Robin's Egg Blues

It’s 3 am and I am having trouble sleeping again. The same brain that can really nail an Instagram caption also loves to replay traumatic mistakes and have me try to THINK my way out of whatever negative feeling it gives me. My brand of OCD is shame-flavored with a bit of symmetry obsession mixed in. The scene stuck on repeat is one of my greatest hits. Picture a sunny afternoon and you are me, and I am four. My mother is visiting a friend I am not super familiar with. The house is large, and to me, four and poor, it was very fancy. I am the best-behaved child my mother has ever met at this point in both of our lives. She says this so often that it etches itself onto my frontal lobe. I thought about being good constantly and defined my entire personality around it and cats, so yes, not much has changed. At four I hadn’t developed obvious enough symptoms for adults in my life to notice, plus the obsession with being good also helped me disguise that anything was wrong with me for years. Plus the 90s were a wild time.

Anyway, the house was fancy, the sun was shining, and I am four and a very good kid. I ask to use the restroom, which is upstairs. I am allowed to go by myself since I am such a good kid. I ascend the dark wooden staircase that had a waxy layer that gleamed brightly in the sunlight. Our stairs had a musty stained and greying carpet on them just to give you an idea of where I was coming from. I walked up the stairs and down the hall and took a left, I remember left because even though I am four I do know I have a freckle on my left hand and none on my right, still do to this day.

I enter the bathroom.

It was white and smelled of cosmetic powders and rose petals. Sat on the back of the toilet tank rested a tiny bird’s nest. With four perfect eggs, a color I had yet to really ever see before. It was beautiful. But due to the color of the eggs, I knew they had to be soap or something. I picked one up and it broke in my hand. This rich lady had REAL BIRDS EGGS IN HER BATHROOM. Then my undiagnosed OCD really kicked in. “You can’t leave them looking different” it shouted at me. I then proceeded to squish the other three eggs to make the nest “even” while knowing that I was indeed a fraud. I was such a bad kid. I was squishing some sort of crazy blue eggs in some rich lady’s house who my mom just convinced I was a golden angel child of perfection.

After the fourth and final squish, a wave of nausea and guilt overcame me. I felt hot in the face. I had to get out of there. I walked down the stairs quietly listening for my mom’s conversation to be dwindling. Wrap it up, ma! That was all I could think. I couldn’t make a scene, I was a good kid, I couldn’t explain what I did cause I was the good kid, my only option left was to fake sick. Luckily my four-year-old nervous system was already calibrated to be HIGHLY sensitive and the guilt of what I had just done, the repeated replaying of it, and the overwhelming sense of doom I was feeling really did leave me hot-faced and flushed. My mother took me home and we never saw that woman again. I never told my mom, I haven’t even told my therapist. But sometimes at three am I see a little bird nest in my mind with four little squished eggs in it, and I have to get up and take a shower. Anyway, thank god for Prozac.