I Keep Comparing Them And I Know I Should Not

You do it in about a second and a half and you cannot stop.

The younger one brings something home, and before any thought has happened you have already run it against what the older one was doing at that age. And you know it is not fair. You have told yourself so many times. And it happens again the next week, in the same second and a half, without asking your permission.

So let me start with the thing that will let the rest of this be useful.

You are not a bad parent for doing that.

Comparison is what a mind does with two similar things placed side by side. It is not a moral act and it is not something you chose to start. Every parent of more than one child does it, including the ones who say they do not, and the difference between parents is not whether it happens but what they do with it afterwards.

So we are not going to work on stopping it. That has not worked, and the trying has only added a layer of guilt on top of the comparing, which means you now carry two things where there was one.

We are going to look at what the comparison actually tells you, which is nothing, and then at what to do with the second and a half.

If the whole body were an eye

There is a passage about a body that is usually preached at churches, and it works exactly as well on a kitchen.

If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? (1 Corinthians 12:17, King James Version)

If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing.

Notice what the question is doing. It is not saying that the eye and the ear are equally good, which is the version people usually take from it. It is pointing out that they are not comparable at all, and that a body made entirely of the better one would be a disaster.

You cannot rank an eye against an ear. There is no scale that holds them both. Asking which is better is not a hard question, it is a broken one, and the passage treats it as slightly absurd on purpose.

And now hold that against your two children.

You have been running a comparison that has no scale. Not because they are equally good at things, which is not true and everybody in your house knows it. Because they are not the same kind of thing, and the measurement you keep taking does not exist.

That is why the comparison never resolves and never settles anything and comes back every week. It is not that you have not thought about it hard enough. There is no answer at the end of it.

You are comparing two things that were never on one scale, and the measurement you keep taking has never once existed. First Corinthians 12:17 treats the ranking question as absurd rather than difficult, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a parent stop trying to answer it.

The comparison hides this child

Here is the cost, and it is the reason this matters beyond fairness.

While you are measuring, you are not seeing.

A comparison uses the older child as the ruler. Everything about the younger one gets described in terms of them: quicker, slower, more like, less like, not as. And every one of those descriptions is about a relationship between two children rather than about the child in front of you.

Which means the things that are only true of this one, that have no equivalent in their sibling, become invisible. Not because you do not love them. Because a ruler only measures the thing it was built to measure, and everything else falls outside it.

And children know. Not the details, but they know which of them is the ruler and which is the thing being measured. They know it very young and they almost never say so.

You are able to see this child rather than measure them, and a ruler has never once been able to show you what it was not built for. The written word refuses the ranking and describes the parts by what each one does, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a parent look at one child on their own.

Notice one thing only this one does

So here is the assignment, and it is a noticing rather than a stopping.

Notice one thing this week that only this child does, and tell them.

Only this one. Not something they do better, which is still a comparison with the word better hidden in it. Something the other one does not do at all, in any form.

It might be small and it will probably be odd. They ask about the middle of things. They notice when somebody is upset before anybody says anything. They will not start something until they have the whole thing set out. They put music on to think. They tell a story starting from the end.

Those are the things a comparison cannot see, because there is nothing to compare them to.

Then tell them. In an ordinary voice, at an ordinary moment, without turning it into a lesson about being individuals.

And when the second and a half happens next week, and it will, do not fight it. Let it run, notice it happened, and then go and look for one more thing that only this one does. You are not trying to stop the machine. You are giving your attention somewhere the machine cannot go.

First Corinthians 12:17 describes each part by its own function rather than by rank, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a parent sees something that only one of their children does.

You are able to notice what has no equivalent, and it has never once required you to stop comparing first. First Corinthians 12:17 makes the ranking question absurd and looks at each part on its own, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you while you watch this week.