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labels off of cans."
    It never got any better. When he stopped slobbering, he began to spit. When we got his mouth fixed, his nose started to run. When he walked, he stumbled; when he sat down, he got something wet. Even breathing became annoying.
    When children are born, they come equipped with a computer bank that files away every kindness or gift ever rendered and the age it was rendered.
    Heaven help the parent who gives one child a bicycle a year sooner than his brother or sister got one, or rewards him with a trip to the circus before the exact hour the others received their first trip to the circus.
    The parents are not totally blameless.
    I can't think of a mother in this entire world who has not committed the first sin of parenting: comparing her children.
    From the day kids are born, we compare them with ourselves, their siblings, their contemporaries, and every other child with whom they come in contact.
    They are smaller than their brother when he was that age. They are dumber than their sister in math, lazier than the boy next door, don't catch a baseball like their dad, and their hair doesn't hold the curl like their mother's.
    One day my younger son said, “Why do you always compare me to my brother?”
    “Because you're a cheap shot,” I said.
    “I wish I was an only child.”
    “Wouldn't matter,” I said. “When I was carrying your brother, I compared him to a baby my best friend was carrying. Hers moved more than your brother did.”
    Near the end of the meal, one of them kicked another one under the table. When I asked why, he said, “HE knows.” When I asked “He,” I was told, “He's lying.” When I told him to stop it, he said, “You let him yell 'EEEEEE' at me all the time and never say a word.”
    It went back and forth like that until the end of the meal.
    I told one of them to go to his room. He said, “Sure, he's Mama's favorite.”
    He was right. Every mother had a favorite. I had mine. It was always the child who was too sick to eat the ice cream at his birthday party, had measles at Christmas, and wore leg braces to bed because he toed in.
    She was the fever in the middle of the night, the asthma attack, the child in my arms at the emergency ward.
    My “favorite child” was the one I punished for lying, grounded for insensitivity to other people's feelings, and informed was a royal pain to the entire family.
    The favorite child said dumb things for which there were no excuses. He was selfish, immature, bad-tempered and self-centered. He was vulnerable, lonely, unsure of what lie was doing in this world ... and quite wonderful.
    The one I loved the most was the one I watched struggle ... and because the struggle was his ... did nothing.
    Every mother knows her favorite child was the one who deserved love the least... but needed it the most.
    As parents sit and listen to this exchange between siblings at the dinner table, they cannot help but reflect on the dazzling performance. But then the kids have enjoyed a long run with it.
    No one asks for an encore, but you get one anyway as they spring into their “It's not my turn to do dishes.” Their freshness never ceases to amaze me.
    If a poll were taken of children asking why they thought their parents had children, 12% of them would say they got bored watching television, 26% would say it was a 4-H project that got out of hand, and 62% would swear adults had kids to get out of doing their own dishes.
    Despite the fact that fifteen million Americans walk around half sick from eating off of diseased dishes and breakage runs into six figures, it is still the number one chore of kids in the country today.
    Early in my mothering career, I saw what I had going for me: a surly child who secretly spit on plates after she rinsed them, laying a foundation of mistrust; a child with kidneys the size of lentils who visited the bathroom five times during the clearing ritual; and another one who argued about it not being his turn for so long the