Motherhood is my favorite

Being a parent of more than one child is such a blessing. It is wondrous to see how people created using the same recipe can be so different from one another–which may be my favorite thing about having three children. As Mother’s Day approaches, I find myself ruminating on this fact more than usual. I know parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, but of course I do.

My middle son, Spenser, is my favorite. (Also, as our self-described “Middle Guy,” he hardly ever gets to go first.) He is so like me. We both love to read, write, and perform. Spenser will recommend books to me and warn me if I’m going to cry when reading them. We each are interested in a million different things (not necessarily the same things) and want to do them all, and are frustrated that there isn’t enough time. We are the early birds in the family and enjoy having alone time before anyone else gets up. We are communicators (perhaps not surprising since we are writers), and our five-person family group chat is mostly posts from the two of us. I also can count on Spenser to respond to any text, which I love. Of course, Spenser also is unlike me. He actually finishes things he starts–stories, screenplays, novels (the longest thing I’ve finished is a blog post). He was interested in being in a band so he started a band, and it has had actual gigs (with more to come). Whereas I might have a superficial interest in a topic and be satisfied with that, Spenser will go deeper and has a vast amount of knowledge about arcane subjects. (We once won a trivia tournament because Spenser was the only person in the room who knew that Ulaanbaatar is in Mongolia.) I want to plan things out to the minute, while Spenser prefers being spontaneous (so on family vacations I make sure to schedule time where nothing is planned). Spenser smiles with his whole body and is filled with joy which spills out into those around him.

My youngest son, Riordan, is my favorite. He is so like me. We both speak sarcasm as a second (sometimes first) language. We are fundamentally shy people (hard to believe, given how much I like being on stage–that’s a whole other topic), but are driven to be liked by everyone. We enjoy cooking and baking and like to feed other people as an expression of our love for them. We are the two in our family most likely to be in a swimming pool at any given time. We want to please everyone and are torn when we have to choose between options. Of course, Riordan also is unlike me. He has more athletic ability in his little finger than I have in my whole body. (By the time he was five he was throwing balls too hard for me to catch. Seriously.) He has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports–all sports, even those he’s never seen live–and can spout statistics about games that happened before he was born. Riordan has a plethora of friends and is forever making plans to do athletic things with them (like playing golf, ugh). He doesn’t have much tolerance for anything he deems boring, and prefers to be doing multiple things at once. Riordan loves to laugh and to make others laugh, sharing his sense of fun (and his famous chocolate chip cookies) with all his friends.

My oldest son, Reilly, is my favorite. He is so like me. We both love music with our whole hearts, and have to make music regularly in order to stay sane. We both love flying, and the history and future of airplanes. We enjoy the limelight (which we learned when five-year-old Reilly was singing at school and realized what a microphone does, edging closer and closer to the mic throughout the group performance). We both enjoy science (which is why we have a “science room” in our basement). Of course, Reilly also is unlike me. He has perfect pitch, along with a passion to create music through composition and performance that drives him daily. He builds rockets and drones just for fun. Reilly is not just interested in flying–he actually learned to fly and has his pilot’s license. He can amuse himself for hours/days/weeks by researching whatever catches his fancy (I’d never heard of the Second Punic War until Reilly told me about it. I didn’t even know there was a First Punic War. Or what Punic means). Reilly loves to do things that challenge his mind and to be around others who share his interests and can keep up with him.

The three of them together are a killer trivia team. Sometimes they get along, and sometimes they don’t; sometimes they like being with their parents, and sometimes we drive them crazy (that’s our job!). The parts that make us alike sometimes create more tension between us, but those parts also can bring us ever closer (and fortunately none of them seem to have gotten my worst parts). My three sons are the best parts of their parents, mixed up and molded into entirely new and different people. I love them all endlessly. How boring it would have been if they were the same.

They all are me. And they all are not me. What a miraculous thing. Being their mother is my favorite.