Word of The Day Challenge: EGG

Avery Palmer

Back when I was in Highschool

I took a class called ” Family Living ” and in this class we learned to balance checkbooks, decorate a living room- not with furniture but we helped chose paint and finishings for houses that our carpentry class ( don’t remember what it was actually called ) helped to build.

We even worked on things like figuring out the pros and cons of various wood burning stoves, hot tubs and home electronics.

Then we strted  a unit I called babyland.

We learned about child development and we even had a chance to work with real little kids.

I was fine with that because I babysat a lot and some of the children I I watched were special needs kids.

One of the projects in our  Family Living class was to carry around an egg for a week.

We could decorate our little egg, we  were supposed to name it, we even had a little ‘baby book’ and that we had to fill out.

Our teacher even went as far as to check up on us in our other classes and and she had her teacher’s assistants check up on us to make sure our Egg Babies were with us.

It was fun.

The not so fun part was that if you found a little red ” x ” on  your egg it meant that your Egg Baby was disabled.

Guess who got the flawed egg?

Some students took extra good care of their disabled Egg Baby- but I have to admitt, I did not.

I knew what it was like to have to put diapers on a eight year old. I knew what it was like to have people stare at the child in your care and have them ask, ” What’s wrong with it.. I mean her.”

I knew what it was like to find a Mom crying in her backyard because her three year old child’s grandfather had said, ” I guess his life is over already.”

Seeing that little red “X” broke my heart and at that moment I decided I didn’t want to play.

I was in my science class when one of my Family Living Teacher’s assistants came in.

She bounced up to my desk ( all of this teacher’s assistants were perky, I think it was a pre requistate to work with her ) and said, ‘ Ok. Where is your baby?”

I looked up and said, ” it’s in my locker ”

” Well. She said primly, ” you’re supposed to have it with you at all times. ” she took up her clipboard and was about to put a zero next to my name when out of my mouth fell the words,

” Well.”  I said just as primly but with a little bit of anger, “It was supposed to be normal. ”

You know, there are words that you say that haunt you forever and for some reason those words will always haunt me.

I’m sorry Egg Baby. I should have given you a real name.

Avery Palmer