Loving our Children Equally

“But Daddy, you should love me more because I was born first!” The logic of a six year old who was trying to cajole his father into choosing to give him more treats than his little sister. But still I heard the words and it got me thinking…do we really love our children equally? What are the criteria we feel in our hearts for loving other people? Of course we love all of our children and the correct thing to say is that we love them all the same amount, but parents are humans too and we are inevitably affected by the actions and behaviour of others.

When we have some children who are easy going and play quietly without disruption and others who are so desperately in need of our undivided attention; one child who will obey without question and one who must challenge every instruction and buck every rule, how can we genuinely feel the same level of love in our less than perfect hearts?

The truth is it’s not the same, but it is just as deep, because there’s something wonderful about the way we are designed to love others. We have been created with the capacity to forget the events of a particularly bad day and love our offspring all the more deeply for having worked so hard to care for them. Sometimes the very people that put us to the test on a daily basis create such intense emotion within us.

Think of a meal, we can buy a pizza and a bag of salad, serve it on paper plates with cans of pop and it will hit the spot with no complaint from our families. However, what about spending some time in the kitchen, preparing the meat, peeling potatoes, rolling the bread dough, sautéing fresh veggies, and baking a lovely cheesecake from scratch? After spending so much time and energy in the kitchen lovingly preparing a wonderful meal, don’t we enjoy it that much more? Similarly when we take the time to personally design the look of our home, search out every individual piece of furniture and decorative piece, coordinate the colour palette and renovate room by room according to our budget; what a wonderfully fulfilling achievement to stand back and enjoy the fruits of our labour. It’s just not as gratifying to hire a decorator to get it done in a week.

I believe it’s the same with our children, if they were too easy and low maintenance, we just might take them for granted, not really appreciate them for the complex and unique creatures that they are. Each individual child has the ability to drive us crazy in their own special way and yet there are those moments when they unexpectedly crawl up into our lap to cuddle and we forget everything wrong they’ve ever done. And when that little voice cries out in the night “Mommy I need you, I feel sick” we don’t even remember their temper tantrums or cheeky back talk, we would wade through an alligator-ridden swamp just to hold them close.