The Broken Shell

A tiny fragment of a bright pink eggshell remains on the floor after an Easter morning tradition, carrying with it the memory of one little girl’s magnificent egg, her absolute certainty that it could never break, and the lesson that followed when it did.

The Broken Shell is a reflective prose reading by Easter Ellen about childhood, motherhood, memory, and the things we cannot always protect the people we love from learning.

About These Stories

I write stories, reflections, and imagined entire worlds! Some are arguably true, some suspiciously borrowed from memory, some robustly exaggerated, and some entirely made up from the pure delight of imagining, capturing whatever is persisting stubbornly enough that I simply cannot ignore it any longer.

More writing, reflections, and audio pieces live at easterellen.com.

What is Easter Ellen?

Welcome. I’m Easter Ellen.

I write stories, reflections, and imagined entire worlds. Some are arguably true, some are suspiciously borrowed from memory, some are robustly exaggerated, and some are made up entirely from the pure delight of imagining.

Mostly, I write what persists stubbornly enough that I can no longer ignore it.

If you enjoy these pieces, subscribe so you do not miss the next one.

You can find more of my writing, reflections, audio pieces, and creative work at easterellen.com.

You can also find me on YouTube at EasterEllen, where I share longer stories, thoughts, and conversations about change, choice, self-trust, and moving forward.

Welcome to Easter Ellen.

This is a sister space for my writing and video channels. I read my flavour-of-the-day pieces, follow whatever thread of thought shows up, and let the work live in audio form.

Today’s piece is called The Broken Shell.

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It was staring up at me.

I had been sitting in the chair for, I don’t know, 45, maybe 50 minutes. And the whole time, I was staring at this tiny piece of a broken 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 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 to an age where they are tired for half of the day and then liven up around 5:00 p.m. until 4:00 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 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 we felt like giving them 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 clues for the four of them, and I had so much joy watching them in the morning.

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 the kitchen after I boiled the eggs. We would have the crayons out to resist the dye, and we would draw little pictures on the tiny eggs like true artists.

They would work on a certain egg, 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.

After a couple of minutes, I said, “Sweetheart, your egg is ready.”

She said, “Oh no, Mommy. That’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 while cleaning up everybody else’s messes because, of course, children don’t clean their own messes. They leave them 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.”

I was like, “Oh my God, you’re right.”

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 had worked out. I really, really hoped it had 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 little 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.

It was very, very lovely.

She was 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.”

“Mommy, 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 her for a while.

She got really sad and insisted that I had to keep it forever.

I propped it up 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 be not excited about it.

This gave her a reason to fully dive in and be excited with her sister. For her sister, of course.

But all of us knew she was just as excited as the rest of them.

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, my 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.

It didn’t break.

Then, with a big smile, she smashed it into her other brother’s egg.

It didn’t break.

Then, with a bigger smile, she went to her big sister, and it was time to smash their eggs.

My eldest looked at me a little worried. I could see in her eyes that she didn’t want to take a chance on 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 against hers.

And POW!

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

It took her a full minute as she stared with utter disbelief, as though 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 it up because eggshells have this really special way of sticking to the ground, unlike many other things that are easy to sweep up.

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

I sat there looking at it as it stared back at me, and I thought to myself:

How sad is it 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 my little girl to realize that everything is temporary, and that little egg was her lesson that not everything we want to stay perfect can stay 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.

I hope you enjoyed the story, and thank you for listening.

I’ll be back soon, and I hope to find you here.