The Favorite Child

By Adam Christianson

I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix lately. They just put up all ten seasons of Friends, so my every waking minute not dedicated to school, I’ve been reacquainting myself with one of my all-time favorite sitcoms. Remember that episode of friends with “the list”? Ross learns that Rachel is in love with him so he makes a chart with the guys comparing Rachel’s flaws to those of his current girlfriend, Julie. Remember when she found the list and read over all the flaws? It just devastated her.

“Imagine the worst things you think about yourself. Now, how would you feel if the one person that you trusted the most in the world not only thinks them too, but actually uses them as reasons not to be with you.”

I thought a lot about this clip when I was reading a 2008 babble post by Keri Fisher where she discusses how parents often have and in fact blog about their favourite child(ren). What happens when you blog about your favourite child? What happens when you blog about “the problem child”? It seems fairly normal for parents to have a favourite child. Keri writes that Stacy DeBroff, the founder of momcentral.com, thinks favouritism is “somewhat inevitable….As a parent, you find yourself drawn to a child who is most like you – traits that you can identify with and deeply empathize with as you experience them yourself.” After all it seems pretty normal that some personalities click while others just do not. But what happens when you publicize that?

I think about my own relationships, my own faults. My mother knows them, we talk. Not often. But she knows me. Sometimes we get along. The other day we had a fight and she told my friend that she couldn’t wait for me to move out.

But Growing up LGBT in the city is about as far away as you can get from my mother’s upbringing as it can get. I suppose if things were different and she was blogging about me that I might be the subject of some online criticism.

My mother doesn’t blog and I’m not sure I’m really interesting enough for my mom to blog about anyway. But you don’t blog about the good child, it doesn’t make for interesting writing. Maybe when I was younger I would have been featured more often than now.

I’m not that concerned about people reading about my life, it’s really boring. What would break my heart, is seeing my mother struggling with raising me or raising my brother. If I logged on to a blog and saw that I was the source of so much pain in my mother’s life I couldn’t help but feel like the worst son.

Image: ©R.Mcguire. Gratistography.com