Sable Monroe

My mother had a favorite child.

It wasn’t me.

I knew this long before I had the vocabulary to call it favoritism.

When I was little, my mother told me that I was for my father and that her baby, my younger brother, was for her.

Children remember shit like that.

Years later, when I was a teenager, I reminded her that she’d said it.

She denied it.

Of course she did.

By then we were living in America, and I think she understood that openly admitting you had assigned your children to teams wasn’t particularly good mothering.

Presentation mattered.

But I remembered.

I remembered because I remembered how it made me feel.

My brother was hers.

I was apparently somebody else’s.

The strange part is that I helped raise the child who belonged to her.

I was his older sister, but I was also something of a junior mother. I helped care for him. I worried about him. I loved him with some of the same protectiveness I would eventually feel toward my own children.

Then I left home at eighteen.

My junior-mother contract terminated immediately.

Not because I stopped loving my brother.

Because I had a life to save.

And once I left, my mother had to finish raising her favorite child herself.

Boy, did that shit go south.

The warning signs didn’t arrive all at once.

They accumulated.

When my brother was around fourteen, my mother showed me something she’d found. It was some kind of handwritten gang handbook in an ordinary lined notebook.

She seemed worried.

Worried enough to show it to me.

Not worried enough, apparently, to fundamentally change anything.

Then she found weed.

She confronted him.

He told her it was parsley.

Parsley.

And somehow that explanation was allowed to breathe.

Even if I had believed him, which I absolutely did not, I would have had one fairly obvious follow-up question:

Why the fuck is your son smoking parsley?

Make it make sense.

Then came a photograph.

My brother was holding firearms and wearing a bulletproof vest.

At some point my mother started talking about sending him to his father in Jamaica.

That wasn’t realistic. By then, my father wasn’t speaking to her.

So I started thinking about alternatives.

Military school.

By then Google existed, so I researched.

I found a school that, as I remember it, cost somewhere around $20,000 a year.

I thought that was manageable.

There was one problem.

My mother had a habit of lying about how much money she made.

Based on what she had led me to believe about her salary, I thought she could afford it. Twenty thousand dollars a year sounded expensive, certainly, but if you were supposedly making $80,000 or $100,000 and that tuition covered much of your son’s living and educational expenses, I thought:

Do it.

Get him away from whatever he’s getting involved with.

Put him somewhere structured.

Interrupt this shit before it becomes his life.

I gave her the information.

She sat on it.

Nothing happened.

Life kept moving.

So did my brother.

Eventually, we got word that he’d been arrested.

By then, I was pregnant with my daughter.

I went to court with my mother.

And I remember seeing my brother and his co-defendant come out in handcuffs.

I cried.

Not dramatic crying.

The tears just started running down my face.

Because that wasn’t merely my little brother standing there.

That was a boy I had helped raise.

A child I had fed, watched, protected and worried about.

And now he was in police custody.

I never imagined seeing him that way.

He had a public defender.

The lawyer explained that my brother had been offered a plea deal. If he took it, he wouldn’t serve jail time. He would get probation.

But he would also have a felony conviction.

My mother immediately objected.

He couldn’t have a felony, she said.

He was an immigrant.

He had a green card.

The public defender responded with a sentence I have never forgotten:

If he doesn’t take this deal, he’s going to be an immigrant in jail.

That was the choice.

So they took the deal.

And then another problem began.

My brother had immigrated as a child. Eventually he would need to deal with his immigration status as an adult, including the documentation and background checks that came with it.

Now there was a felony.

And with that came fear.

The warning signs that had once looked like notebooks, weed, photographs and teenage bullshit had become consequences that could follow him into adulthood.

This was my mother’s favorite child.

Her good son.

And that is why I eventually learned something uncomfortable about favoritism:

The favorite child isn’t necessarily the lucky one.

Sometimes the child a parent is hardest on develops muscles the favorite child never has to develop.

Sometimes the child who is questioned learns to question herself.

Sometimes the child who isn’t rescued learns to rescue herself.

Sometimes the child who knows she cannot rely on approval starts building an identity outside the family.

And sometimes the favorite child gets protected right past the point where protection is useful.

My brother and I were never measured by the same ruler.

Success, in my mother’s mind, wasn’t determined by the ordinary things people might use to evaluate how their adult children were doing.

Education.

Independence.

Employment.

Relationships.

Stability.

Building a home.

Creating a life.

Those measurements couldn’t be applied equally because the verdict had been rendered when we were children.

He was the good one.

I wasn’t.

Once a dysfunctional family assigns roles, evidence can become strangely irrelevant.

The difficult daughter can grow up, become independent, build a life and remain the difficult daughter.

The good son can be standing in fucking handcuffs and somehow remain the good son.

Because the roles were never based on performance.

They were based on what the parent needed each child to be.

I think that’s one reason favoritism can be far more destructive than people realize.

Everyone sees what it does to the child who isn’t favored.

The rejection.

The resentment.

The feeling of being less loved.

The constant comparison.

Those wounds are real.

But people don’t talk nearly enough about what favoritism can do to the child who wins.

Being favored can become its own trap.

If a parent needs you to remain the good child, she may minimize things she should confront.

She may excuse things that should scare her.

She may protect you from consequences that could have taught you something while the stakes were still relatively small.

She may continue believing in the version of you she created long after reality has begun screaming something different.

And sometimes love without accountability isn’t protection.

Sometimes it’s neglect wearing a prettier outfit.

I don’t know exactly what would have happened if my mother had intervened differently when my brother was fourteen.

Maybe military school wouldn’t have worked.

Maybe sending him to Jamaica wouldn’t have worked.

Maybe nothing would have worked.

Human beings are not equations. You cannot change one variable and know exactly what the alternate life would have been.

But I know there were warnings.

I saw them.

She saw them.

And I know what came afterward.

That is enough for me to wonder.

I also know something else.

For years, I could have looked at my brother as the winner.

He was hers.

I was for my father.

He was the good child.

I was the difficult daughter.

He received the softness I didn’t.

But adulthood complicated that story.

Because perhaps being forced to understand early that my mother’s approval was unreliable gave me something I couldn’t recognize at the time.

Distance.

Skepticism.

Independence.

The willingness to disappoint her.

The ability to leave.

Meanwhile, the child she held closest had his own price to pay.

That’s the part of favoritism nobody puts on the greeting card.

The favorite child may receive more approval.

More excuses.

More protection.

More chances.

But none of those things necessarily prepare a person for life.

Sometimes the child who gets pushed out learns how to stand.

Sometimes the child who gets held too tightly never learns how.

And sometimes, years later, you look back at the family hierarchy you once thought had placed you at the bottom and realize something strange:

Maybe you weren’t the child who lost.

Maybe you were the one who got out