I have superhuman powers. Not of the cape-wearing, building-leaping sort -- what good is that to a mom, anyway? No, what I can do is glance at the individual macaronis on two plates of macaroni and cheese and announce to my sons with absolute conviction that their helpings are exactly -- exactly -- the same. And I can pour two identical-to-the-milliliter glasses of orange juice and set them down on the table at the precise same moment.
Only sometimes, my powers fail me. Like yesterday: When I set down those two glasses of juice, there was a distinct double beat.
"Mommy?" said George, 5. "You didn't put them down at the same time."
I looked at him.
"That's not fair," he said.
"Well, hmm," I said, playing for time. "Do you know which one was set down first?"
"No. But..."
"Oh, so then it is fair!" I said confidently, as if this were just one more of those rules of the adult world that he'll get the hang of sooner or later.
Fairness is a big deal in my family, as I'm sure it is in every family. In fact, arguments about it crop up constantly. "Mommy? Mommy?" my boys clamor for my attention. "Which one would be faster, a rocket-powered garbage truck or a jet-propelled fire truck?"
"They're equally fast," I say, as if I had an advanced degree in the subject.
Why do I bother being evenhanded? Despite my best efforts, I'm accused of being unfair (or of conspiring to make the world unfair) a dozen times a day. Like when one of my boys finishes putting his toys away and the other still has trucks parked all over the living room. Or when I take their baby sister out, leaving them behind with a sitter -- even if I'm taking her to the pediatrician's office. And, of course, it happens whenever I put food on the table.
To hear them tell it, I'm failing miserably in my attempts to be fair. But I'm not discouraged -- yet. For one thing, I don't define fairness the way my kids do. To a child, "fair" translates loosely as "whatever I want." Used in a sentence, it goes like this:
"Can I have some ice cream?"
"No."
"THAT'S NOT FAIR!!!!"
I suspect that kids learn early on to use the F-word because it triggers a primitive need in a mom to make things right for her offspring, either by engaging in fruitless further discussion with a temporarily insane toddler or by simply conceding.
But surely kids are wiser than they seem. They have a kind of inner emotional barometer that registers things they can't articulate because they don't have the language skills yet. When the world feels off-kilter, they simply react: They have frequent tantrums, perhaps, or become clingy and whiny.
And when the balance is off with a brother or sister, they take it out on each other. Any disparity in the meting out of parental stuff -- love, attention, orange juice, toy trucks -- can play itself out in sibling rivalry, and can leave wounds that last a lifetime.
Celia Barbour, a mom of three, lives in New York City and has written for Gourmet and Martha Stewart Living.
