I spent the greater part of the afternoon sitting at a down-home country restaurant chatting with my kiddo. Over chicken and dumplings and coffee for me and root beer for her, we talked about a lot of things. She did most of the talking. Me? I mostly listened. I liked it just fine that way.
Unless you happen to subscribe to the idea of reincarnation that says you're supposed to be living all these chosen lives and doing certain things with each one every time around, you don't pick the people who end up in your family with you. It's random happenstance. You're born and you end up somewhere and you do the best you can and sometimes your best isn't good enough. Sometimes you discover you've ended up with the shoddiest bunch of kooks to ever grace the planet and sometimes your family members end up putting up with you, one of those aforesaid kooks. It's a particularly interesting form of chaos in action.
Parents who have more than one kid -- hell, even parents who don't -- know deep down that they have favorites. They are loathe to admit it but they do and many times the kids are well aware of their parents' favoritism. Some take it personally but others seem to better understand and accept that its origins are not so much anchored in who loves who most, but who likes who most. Parents love their children equally, love just is. But you really get down to the brass tacks of things when you talk about the art of liking. Liking is something that creates friendships out of possibilities. Liking is choice. Liking is when you realize that the person in front of you has something within them that calls to you and that you want to find out what that is. But liking doesn't mean that the person you don't take to as much is a bad person or less worthy of love; it simply means that for one reason or another, two people just seem to feel an inaudible click that two others don't. That is just the way of these things.
I love my kiddo. Dearly, passionately, deeply. But today, as I was listening to her tell me about her school classes, her widening tastes in food, how her best friend needs to stop telling her mother that she hates her and be more positive about life, and how she believes that all bad things that happen end up being beneficial in the end if she just waits them out to see how they pan out, I realized that I truly liked this kid. I liked the person she was now and the person she was in the process of becoming and I couldn't wait to enjoy her as a friend as well as a daughter. I could see the relationship down the road for the two of us would only get better and better and that our personalities meshed for many other reasons than an accident of birth and shared blood.
And life doesn't get any better than that.
((Song: "Let Your Love Flow" by the Bellamy Brothers. Lyrics here:
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/bellamy-brothers/let-your-love-flow-22054.html ))
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