New excerpt from the book draft: The Eggs

Thanks for being here. I'm writing a lot these days! Here's another little excerpt from the book in progress, freshly written this week. About Easter! Is the ending clear? I am unsure about it.

Thanks for reading! xo namee

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Every mom lies to their kids in varying degrees. We tell them their scribbles are beautiful and we tell them we’re fine when we’re not always fine and once a year we fill plastic eggs with candy and hide em all around the house and say a rabbit did it. This is one of my favorite lies, and I am very good at it.

It used to just be candy. But then one year I also hid a bigger candy surprise, and to find to the bigger candy prize I made a map, and I cut the map into puzzle pieces, and I hid the puzzle pieces in the eggs. Another year we added a maze made out of string - a tradition that came from my partner’s family - and SunWoo stepped over and under to his basket like the softest mission impossible. This year my son is sixteen, so I stuffed the eggs with a little bit of candy and four of them contained riddles, and the riddles led to cold hard cash. Lol no not that kind of cash, just five dollar bills. Not much. But, enough.

See, your egg hunt has to grow up. I learned from my mom, my american mom, who always got the good candy and who always had them hid before we woke up. When we were all grown adults she bought 6-packs of beer, hid the bottles in the yard, gave us the boxes as our baskets and said Ready, set, go! Even my dad was peeking under the porch for another Corona. For a little while, we were all children again. Bouncy and unstressed and enchanted. My mom did that. She’s a pro.

We do it for the kids, but I think we also do it for ourselves. I love watching my baby play with his toys; I said this when he was a baby and I said this yesterday, just idling in the hallway by his room as he changed a record on his record player.

I’m not a great mom. And I’m really quite bad at celebrating holidays, which I think they must teach in a mom school somewhere that all the other moms must go to. But I’m pretty good at a few things, and the egg hunt is one of them. This is why, as we packed for Korea, almost a month before Easter, I added a set of plastic eggs and some american candy to my suitcase.

We are in Busan in a tiny airbnb, with a bedroom separated from the main room by a screen. I sleep in the bedroom, SunWoo sleeps in the main room on a pull out couch. I didn’t understand this floor map when I booked the place, and it is right now a considerable challenge since I have never hid the eggs in the same room the baby is sleeping. I filled the eggs while he was still awake playing his video games - the sounds of Star Wars battlefront obscuring the crinkle of the candy package opening, the ksh of the eggs closing, the fragile stone sound they each made as I set them aside in a pile, one at time, I love you, I love you, I love you, they said

*

In his suitcase. On top of his clothes. In the fridge, in the drawer, on the wall ledge. It was not a big room, there were not a lot of hiding places. I tiptoed around the room like the quietest most acrobatic Easter bunny you’ve ever not seen. In Korea I am awkward and generally incapable and a fraction of the woman I usually am, but let the record show I did not wake the thirteen year old baby. It was not a very creative or even challenging hunt, but I fell asleep feeling - what is the word - proud? Sure. I felt sure.

In the foreign morning light, two dozen neon colored eggs are flashing, so obvious in their hiding. Yet, for hours, the teen doesn’t notice. Did you know it’s Easter? he even asks me, standing next to a bright pink egg on the side table, tells me he’s bummed to be missing it at home. I’m sorry babe; I console him, my eyes darting to the left, to the left, as a hint. The hint fails.

It’s when we’re leaving for lunch. Finally: he finds a blue egg in his shoe.

The shoe is so obvious, he said. I think he was six. You put one there every year.

Whattttt, he says, holding up the egg, grinning. Just thinking about that grin makes me look up from my computer and grin back at him, right now, years later. It defies time and space. It is the kind of grin you have to be fluent in to fully understand. Where’d you get the eggs?? he asks. He doesn’t even open it.

The look on his face. The wonder. The softness, the relief. How culture is alive and not lost, and ours. What I want is for him to feel as rooted as I imagined him to be, when the home he thought was elsewhere was, for awhile, beside him, behind him, all around him

What I want is to be the mom he imagined me to be: when he put on his shoe, when he came into this world, when I kissed an owie, when I picked him up from daycare - and he looked at me