I look down and Emma’s standing next to me, still in her nightgown, her coloring book and crayons forgotten on the table.
I feel my face flush with embarrassment. A four-year-old is offering to help me make breakfast because I clearly have no idea what I’m doing.
“Sure,” I say, stepping to the side to make room for her at the counter.
She silently drags over a little wooden step stool that was tucked beside the fridge, positions it carefully, and climbs up so she’s at counter height. Then she looks at the bowl with all the shell pieces floating in it and doesn’t say anything about what a disaster it is, which I appreciate more than she probably knows.
“My Daddy always taught me you have to crack the egg on something flat first,” she says, reaching for one of the remaining eggs. “Like this.”
She taps the egg against the counter—not too hard, not too soft, just right—and a clean crack appears in the shell. Then she holds it over the bowl and carefully pulls the two halves apart, and the egg slides out perfectly, no shell, no mess, just clean yolk and white dropping into the bowl.
“See?” She looks up, her expression one of pure, helpful pride. “You try.”
I reach for another egg, still feeling uncertain and humiliated. A four-year-old is tutoring me in a fundamental life skill. I’m here to care for her, and she is already, in ways she cannot understand, caring for me. How many eggs am I even supposed to make? Four seems like enough for me and a kid, right? That’s not too many or too few?
I tap the egg against the counter the way Emma showed me, and a crack appears. Progress.
“Now open it,” Emma says, and she puts her tiny hands over mine, guiding me as I pull the shell apart. The egg drops into the bowl, clean, no shells this time, and I look over at her and smile.
She’s still concentrating hard, her little face serious, making sure we’re doing it right. And it hits me suddenly that to Emma, this isn’t strange. She doesn’t think that just because I’m an adult that I should automatically know how to do everything. She saw an opportunity to help, to teach something she knows,and she took it. There’s no judgment in it, no confusion about why an adult doesn’t know how to crack an egg properly. Just this straightforward willingness to show me.
Despite all of her apparent behavioral issues—the locking nannies in bathrooms, the plate-throwing, the hair-cutting—I can tell that Emma is a kind person. She’s good inside. She’s just hurting and doesn’t know how to express it, so it comes out sideways in all these aggressive ways. But underneath that is this little girl who wants to help, who wants to connect.
“Thank you for showing me that,” I say, and the gratitude is genuine, humbling. “That was incredibly helpful.”
Her face transforms, lit from within by the pride of a teacher whose lesson has landed. “Can I help with something else?”
“Absolutely.”
I start stirring the eggs in the bowl—just breaking up the yolks, mixing everything together—and then I dump them into the hot skillet. They sizzle immediately, spreading out across the pan, and I stare at them trying to figure out what to do next. Do I just stir them? That has to be it, right? Keep them moving so they don’t burn?
I grab a spatula from the container of utensils on the counter and start stirring the yolks and whites into a pale yellow swirl, pushing them from one side of the pan to the other, watching the liquid coalesce into soft, creamy curds.
“You can help me wash the strawberries,” I tell Emma, pointing to the container on the counter.
“Okay!” She hops down from her stool and drags it over to the sink.
We work in a companionable, focused silence—me at the stove, her at the sink, each small task a brick in the foundation of our morning. She treats each strawberry with a jeweler’s care, placing them one by one on a plate in a careful, radiant circle. It’s kind of nice, actually, working alongside her like this—nottrying to entertain her or manage her behavior, but doing a task together.
By the time everything’s done—eggs are fluffy and only slightly brown on the edges, toast is toasted, strawberries are washed—I’m actually feeling pretty accomplished. I cut Emma’s toast diagonally the way she likes it, put everything on plates, and carry them over to the small kitchen table.
She climbs into her chair, surveys her plate, and her face clouds. “I want my Ariel plate.”
I look at the plate—white with Princess Jasmine on it, in her turquoise outfit with the tiger—and then back at Emma.
“The Ariel plate is in the dishwasher,” Leo says from the living room, not looking up from his papers.
Emma folds her arms across her chest. “Then I want the Flounder one.”
“That’s also in the dishwasher.”
“I don’t want Jasmine.” She pushes the plate away with a definitive scrape of ceramic on wood, her lower lip emerging in a pronounced pout.
“But Jasmine is so cool,” I say, sitting down across from her with my own plate—plain white, no princesses. “She has a pet tiger. A whole tiger! That’s basically the coolest pet you could possibly have.”
“I don’t care about her tiger.”
“And she goes on that magic carpet ride and gets to see the whole world from up in the sky. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”
