an egg-baby prophecy
october 18th, 2000

For some reason, a memory from long ago popped into my head while I was on 
my way out of probability and statistics class, and it set me to thinking 
(which is always a dangerous thing.) When I was visiting Amber this 
weekend, the subject of conversation came up involving the possible 
ulterior motives of some individuals involved with sex education, and I 
was thinking back to my sex education classes in grade school - back to 
all the handshaking exercises that taught the dangers of AIDS, to the 
silly dramatic school videos with the silly school dramas - trying to 
remember if something ulterior had been slipped into my early education, 
to see in what way such things might have shaped me.

I couldn't think of anything. The only sense I got from my class was that 
it was a fairly new institution in Greene County Schools and no one was 
entirely sure how to approach the subject, or how to react to it. I think 
I might have learned what a hymen was, I don't know. A lot of it seemed 
silly and meaningless, and much of it was what I already knew. I mean, 
they never thought to tell you the really important stuff in sex ed class. 
Like what all the lingo meant. (I didn't know what "giving head" meant 
until I was sixteen years old.) And they never taught you a skillful and 
socially redeeming way to extricate oneself from a rather uncomfortable 
situation. The girls in the video would all say, "No!" very harshly and 
push the guys away from them and walk away. Kudos to any girl who has ever 
actually done that, because I haven't.

However, in all of these remembrances, one activity blatantly stuck out in 
my mind. The egg-babies. Did anyone else ever do the egg-baby activity? 
Where you take a boiled egg and decorate it in little egg-clothes and 
egg-smiley faces and name it and make a little crib for it and carry it 
around with you everywhere you went? These little hard-boiled accessories 
became surrogate children for 7th graders for the span of about a week 
(perhaps not even that long.) For some reason, this particular exercise 
meant a great deal to me. I painstakenly decorated a small basket in bits 
of cloth and leather and feathers (I was going through my whole Native 
American stage back then - I even gave my egg-baby a little feather 
headband) and tended to my little egg, and went above and beyond the 
assignment details, reading stories to it, talking to it, acting as if it 
really *were* a baby (because that was the whole point of it, wasn't it?) 
Her name was Nicknevan Chelsea Alchemy Asdell (and you though Aisling 
Stoirm was bad!) and she was my surrogate egg-child for about a week of my 
pre-adolescent life.

Everybody thought I was crazy. When I happen to remember this story to 
this day, people still give me strange looks and laugh and shake their 
heads. But I got really attached to that egg. We were supposed to imagine 
these eggs were really our children, and I had an *excellent* imagination. 
And when the assignment was over, and we could throw our eggs away, it was 
extremely difficult for me. In fact, I ended up simply giving the egg a 
sort of burial instead, because I couldn't just go and throw her in the 
trash. It just seemed wrong somehow. (Which makes me a freak, I know.)

The point of this - I don't know. The assignment was designed to teach 
young kids just what sort of immense responsibility was involved in having 
a child. But something went wrong with me. I enjoyed having an egg-baby 
around, and missed her after she was gone and the project was over. I went 
out of my way to make the experience as real as possible. (And granted, 
now that I am a mother, I am more than aware of the shortcomings of the 
experiment - for true realism they would have to create a slobbering, 
drooling, screaming doll that you would have to change every hour, that 
would spontaneously spit things up on you, that would wake you up three or 
four times in the middle of the night, complete with some mechanism to 
measure the kind of true attention you were giving it. But even if I had 
been given something like that to tend to, I think my attitude would have 
been the same.) But I can remember being horrified because some boys on a 
bus I was on decided to start playing catch with one of the egg-babies. 
Nobody took it seriously. I have no idea why I did.

Maybe that has something to do with why I made the decisions I did. And 
maybe that has everything to do with the fact that my life is so much more 
complete and happy and stable with Ash in it. And isn't it ironic, that a 
girl who spent half of her life deperately trying to never grow up has 
found her life's true happiness in starting a family and taking on the 
title of motherhood? Isn't it funny, that a girl who talked about 
wandering the earth barefoot like Cain from Kung Fu, or selling tarot 
readings out of the back of her car while she travelled the United States 
- and now, all she wants is a comfortable little home in the mountains 
outside of Asheville, North Carolina, with her family. Stability, once her 
greatest fear, has become her warmest comfort. But then again, looking 
back on the 7th grade girl tended to her surrogate egg-baby, maybe there 
never really was a question of it.

Something really wonderful happened yesterday, a mark for me in my growing 
confidence. Those of you who have been around me lately may have noticed 
that I've stopped wearing make-up. On special occasions I will wear a bit, 
but my face is usually clean and there and I leave it alone. I was 
discussing this with my grandmother last night, and she got all flustered, 
telling me that I needed to wear make-up, why would I go and do a thing 
like that for...and I was shocked. "I don't need make-up," I retorted. "I 
don't need anything. God blessed me with a beautiful face, created just 
for me, and how dare I mock him by marking all over it?" And while this 
was a highly exaggerated comment designed particularly to make my 
grandmother think about what she was saying, it was also a footmark for 
me, that I could actually think of myself as being beautiful enough to 
defend. And those of you who know me best - well. You understand.