Yesterday I made scrambled eggs. It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement, eh? And it’s true, for most people it’s not. Then again, they’re not me.

I love food. I love to eat. I don’t cook. I don’t bake. I’ve gotten better at preparing basic meals over the last year as, for reasons I won’t get into, I’ve found myself on my own a lot more than usual. I can make pasta. No sauce – lucky I love olive oil and basil. I can heat stuff. I can make instant mashed potatoes and I have this wonderful little pocket that makes baking potatoes in a microwave possible. I can make toasties and improvise with all sorts of breads and cheese. I don’t peel vegetables. And I don’t do eggs.

Eggs are fickle little things, they’re both hard and delicate. It takes my brain a lot of work and energy to imagine how much strength I would need to hold one, let alone break it. These are the main reasons I don’t cook or bake: those first steps (breaking eggs, peeling fruits or vegetables) seem insurmountable most days. Add sensory issues (egg yolk on my fingers? 😬) and as much as I love food, preparing it isn’t fun at all.

A few days ago however, a post on a dyspraxia group on Facebook made me want to investigate different ways to break eggs. I found out that the egg opener we use for soft-boiled eggs can also be used on raw eggs. Yesterday, my wife was in the process of preparing brunch and asked if I wanted to practice my egg breaking. It was the right time. My hands were okay with it, my skin was too. So I did. The first one didn’t break where I expected it to but I didn’t get any on my fingers. The second one was perfect but took much too long and I have no patience. But since things were going well, I decided to try and break the next one in a more traditional way, on the edge of the bowl. That’s the part I usually hate, I either use too little strength and the egg doesn’t break or too much and it ends up on me. Yesterday, everything worked. I broke six eggs in total, only got a little yolk on my fingers, managed to ignore.

Feeling bold, I asked to scramble them. I beat them, that was fun (and tiring). Pouring the content of the bowl into the pan was dicey, it slipped at the end but didn’t fall. All good. The result was too, good I mean. It was delicious. It was yummy. It was fantastic. All because I made it myself.

See, I’m 49. When something like this happens, I’m 7 again. It’s all new. It’s all amazing. It opens a whole world of possibilities. It’s both wonderful and a little embarrassing because, damn, I’m an adult. And sometimes I don’t want to feel like a child. It makes me frustrated and angry at life. I don’t want that anger, I’ve been working on fighting it for years. It works, most of the time. And when it works, I can now celebrate by making scrambled eggs. Or an omelette. Or cakes! So many possibilities.