I couldn’t help thinking as I came downstairs this Easter Monday morning to find no plundered Easter Egg boxes with I owe you notes hastily scribbled and stuck to the side, how different this year has been to many in the past. To be fair, my boy didn’t have any Easter Eggs this year – he’s not overly bothered by a desire to eat chocolate and I figured that not having any in the house was safer. He’s in his late twenties now so the fact that the Easter Bunny didn’t come calling isn’t going to send him to therapy in later life, you know?

When he was little I was in a particularly bad place where my relationship with food was concerned. I mean, I’d grown up as a fat child and my mum had regularly applied edible band-aids to anything that hurt me, so medicating with food was par for the course. However, in my very early twenties I found myself alone with a new baby having escaped from an abusive marriage, and at times it felt like food was my only companion.

We had a tiny family, even back then. Just the two of us and my mum, who lived nearby, and a handful of extended family who lived much further away. I had a bee in my Easter bonnet about my boy not ‘suffering’ from a lack of Easter eggs due to the fact that our family unit was so small, so I remember buying Easter Eggs for him from long-gone family members…here you go son, this one’s from your great grandma and that one’s from your old Uncle Donald…even I didn’t remember too much about Uncle Donald, who was my mum’s second-cousin-once-removed and who’d been pushing up daisies for a good twenty years before my boy was even born. And he must surely have wondered in his two or three or four-year-old little head who the hell all these relatives were, who sent Easter eggs but never came to visit.

So on Easter Sunday there was always an impressive array of chocolate eggs for my boy, hand delivered by the Easter Bunny. If I’m being completely honest, some of them were the second or even third replacement of the original purchase, depending on how many times I’d been caught in the grip of a binge in the month or so leading up to the big day. And lets not even get started on the post-Easter binges, which were all very well until he got the hang of sums. Then it became a bit more difficult to get away with. But I had four left Mummy and now there’s only three…

I became really adept at fashioning the fancy foil in an Easter Egg sort of shape and arranging them in their boxes on top of the dresser until I had chance to replace them, so he could count them not realising they were empty. And then when he was older, and sussed that out I’d scribble an I owe you, and promise two eggs to replace the one I’d accidentally eaten.

On the surface of it, it’s amusing. Except it’s not, not really…since when is it amusing to lie to your child, and steal from them..? I mean, I know it’s only chocolate but still. That’s the behaviour of an addict, right? I didn’t recognise it back in the day, it’s only now that I can look back retrospectively and feel that hot flush of shame when I realise how messed up it all was.

This year, there is no carnage, not a single creative foil sculpture, and no I owe you notes. Mind you, these days I’d be far more likely to get greeted by an infuriated man-child holding an empty box hollering I can’t believe you’ve eaten my fucking Easter egg again…a bit like me, he calls a spade a spade. But I’m here to tell you that waking up chocolate-debt free on the day after Easter is a good feeling 🙂

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