs for breakfast.

But I also like having soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. Always two, and I put the eggs in water and watch them boil. When the bubbles become big I take the pan off the fire and throw out the boiling water, run tap water over them to make them easier to spoon into one of my small breakfast bowls. Then I enjoy eating them with somewhat-hot salsa. These are the ways I like to eat eggs now that I’m old.

I was not always this way. When I was a teenager I loved to bake cakes. I was very good at chiffon cakes. You made them with many room-temperature eggs. If I was going to bake a cake in the afternoon, I would bring the eggs out of the refrigerator before 10 in the morning. The secret to baking good cakes is to have all your ingredients at room temperature. Then the cake will rise up high, and will be moist and delicious. 

Then my mother went on a diet based on hard-boiled eggs and apples. I joined her too and maybe that’s why I don’t have a fondness for hard-boiled eggs. I like them when I make them into deviled eggs or when I find them in adobo but I don’t like plain hard-boiled eggs with salt.

Eventually I got married and got progressively more sophisticated. I could now make good scrambled eggs with butter and milk, a bit wet and flavorful. Then I taught myself to make omelets that had all sorts of things in them — celery, basil, cheese, ham, dill — all sorts of delicious things and herbs. But over time I got tired of making omelets, too. For whom would I make them? I had no more husband. Instead I had a career. I usually only had black coffee for breakfast then dashed off to work. I was very active at work. My last job was president of an all-Filipino advertising agency. By then my children had grown, were independent, had their own sets of children. By then I lived pretty much alone. Before I knew it, I quit my job, did all sorts of things but lived pretty much alone. I didn’t have anyone to cook anything for. Not even eggs.

That’s when eggs took on a different character for me. One morning I was feeling lonely in my empty nest. This was years before I got remarried. I just got remarried last January. I soft-boiled two eggs for my breakfast and as I threw the eggshells in the trash suddenly I felt a strange relationship with them. They reminded me of parenthood. When your children are babies, how you adore them. How close you are to them. You kiss their wonderful baby heads, sniffing their fine hair into your nose. You cook for them, play with them, laugh and tickle them; you brim with love for them.

Then they enter puberty. How they confuse you! How held back you are about your reactions to them. Then they do something that provokes you and you lose it. I remember pretending I wasn’t bothered when one of my daughters escaped from school and modeled for one week. I pretended to be reading a book but I couldn’t understand a thing. My children’s puberty brought me the worst times of my life. We couldn’t understand each other. Now I know we were supposed to grow and find our own lives, our separate ways.

I remember coming home early one afternoon and finding my daughters engrossed in a conversation on who would take care of me when I grew old. None of them wanted to. That told me nobody would. They grew up, became totally independent. For a time I felt like a discarded parent.

But there is use for discarded things. You can put discarded eggshells with the coals in your orchid pot and soon it will bloom and have beautiful flowers that you know would not have been so beautiful if you were not there caring for it. Mothers, too, have lives of their own and gifts of their own to give to people who need them, who welcome them lovingly into their lives and cherish them. We, too, have to find lives for ourselves after the children we once cared for so much have found lives that no longer include us as much. I know we will find it.

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