Whose Castle Is This?

Here's a Chris Rock bit that echoes through my house: "What does daddy get for his hard work? The big piece of chicken at dinner! My mama would kill us if one of us ate the big piece of chicken by accident! 'What the... you ate the big piece of chicken! Oh, lord no! Now I gotta sew up some chicken! Give me two wings and a porkchop, daddy won't know the difference!'" Monday night we had Sloppy Joes for dinner. My wife and son each had one. I got two. This is how we draw the line in my house. If you bring home the bacon, you get more bacon.
That doesn't mean this line is always clear. Way back in my bachelor days, I used to sit down to dinner in front of my very own Tombstone frozen pizza. Sometimes I didn't even bother slicing it into eight smaller pieces. Instead I would chop it into four big slabs and commence to gnawing. When I moved in with my wife-to-be, We shared that same pizza. Now the eight pieces were split five to three. I got the five. When my son was born, he was more than happy to take the nodules of sausage we would drop on his high chair tray. One of his first words was "meat." Eventually we had to give up one of our pieces of pie to the growing boy, and I was quietly pleased when my wife sacrificed one of hers. I held steady at five, while she dropped to two. Soon my son's appetites could not be satisfied by one piece, and so I let one of mine go. Now that he is in middle school, the ratio has changed again. Mom is still a solid two, while my son and I hold steady at three each. Even now I am getting questions from my son that sound like this: "Are you going to eat that last piece?" Or "How many have you had already?"
Does it matter? I'm the dad. I should be forking food off of your plate. But that's not the way it really works. It's only a matter of time before we're cooking two pizzas, and watching our little boy inhale his very own. It's the mathematics of parenthood.