First among equals

WERE you your parents' favoured child? The least? Is there a rueful melancholy even thinking about that?

The damage can work both ways - if there was a golden sibling beside you, or if you basked in the glow. The perception, rightly or wrongly, can stain a life; we can spend our whole existence trying to counter our parents' biases, developing ingenious ways to be noticed - or just giving up.

My father, canny old thing he is, is always teasing his seven kids that one of us is the chosen one, but he's never saying which. It keeps us all on our toes. He says only one has ever asked, "Is it me, Dad?" Is it a surprise it was the eldest, the firstborn son? I have a giggle about that. Floating somewhere around the middle of the brood, I just wouldn't presume. Studies show it's most likely the firstborn or the last; a mother's more inclined to favour a son, a father a daughter. God knows with Bob Gemmell. I strongly suspect he doesn't actually have a chosen one although studies say that's usually not the case. One from the University of California Davis concluded that 65 per cent of mums and 70 per cent of dads had a preference for one child and in most cases it was the eldest.

My alliance with Dad, jostling with so many other disparate personalities, is now founded on what I think is the secret of any good relationship (not least a marriage): laughter. Combating with a light heart. It's my survival tactic and whether it works or not I don't know, he's not saying. We all define ourselves through sibling difference and Dad said to me once that the squeaky wheel on the bike always gets the attention ... perhaps trying to explain why he's never paid me much notice, comparatively, in the great rush of life. To him, I just didn't need it. It used to hurt, violently, as I mistook love for attention, but now as a parent I understand - we can only fight so many spot-fires at once and the love can still be there. Unspoken.

Anna Campion, filmmaker sister of Jane, said once, "Our parents believed that if you wanted a child to do well, you'd just ignore them." I recognise that. All my attempts at achieving when young were perhaps a tenacious ploy to be noticed, fuelled by a subliminal anger at being ignored.

Apparently favouritism is a biological instinct. Parents tend to lean towards the strongest, healthiest child because nature dictates that it's the one who'll be the most successful, reproductively, at widening the gene pool.

I don't have a favourite. They've all clung to me like wet plastic bags slicked around a tree and I've held each one in return fiercely, voraciously - equally. Yes, there's the absolute wonder of the firstborn as he blazes the path for the rest of them, let alone his parents, in terms of how we navigate the whole child-rearing thing. ("He's the one we're experimenting on," the chap and I often say - poor thing.) I craved the daughter next, succumbing to an obscene, ugly bout of narcissim. There was a flash of disappointment when the midwife declared "It's a boy!" - but then I saw this most scrumptious of babies and have been passionately in love ever since. It's like nature made Son Number Two so vividly adorable to guarantee the intensity of the wonder all over again (or maybe he's just very canny).

Narcissistic craving still raging, I googled "gender selection/female/diet." Ate yoghurt until I could no longer bear it. Got the girl. Wonder, delight, chuff. And finally the wee interloper, crashing most impertinently into his parents' middle ages just as we were lightening, loosening, climbing back into the world - and sleeping the bliss of uninterrupted nights. He should be resented but he's become like a medieval kissing post; cuddled, kissed, by all of us, endlessly. Yet I cannot say he's loved any more than the rest ... honestly.