A Matter Of Perspective

If you asked my brother and sister (before she died) whether my parents played favourites, I am pretty sure they would both have told you that – yes, they do. But neither of them would have said that they were the favourite.

Me, personally – I didn’t see it.  I was punished when I did something bad (which was not all that often – all three of us were sickeningly good children as it turned out) and, as far as I remember, I don’t think I was allowed to get away with stuff that got big sis and baby bro in to trouble.

(Then again, I was a kid – so maybe I have a warped memory of this sort of thing. My brother is always telling me that what I think I remember isn’t actually true, and that I am either making it up – fantasising it – or just misremembering it a little. 

Me? I think I have a pretty darn good memory, and that the image I have in my head of me and him walking back from the cub-scout hut one Sunday morning because my parents forget to set the clocks forward and so missed picking us up is actually a real, proper memory and not something I have invented. Partly because I remember it very clearly, but mostly because why would I make something like that up? I like my parents and never had any urge to paint them as bad. 

Annoying, maybe, but not bad!

But I digress!)

I don’t know when the "me being their favourite thing" ended exactly, but my suspicions are it was around the time my sister left for University, because then there were only the two of us children left in the house, so *shrug* things possibly balanced out a little better?

Anyway – flash forward some amount of years to the present day (or at least recent history). 

I moved out, and have been living on my own ever since (aside from a six month stint with housemates that – quite honestly – I want to forget because while I liked the people I was living with, I did not like most of their friends and really disliked quite a lot of them), whereas my brother has been (up until recently) mostly living with my parents. He moved out once or twice, but things tended to go wrong and he moved back in.

Consequently, they spent more time together, did more things together and so on.

This was note helped by the fact that I seem to be a hop-out-of-kin compared to the rest of my family. 

They tend to like serious things. Crime thrillers, philosophy books, history of war in the congo – basically things that could happen in real life or have happened in real life. Or (as my brother puts it) things that are "worthwhile".

Needless to say – Harry Potter, Buffy, Alias, Charmed, Dead Rising, Fable, Scott Pilgrim, Doctor Who, Size 12 is Not Fat and so forth do NOT fall in to the category of "serious" things or "worthwhile" things. 

In fact, I am pretty sure that every time I bring something like that up, they are all mentally rolling their eyes and hoping I will shut up about it so they can go back to talking about grown up things and serious things and not waste their time on fantasy and science fiction (which – my brother has seen fit to tell me – is not actually science fiction, because real science fiction should not be about creating fantastical worlds and future technology, but about how we interact with technology and how it is shaping out culture and blah-blah-blah-I-wish-he-would-just-shut-the-hell-up). 

So basically – because I don’t tend to read anything they like, go see any movies they like or watch any TV programs they like, I am usually left out of most conversations because I know nothing about who made the tastiest cupcakes on Masterchef or why The Dude Abides or anything like that. I can tell you all 144 episode titles of Buffy (usually in order, because it is easier to remember them that way) and – as it turns out – most of the names of the chemical elements (thank you Tom Lehrer). I can also tell you about Frodo and Sam, about Spike and Lynda, about Veronica and Logan, Donna and Josh, Will and McKenzie and Rory and Amy.

But since my parents and brother not only don’t know about any of that, they don’t even WANT to know about any of it, that doesn’t really help me when we get together for a family dinner or lunch (much like we will one week from today).

But this is where the matter of perspective comes in. 

When I was a kid, I think my brother and sister held the perspective that I was the favoured child. Me? I don’t think that was true, but as I said – I was a child, what do I know?

And now – well know you will probably get the impression that I think my parents tend to like my brother more, because they have more in common with him than they do with me. 

But then again, maybe I am just imagining it because (for oh so many other reasons) I really don’t like my brother all that much (I may have possibly mentioned this before!) and so I am projecting my dislike of him on to my parents relationship with him and with me.

No – I did not take intro to Psych, but turns out you learn a lot from "kiddy" tv shows like Buffy, Charmed, Alias (which involves death and torture, but it still not "serious" enough because it also has a somewhat fantastical element to it) and the like. In fact, most of what I know about the world I have gleamed from various shows, running from Jane and The Dragon to The West Wing, from Press Gang to The Newsroom (which have a lot more in common than you might think) and so forth.

So – to sum up – I don’t think my parents have ever played favourites but – as with all things in life – it is a matter of perspective.