It was staring up at me.

I had been sitting in the chair for I don’t know, maybe 45 minutes, maybe 50… and the whole time I was staring at this tiny broken piece of an eggshell. It was no more than three or four millimetres. The side staring up at me was bright white, but I could still see the edge of a happy Barbie pink on the other side of it, like the truth behind it.

It started like every other Easter morning.

The children had woken up early, their hair a mess, feet flopping all over the place as they ran down the stairs to start their Easter hunt. I remember my eldest. She literally couldn’t keep her eyes open and she shuffled forward. The others were younger, but she was starting to show that almost-teenager thing almost-teenagers get, where they are tired for half the day and then liven up around 5 PM until two in the morning, or three in the morning, or four in the morning before they get tired again. I don’t know what it is about that particular age, but the body clock just seems to do a total reset.

The others were dancing around her with delight.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Where are the clues? Where are the clues?”

I had gotten into the habit of creating a really fun game we played every Easter. Each child got their own little map of instructions, but the instructions were broken up into pieces, and each piece was a clue to the next piece. Every time they found a piece, they got a little piece of chocolate, or a little stuffed animal, or more chocolate, or whatever else I felt like doing that year.

Each little clue had a rhyme on it, so it might say something like:

Walk to your left and up the stairs, and look behind the teddy bears.

They loved this little game, and I had so much fun creating it for them. I would stay up all night writing the little rhymes and little clues, and I had so much joy watching them.

Part of what we did every year was make Easter eggs, of course, because who doesn’t make Easter eggs at Easter time? We would all gather around in the kitchen after I boiled the eggs. We would have the crayons out to resist the dye, and we would draw our little pictures on the tiny eggs. Like true artists, they would work on certain eggs sometimes for an hour. They took it quite seriously because it was a once-a-year thing, and over the years, they got better and better at it.

I remember my little one really struggling with hers because she wanted to do something she had heard of in church. I guess she had seen a picture of a cross, and at the bottom of the cross there were little tufts of grass and coloured eggs. She was only four years old, and she really, really wanted to make this. If I tried to help her, she got frustrated because she wanted to do it herself like her siblings, who were older and more capable.

In the end, with the least amount of touching guidance and the most amount of telling guidance, she got something that, to her, was good enough. Then she dipped it in the pink dye, and after a couple of minutes, I said, “Sweetheart, your egg is ready.”

She said, “Oh no, Mummy, it’s not ready yet. It has to be really, really pink.”

The stubborn little egg from the stubborn little girl stayed in the stubborn pink dye for hours.

I had forgotten about it, basically, while cleaning up everybody else’s messes because, of course, children don’t clean their own messes. They leave it for Mommy.

Before bedtime, she came up to me and said, “Mommy, I think it’s time to take my egg out of the pink.”

So I went downstairs, and there was her little egg in the little cup with the pink dye. Both of us held our breath in anticipation, hoping it worked out. I really, really hoped it would because I did not want her to feel disappointed.

Of course, she wanted to do it herself. I was trying to direct her to use the spoon to take it out, but she dipped her fingers into the dye. Her fingers got all covered in pink, and she lifted the egg out.

It was this magnificent, magnificent singing shade of pink I had barely seen before. Almost like the shade you see on cosmos flowers. It was quite lovely.

She was absolutely delighted beyond words.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Look at how beautiful my egg is! Look at how beautiful my Easter egg is! Oh, it’s perfect, Mummy. Please promise me you’ll never break it. Please promise me you’ll keep it forever and ever and ever and ever!”

I explained that I would try to keep it in the fridge for a little while for her. She got really sad and insisted that it had to be forever.

I just dropped it.

Like a good little bunny waiting for Easter morning, she hippity-hopped up the stairs and went to bed early for the first time in forever. She was so excited about Easter morning.

So the morning was finally here. All four of them were downstairs, gathered at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for their first clue. My eldest daughter liked to help the little one find her clues and read them. It was exciting for her to be a big sister and be able to help, instead of feeling like that awkward almost-teenager who was too old to be excited about finding chocolates, but too young to not be excited about it.

This gave her a reason to be excited with her sister, for her sister.

But all of us knew she was excited for herself just as much.

At the end of the chocolate hunt, it was time to do what we did every year after the hunt, which was to follow the Greek tradition, as their father was Greek, of smashing eggs together and seeing who had the strongest egg.

Of course Vmy little princess had the strongest egg, she thought.

Of course hers wouldn’t break because it was so special.

She had absolutely no fear whatsoever as she smashed it into her brother’s egg, and it didn’t break. Then she smashed it into her other brother’s egg, and it didn’t break.

Then she went to her big sister, and it was time to break her egg.

My eldest looked at me a little worried. I could see in her eyes that she didn’t want to chance breaking her sister’s egg, but as always, my youngest was insistent.

“Come on! Come on! My egg won’t break. You’ll see.”

I guess she had picked up on her sister’s fear.

So the big sister, caring and worried, hesitantly held out her own red egg and offered it for her little sister to smash hers against.

And pow.

They smashed their eggs together, and my little daughter’s special, beautiful, Barbie-pink, magnificent egg smashed to smithereens on the bottom.

It took her a minute.

It took her a full minute as she stared at it in disbelief, as if she had been betrayed. Then her face crumpled up very angrily, and she said, “This stupid, stupid egg. I hate this egg.”

And she smashed it to the ground.

Eggshell went everywhere. Little white speckles and bright pink speckles covered the floor. It took me forever to clean up because eggshells have this really special way of sticking to the ground, unlike many other things that are easy to sweep.

But when I sat down after we had had our big brunch, there was this little piece of egg I had missed.

I sat there looking at it as it stared at me.

And I thought to myself how sad it is that our dreams sometimes don’t come true, and that sometimes something we believe in just isn’t true.

It was a very hard lesson for a little girl to realize that everything is temporal, and that little egg was her lesson that not everything we want to be perfect is perfect.

And it was a very hard lesson for me to realize that I couldn’t protect her from it.

I couldn’t make her feel better.

I couldn’t stop life from happening.