Egregious adj. – Conspicuously and outrageously bad or reprehensible
So, you mean to tell me that every year you oblige your kids in the traditional Easter egg hunt? And you don’t feel completely insane while at it? Personally, I feel outrageously bad and reprehensible before, after, and during participation.
Why? I’ll tell you why.
First, let’s review the steps of easter egg huntery:
1- Gather your very large bin of plastic eggs you store for annual insanity. (If you aren’t as prepared, you will be forced to your local Walmart where you’ll fork over a minimum of $20.)
2- Prepare the candy. (We do that by taking our twelve bags of variety and dumping them into a pile and mixing them together on the living room floor.)
3- Fill the eggs.
4- Hide the eggs.
5- Find the eggs.
Now, this is where it really starts to get to you. You must sit patiently with a smile on your face, as to not ruin the tradition’s fun for your children. Just look happy as you watch the kids do #’s 1-3 in reverse order.
6- Dump out all candy from the eggs, back to a pile on the floor.
7- Reorganize the candy back into it’s original sorting so that you can literally place it back in the bags from where it came.
8- Take the refilled storage bin of empty Easter eggs back down to the basement for next year.
I’ve been obliging my family for fifteen years with Easter egg witchery. I’ve implemented every way around the frustration. I started with saving the eggs from year to year so I didn’t have to purchase them over and over again. (You’re welcome Mother Earth.) I advanced to requiring the children to do the work….more every year. Fifteen years ago they just had to do the finding. A decade ago, I started making them fill. (I kindly informed them there would be no finding without filling.) Five years later, they had to start hiding the eggs too. This year all I hoped to do was buy the candy. I tried to get them to do the whole thing without me, but they guilted me into believing that a mom’s participation is essential for the fun.
I snapped. I’m so ashamed. I started screaming, “WHY? WHY do we do this every year? Just eat the candy! Just eat the candy!” Tears started streaming down my face. My maniacal laughter must have startled them, but children…they just can’t see the error. It’s like their corneas have been rainbowed over with egg-dye and bunny candy poop. They were in a trance just going through the motions like an Energizer bunny with faulty programming. I tried waving my hand in front of their eyes, they just held their arms out stiff in front at 90 degrees and mumbled, “We must get Easter candy.”
This is my plea to the American public. We must find an immunization for this nonsense. And we must do it before next Easter. Please help me! We can’t all convert to Judaism, even though they are obviously the most sensible of the religions.
Maybe my parent’s solution can help you start thinking outside the egg. They just opened the bags of candy and threw them around the house and called it good bucking the eggs all together. Easter morning, their seven children would scramble like starving field-working immigrant children experiencing their first pinata. We never even knew to complain, we didn’t know any different. I think by keeping the plastic eggs out of the house they saved us from the trance all together. My only regret is that even though we lived in Southern California with perfect Easter weather, we only celebrated outdoors once. You see, we all learned the hard way that this method didn’t really work outside. When attempted, the morning dew sogged up every last piece (especially the chocolate) leaving me traumatized for life.
Although, I’m telling you, I would take eternally sogged up candy over one more year of the dark side. We must stop the madness. I’m afraid next year I might need a straight jacket. Maybe I can just start sporting one so my kids will see that my hands are tied?
My only consolence is at least I don’t live in Germany where I would be expected to hang 10,000 eggs from a tree.
I hope you remember 
One way I give myself this daily reminder is when I play taxi. Every time I pull up to the school, the field, the kids’ friends’ houses, the church…wherever I am picking them up, I text them an acronym.
Yesterday, I employed a new tactic. It’s called the special dinner. I thought, “If she is acting this bad, she must be really desperate,” so I pulled out the linens, the glassware, and flowers. I made a nice dinner. We all toasted her. We wrote down what we loved about her. Just because she is grounded for five weeks it doesn’t mean that we should quit loving her. If I’ve learned anything I’ve learned that they need the most love when they are in trouble….which is often as a teenager.
Had I remembered…..
alice w. gold 