Not Fair

Parents of only children don't have to hear this on a near daily basis. But if you have more than one child, no matter what the situation is, one thing that it isn't is fair.

By "fair", children do not mean the same thing that I think of as fair. To me, being fair is to give each child what she deserves (whether reward or punishment) and to be more or less equally generous with those things that they do not deserve.

My children do not see it this way. To them, "fair" means "same". So if you have one child who was a perfect angel and one child who was a perfect monster and the angelic one gets to stay up and watch a movie and the nasty one has to go to bed early, this is what I would consider fair. But nooo, this is not fair, because it is not the same. Naturally, the one being sent to bed early will be the one protesting, but the one getting to stay up still views the situation as unfair. Make no mistake, she's just sitting there feeling smug and failing to see her reward as a result of her behavior.

Yesterday I was at Hobby Lobby with Genevieve who was bored to tears as I spent too much time shopping for art supplies. But she was cooperative and kept the complaining to a minimum so on the way out I bought her a silly putty. When we picked Imogen up from school, we got to hear that this was not fair.

Today I bought a small battery operated pencil sharpener for a drawing class. But when I got home I realized that it was too small and weak for the amount of sharpening I needed to do, so I gave it to Imogen when she got home from school. It was very inexpensive, comparable to, say, a silly putty. But Genevieve positively wailed in the car about unfair it was.

Irritated, I launched into this whole shrieky lecture about how if they want me to be totally fair I will punish them both when one of them does something wrong and if I ever have one of something I will keep it for myself, which they largely ignored except for Imogen to make some haughty comment about how she doesn't keep track of these things anymore. She had reformed a minute and a half before my lecture and felt it was impolite of me to hold misdeeds against her which were so far in the past as to be ancient history (that is, yesterday).

I've told them before: It is not my job to be fair. I don't have to be fair. I do not see it as a goal for me to be fair. But of course, when I say this, I mean that I don't want to be their kind of fair. My kind of fair is much better.