Confused…

I love eggs. Ummm…let me rephrase that! I love eating eggs. Arrrghhh!!! You all jolly well know what I mean! LOL!!!

I love them half-boiled, hard-boiled, poached or fried – omelette, bull’s eye/sunny side up or scrambled, or braised in soy sauce. My daughter loves eggs too. She would go to Old Town and have their perfectly done half-boiled eggs…

As for me, when taking them half-boiled, I prefer the white hard like hard-boiled but the yolk still runny. To get it like that, I would put the eggs in the water in a saucepan and bring it to boil and after a while, I would remove it from the fire and break the eggs into a saucer…to be eaten with soy sauce and pepper.

And talking about eggs reminds me of this short story by my favourite short story writer from Singapore, Catherine Lim. The title is…that’s right, “Eggs”. It’s about this little six-year-old girl who was utterly confused because she was scolded by her mother when she asked for an egg and told that the likes of them could not afford to eat eggs as they were poor.

They lived with her rich First Aunt and her two cousins and one day, the cousins had a plate of fried eggs to eat. One of them accused her of stealing one of their eggs. Her mother was furious and bought a bag of eggs, cooked all of them and forced her to finish the whole lot and when she could not finish, the mother walloped her. The poor child was utterly confused – why had her mother refused to give her an egg and then forced her to eat so many at one go?

Things sometimes seem that way in life. When the children are small, they would be forced to finish all their food. Fat babies are considered cute and lovable whereas the skinny ones somehow do not seem to have the same attraction. But when they grow bigger, the parents would control their diet and refuse to let them eat the things that they love for fear that they would grow too fat.

When a toddler starts moving to the music, everyone would clap happily to encourage the child and say, “Dance! Dance! Good kid!” Clever kid!” However, when the child grows up to be a teen and goes dancing, once the parents hear of it, they will threaten, “Go! Go dancing again and I’ll chop your legs off!”

At home, children are told not to waste and to finish off everything on the plate. However, at a sit-down dinner, should they want to take the last piece, they would be reprimanded at home, if not on the spot, that they are such a disgrace – so greedy, as if they had never eaten in their lives.

I suppose this is just the tip of the iceberg and there are a lot of other instances where parents tend to contradict themselves and the poor kids end up utterly confused. Anybody know of any more to share with the rest of us?