Eggs Benedict

I don’t eat bacon. 

Even during the years when I ate meat — chicken, fish, the occasional lamb at a family dinner — bacon was never on my plate. It never appealed to me. This is not a secret. It is not a recent development. It is simply a fact about me; the kind of fact that the people in my life absorbed long ago without needing to be reminded.

And every time my husband and I go to brunch — every single time, for nearly thirty years — I order the same thing. Eggs Benedict. But not the traditional version. I always ask them to substitute the Canadian bacon with spinach, roasted tomatoes, whatever vegetable the kitchen has available. A modification so routine I don't even think about it anymore.

I didn't think it needed to be said out loud at our table. Not after thirty years.

Then, at an ordinary Sunday brunch that doesn't announce itself as significant, my phone rang — a work call I couldn't ignore. I excused myself, stepped outside, and before I left I said the thing I've said a hundred times in a hundred restaurants: "Just order my regular."

My regular. The thing I always get. At every brunch. For nearly three decades.

I came back to the table as our plates were arriving. The eggs were perfectly poached. The hollandaise was golden. And sitting underneath, exactly as it always comes on every menu in every restaurant in America, was the Canadian bacon.

I stared at the plate.

He didn’t know.

He genuinely, absolutely, did not know that traditional Eggs Benedict comes with Canadian bacon. 

He didn’t know that I always substitute it. 

He didn't know my order — my regular, my favorite breakfast — when I stepped away from the table for four minutes.

The waitress saw my face and immediately offered to take it back. Of course she did. It was a simple fix. The kitchen could switch it in minutes. She was kind about it, professional, but the exchange was awkward in the way these things always are. The over-explanation, the reassurance, the other diners at nearby tables glancing over to see what was wrong.

I couldn't stop the tears. They came before I could make a decision about them, before I could remind myself that we were in public, before I could do what I have done so many times in our marriage: swallow it, smooth it over, decide it wasn't worth the conversation.

My husband looked at me, then at the plate, then back at me. We can send it back, his face said. It's just breakfast. It's not a big deal.

But it was. 

Just not because of the eggs.

***

I know how to cook for my husband. After nearly thirty years I know exactly what he will and won't eat, what spices he prefers, which dishes make him reach for seconds and which ones he politely finishes without enthusiasm. 

When I'm at the grocery store and I see something he might enjoy, I pick it up without thinking. 

I have adjusted recipes, reorganized menus, planned meals around his preferences so many times that it is simply part of how I move through the world.

He did not know I don't eat bacon.

Sitting at that table, watching the waitress take my plate away while the diners around us looked elsewhere, I understood that the eggs were not the point. They were just the moment when everything I had been carrying finally became too heavy to hold in silence.

Because this was not about one missed detail. 

This was about the accumulation.

It was about needing him and feeling profoundly alone during the health crisis I went through. About the exhaustion — the deep, bone-level exhaustion — of managing a household, raising children, and building a life. About asking for help and being met either with absence or promises that dissolved before they were kept. About the parenting that somehow defaulted to me, as if the children were primarily my responsibility while he was a benevolent presence who participated when it was convenient. About the number of times I thought: I see you. I know you. I show up for you. Could he say the same?

I remembered all of his eating habits.
He did not know my breakfast order.

This is not a small thing. This is a measurement. This is what thirty years of paying attention looks like from one side of a table, and what thirty years of being elsewhere looks like from the other.

The tears that came in the restaurant that morning were not about eggs or bacon or a missed substitution. They were the tears of a woman who had spent decades being attentive to a partner who did not know her order. A wife who had asked for help during the hardest moments of her life and been met with something that looked like love but didn't feel like presence. A mother who had held so much together for so long that one small, careless omission on an ordinary Sunday morning cracked open every large thing she had quietly filed away under not worth the conversation.

I sat at that table and thought: who am I married to? Why did I say yes? Why did I stay?

Those are dark questions to carry into a Sunday brunch. But they were honest ones.

***

Here is what I want to say to you.

The small things are not small. They are the evidence. They are the daily proof that someone is paying attention to you; not to the idea of you, not to the version of you that is convenient or familiar or easy to love, but to the actual you. The specific, particular, detailed you who has a favorite breakfast and a way you take their coffee and a look on your face when you’re overwhelmed that someone who loves you should be able to read from across a room.

Attention is not the same as love. You can love someone genuinely and still not see them. You can be devoted, faithful, well-intentioned and still miss the person sitting across from you every single morning. Love without attention is a house where the lights are on but nobody is listening for you to come home.

And attention is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is the repeated, daily, unglamorous choice to notice. To remember. To show up not just for the large and obvious moments but for the quiet ones that don't announce their significance until one ordinary Sunday.

I don't tell this story to expose my husband or to perform my pain. I tell it because I believe most of us are living inside some version of it: on one side of the table or the other, or both at the same time. 

The person whose order wasn't known.
The person who didn't know it. 

Over the course of a long relationship, most of us have been both.

***

So I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer it honestly.

Do you know your partner's order? Not just at brunch, but in life? Do you know what they need when they're exhausted? What they've stopped asking for because asking felt pointless?  What they gave up to build a life with you and whether they've made peace with those choices? Do you know the small daily details of who they actually are — not who they were when you fell in love, but who they are now, after everything? And, if you're honest, do they know yours?

These are the questions at the heart of Lucky Charm, the trilogy that I spent five years writing. Not whether two people fall in love, but whether they ever truly learn to see each other. 

That Sunday morning did not end my marriage, but it broke something open. What I found inside, and what I chose to do with it, is the reason these books exist.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, if you know what it is to sit on either side of that plate, this book was written for you.

Welcome to the Gurukul. The door is open.