THE PARABLE OF THE GUTSY PARENT

We're all children. There's nothing we can do about it-everyone's someone's child. Yes, sometimes parentage itself can be quite problematic-just witness the desperation of Anna Nicole Smith. Simply being a child, however, seldom raises an eyebrow. Children Are Us. It just comes naturally.

The Bible is full of stories, about the problematic relationships between children, especially siblings: Jacob stealing the inheritance due his older brother Esau, or Aaron the older brother of Moses, but nonetheless only his second in command. And then there is the story of Cain, who killed his brother Abel, because of jealousy.

Of course, all those stories obviously have two sides, two perspectives - that of the older and of the younger sibling. And each of them in turn can be portrayed as either the perpetrator or the victim of injustice. Families have always been the same; it's reassuring, since otherwise we might be tempted to think ours is the only one!

In actuality, the plight of the younger child is the more precarious. For the older sibling is not just older, but initially bigger and more seasoned in the ways of the world, even the world of children and families. While the first child was the novelty, the one that brought something into their parents' life that had never been, the second child can be simply the one who now stretches family resources and patience to the snapping point.

The younger child arrives with an older sibling already holding the place of honor - and in traditional societies this older child would eventually inherit the bulk of their parent's savings. Thus stories like that of Jacob and Esau are born, with Jacob thinking his father would give everything to his older brother Esau, and thus thinking the only way he could have a share in his father's inheritance was to steal it. We all know what it's like to live in a first-come, first-served world; and being the youngest child in such a world can mean getting nothing but leftovers. I was reminded of how this is watching Frieda's puppies...the first-born got first dibs on mother's milk-the last ones out were always the ones jockeying for position at the feed trough. Being first is best, whether you're getting a seat on Southwest Airlines or making a run at the refreshments table in the Guild Room after services on Sunday.

But as I already said, all these stories have at least two sides. And being the youngest isn't always a bad thing. The youngest child often indeed is the ‘baby', the favorite-the one who arrives on the scene just in time to re-invigorate a marriage, to rejuvenate aging parents. Younger children can seem to get all the attention; suddenly their older sibling, who until very recently was their parents' one and only, now is ‘the other child'. Sibling rivalries are born that can last lifetimes, even generations - Cain's jealousy of the favor God showed his younger brother Abel was remembered by the earliest storytellers of Israel as emblematic of all the violence and wars that have followed. Tribal warfare in Iraq is at heart a tragedy of sibling rivalries and the family dysfunction that often grows up around it.