There has been a lot of TV chatter this past week about parents not merely playing, but naming, favourites, as in, “I like Child A more than I like Child B.”
Anderson Cooper tackled the subject a week ago, followed by Kelly Ripa and her husband, Mark Consuelos, on The Rachael Ray Show, covered finally by the tag team over at The Talk.
Mind you, a good topic—like anything that is deemed good these days—will be stolen at the drop of a hat (November sweeps hunkering just around the corner), but I have to tell you, this is one subject I wouldn’t tackle with a twenty-foot pole, most especially if I, like Kelly and Mark apparently, could actually name a favourite child.
I mean, really—who does that? Who feels this way in the first place and then, worse, who broadcasts these feelings for people—for one’s children—to hear?
I was gobsmacked.
I know how my mother felt about her children, and I know why. She loved each of us for different, and not so different, reasons. I also know that my father told me I was his favourite, but he was the sort of man who would arbitrarily spin alternating theories depending on his mood.
I have three children, which is no secret to any of you who read this blog. And I have (had) three remarkably separate, unique, distinct, singular, complex, matchless, discrete relationships with each of them.
I can’t begin to imagine how a parent could possibly delineate, let alone actually decide that one child is preferential to another. While some days are clearly better than others (and the same can be said of one’s children), and while some children cannot hide their parental preferences (they are children, after all), it is a weird and weary world when a mother or father can point a finger, definitively, and say, “You! You’re my favourite.”
Frankly (and in this I speak from experience), there is something quite frightening hearing these words; something that leads a person to wishful thinking, as in, “Dear God, please make this gene with which my father is afflicted skip several generations.”
I have all kinds of complicated feelings about the people in my familial universe, but when it comes to my kids, I have loved them all (while not always as well as I might have hoped) to the same degree, which is as deeply as I can possibly love anyone, ever.
You make me happy when skies are grey, you’ll never know, dear, how much I love you...
