I have a favorite child today.
It’s the boy who carried my laptop down the stairs because his mama’s foot is broken and he knows she needs a free hand to hold onto the stair rail so she doesn’t fall again. He carries it so carefully his eyes are opened wide in concentration, and he places it exactly in the right place on the couch where he knows I always sit at this time to feed the baby.
He’s my favorite until it’s nap time and he won’t put away the LEGO pieces he wanted to play with and then, when my back is turned because I’m putting the littlest one down, he smuggles that (quite impressive) creation under the covers and thinks I can’t hear him snapping and unsnapping pieces.
Then my favorite is the one who stacks his books into a neat little pile at the foot of his bed instead of scattered all over the floor like a book carpet, who fell asleep right away and didn’t need any reminders that right now is nap time and not play time.
He’s my favorite until he decides to wake all his napping brothers, because he fell asleep first—which means he’s logically the first one awake again—and he looks at the hangers in his closet and thinks they might be a perfect tool to use in his wake-up plan, so he craftily removes all the clothing from the hangers, arranging shirts and pants and even shoes in what looks like crime scene positions all over the floor and then rains the hangers all over the faces of his sleeping brothers.
Then my favorite is the one who remembers to go potty before we get in the car to go pick up his older brothers from school and isn’t hysterically whining about how badly he needs to go potty and how he really, really, really doesn’t want to go in his pants, which makes panic close off the back of my throat, because I really, really, really don’t want to clean up a toddler’s feces, but there’s a school zone and kids running everywhere and no accessible bathroom that doesn’t require unpacking everyone and at least fifteen minutes of wasted time, judging by the school pick-up line.
He’s my favorite until we get back home and I’m helping his older brother put some things away and he decides he wants a cup instead of a thermos, even though, to date, he’s only ever spilled a cup of anything and we’ve told him he needs to be a little bit older before he drinks from a lidless cup, and he does exactly what he nearly always does: spills it, and two boys slip in the water he didn’t tell anyone was there.
Then my favorite is the boy who goes outside to play and comes back in with a wildflower he found in the yard that reminds him of me because it’s so beautiful and he just had to pick it so I could put it in my hair and match beauty with beauty.
He’s my favorite until he comes back downstairs in his third new outfit since he got home from school half an hour ago and proudly tells me he put both the previously worn shirts and shorts—worn for a collective ten minutes—in the dirty clothes hamper and not on his floor, and, also, he’s wearing twelve pairs of socks.
Then my favorite is the one who lopes downstairs to ask if I want to listen to an audio book with him, because he knows I love reading while I’m cooking dinner and setting out plates, so I say, yes, of course, and we share a story while he sits at the table building LEGO creations and I brown some meat for tacos.
He’s my favorite until he mentions casually over dinner that I might have thought he was doing homework in his room after school but what he was really doing was drawing his new comic book and he’ll have to do his homework tomorrow morning (which will never happen. He and I both know this.).
When I was a kid, I was convinced that my mother had a favorite child. Now I understand that her favorite was always changing. Each one of my children can be my favorite in these snapshots of time when they do something or say something unexpectedly sweet or when they follow instructions to the letter or do what was asked without arguing or sassing.
Parents do have favorites. It’s just that the favorite is always changing, constantly rotating through the inventory.
Except the baby, of course. He’ll always be my favorite. At least until he hits age 3.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography)
