Whose the favourite

Yet another question being posted by my morning djs as I drive to work switching between stations to catch news and views instead of the music ( I honestly prefer my playlist instead of the ones on the air, but let's not go there at this point):
Did your parents have favourites between their children? Were you the favourite or the black sheep of the family? If you are a parent do you have favourites? Do you tell them they are the favourite?

I know the answer to this for me; i grew up being the black sheep of the family for various emotional, intellectual and perhaps physical reasons. I felt that I did not get the equal kind of attention that my other siblings did from our mom. I am not airing dirty linen here but making a point. I have since my twenties been very articulate about it with my mom and she has since (over the last 5 years) been very conscious about the way she treats each and every one of us. But all the same I have very vivid memories about the neglect I felt I was subjected to as a child in comparison to my siblings, and my mom, God Bless her, have come out and admitted to some of these things and i love her even more for it.

Yet if we ask ourselves can we honestly say we don't have favourites among the people in our lives? Between aunties or uncles - surely there is a favourite. Likewise between grandparents, between our teachers, between friends, between cousins, between nieces and nephews etc etc – each group of people presents us with possibilities in which we identify some as have more ‘significant’ in our life that others. We like and perhaps even love them all but there are a few who will stand out in our mind as our favourite uncle or aunt or grandparent etc. Equally as a teacher i do have students in each class who i think well of not because i think they are good but because they exhibit a character that makes them different from the others, and they endear me to them.

So i suppose I do understand my past in this way: i was not as articulate as my sister or as bright as my sister and brother or as beautiful as my sister or as outgoing as my sister; in a nutshell, unfortunately for my parents i was not what one would consider a child that shone from day one of life. I was a late bloomer and with others in the family to focus on and with so much commitments and responsibilities, I suppose it is understandable that one child is 'lost' in the frame of family life. I was fed, I was schooled, I was given the necessities of life but I felt devoid of recognition. I was not recognised for anything specific largely because I did not have any specific qualities to be recognised for; I was a below mediocre, below average in almost everything. Yet that ‘burden’ is something of my past that I have been attempting to accept and move on from in different ways - in my own person, in all my students and in my daughter – to recognise the qualities in myself and others which I feel makes I and them ‘special’ and the ‘favourite’ in my own eyes. I guess I want to live on the premise that I don’t need recognition from someone before I feel significant (easier said than done I know!).

I accept that I am not my mom's favourite and I accept that I cannot change that, but that does not mean I cannot have a healthy relationship with my mom today. The past does not define our sense of relationship, our inability to accept the shortcomings of the past will constrain our current state of care for each other. So i will not be the one she thinks off the most, so what? So i might not be the one she thinks well off when she recalls her children's childhood. so what? At my recent convocation, as i was putting on my robe and walking to the hall, she said this : the one who would cry when i ask her to do her reading or her school work is now a doctor; we both had an emotional moment! Must be wonderful for her to put that ghost to rest, that the one child who she thought might have difficulty amounting to anything in life due to my 'slowness @ lembab @ mangkuk (Penangite might know this word)' is now a significant member of academia. Once she and i are able to move beyond our rememberance of the past we can be more open to each other -- I find comfort in that knowledge.