The Only Thing

[mrissa]

onehipmama just found out that I'm an only child and asked me how I feel about it (a couple days ago now). To a certain extent this is like asking me how I feel about being an oxygen-breather: for many of you, having siblings is the default state of humanity, but it certainly isn't for me. And that's part of what being an only child is like: you just don't assume that there were other spawn running around someone's childhood home. For me, being an only child feels reasonable. It feels normal. It's just how things are. timprov and I make reference to "one of those weird sibling things," because it's the other way that's foreign, not our own upbringings.

In order for people with siblings to imagine being an only child, they effectively have to imagine their siblings out of existence. Very few people are willing or able to do that consistently. Sure, you have days when you'd gladly sell your sister to the Mongols, but most adults have fewer and fewer of those days as time goes on. And even if you imagine your sibs out of existence, you can't really see how it would be different, how your relationship with parents and friends and relatives would change.

It's just as impossible for us to really imagine what it would be like to have had siblings. We can try to make up people whole cloth, but even with the people we already know, it's hard to say what--for example--my relationship with my mother would have been if I'd had an older sister or a younger brother, to say nothing of either of our relationship with that hypothetical sibling. It's a multi-body problem. It's too complex. We just can't tell how it'd come out. You can't say, "If you had a sibling, someone else would share your love of _______," because odds are at least as good that the sib in question would hate _______.

I'm not just an only child but also an only grandchild on one side. We're estranged with my surviving grandparent on the other side (due to his being a lying ass and a coward), but even if we hadn't been, my aunt didn't adopt my one cousin and bear my other until I was 14, so I was very close to an only grandchild there, too. And I'm close, as I've said in other contexts, with great-aunts and -uncles who don't have grandchildren of their own, and with aunts, uncles, generations-older cousins with no children. So it feels to me like I'm the point of an inverted pyramid. I've always known that there will be no one else to look after my folks and my godfathers and so on when they are old, to say nothing of my grands and my great-aunts and -uncles. I was immensely relieved to have a second cousin in my generation on my dad's side of the family, because that accounted for five fewer old people in my care.

I don't know how to make it clear that I don't resent that, but I really don't. It's how things are. You get issued some future old people at birth and others you pick up through the bonds of marriage or affection, and you take care of each other. That's what people do. You pick up the small ones when they fall down and feed them berries and sing to them, and you make sure the old ones are getting their walks shoveled and occasionally chide them about vitamins and make sure they're comfortable with their living situation. (You can sing to them and give them berries, too, if you want.) This is how the world works. Some of us have more children than others, and some have more old people than others, and I've always known I would be in the latter and not the former group. Some of us take care of more people our own age, too, or take care of them more intensely. It's how things are.

That part may just be me. It's hard to spot chicken and egg here. Did I grow up with a "caretaker personality" because I was always aware that I would have more people to take care of, or did the awareness come from that personality trait? I don't know.

Being an only means that I can't take people's presence in my life for granted. When you're an only, no one has to put up with you on a roughly equal basis. No one is stuck with you but your parents, and everyone knows that's not the same. One of the books I read about onlies suggested that many of us make more effort to stay in touch with people because we're well aware that if we don't make an effort, other people may just wander off. (Others onlies are perfectly fine with that and are hollering, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out!" after them as they wander.) People talk about onlies being selfish, but if you don't share with your brother, you get sent to your room, and your brother is still around the next time. If you don't share with your friends, they go home, and they don't want to come back next time.

Being an only is like being one of thirteen kids in that perfect strangers will feel justified in criticizing your parents' family planning choices to you from the time you're about five years old. They will inquire after your parents' fertility, your parents' sanity, your parents' moral fiber; they will assume -- and tell you they are assuming -- that you must be really spoiled. Under what other circumstances would you inform someone who was behaving reasonably that she must be really spoiled? This is just rude. But should a kid learn that adults are sometimes rude and unpleasant, and how to deal with it without being rude and unpleasant? Yep. And is a kid going to have to learn to deal with it on one topic or another? Again: yep.

I have never once wanted siblings. Not for a nanosecond. Not for a femtosecond. Never.

A lot of the positive things I can say about being an only are things that aren't exclusive to being an only. I am, for example, happy with only myself for company. I learned to entertain myself at an extremely young age. Do some people with siblings have that skill? Sure. Do some other onlies lack it? Definitely. But there's something of a correlation. I felt more comfortable with adults earlier than most kids. I've been very close with older relatives. I don't feel like my goals are in comparison with other people but rather are in comparison with what I want to achieve and am capable of achieving. All these things can happen in multi-kid families, but they happen differently.

I feel like if I say, "I'm glad I'm an only because of X," I will immediately have people with siblings popping up to say that they had X, too. And in many cases they'll be right, and I think that's my point: being an only child is normal. It is one of several ways to get a normal, healthy, well-adjusted child. It's also one of several ways to get a sick little psychopath. One is as reasonable a number of kids in a family as zero, two, three, four, five. If you have parents who have a number of children for which they are ill-suited, things will probably go worse than if the parents have a number of children well-suited to their temperaments. The failure modes are different for different family sizes, but good and loving parents make good and loving homes for their kids in whatever numbers work for them.

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I'm an only, as is tanuki_green. You are spot on about people leaving your life. I also felt more comfortable with adults early on; that may also be because my parents treated me like a short adult.

As toxic as my upbringing was, I'm glad I was the only one to deal with it. But I did wish (amusingly) for an older brother who could protect me from the school bullies. If you're familiar with the Trixie Belden books, I always fantasized about a Jim/Honey relationship, where my parents adopted a boy a couple of years older than I was.

And really spoiled? Please. My parents weren't the spoiling type -- one kid or ten, there would be no spoiling.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I adored the Trixie Belden books. But the thing about Jim and Honey (and I thought of this at the time) is that he only became her brother once he was too old to be a stupid jerk out of sheer human ignorance, and he only did the fun kind of teasing, not the mean kind.

One of my friends when I was very small had a brother three years older, and he was always very gentle with me. I think he knew that no one had ever taught me to deal with wedgies and charley-horses and other signs of "big brother love," so even when he was 8 or 9 years old, he knew to be nice to me. But he wasn't like that with his sister, so I thought, hell with this sibling thing! I can have protective older males without any of that nonsense!

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Reporter to George Harrison: "How does it feel being a Beatle?"

G.H.: "I don't know. How does it feel not being a Beatle?"

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I and both my parents were onlies. I have aunts and uncles and cousins because my grandmother died and my grandfather remarried after my dad was an adult. I wanted a sibling, but I think it was more because I wanted someone there to play board games with than anything else. I wasn't clued-in enough to realize at 8 that any sibling would be at least 8 years younger then me, not old enough to be a decent board-game partner until we were close to beign adult, and I would probably bully them a lot.

I still don't get to play enough board games, dammit.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Same here-- by the time I was old enough to want a sibling, I realized that it would be impossible short of adoption to acquire one in the age range I wanted. Especially since what I really wanted was a twin.

Then one day two sisters I was friends with, who were a year apart in age, slept over at my place and I realized something that I never had before, as I knew them both from different activities and so usually hung out with them separately: having a sister may be like having a live-in best friend, but it may also be like having a live-in worst enemy. That was the only time in my life I ever yelled for an adult to come break up a fight, because I seriously thought those two were going to kill each other.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My "cousins" (the women I most often refer to as my cousins, my parents' best friends' kids*) didn't fight nearly that violently, but even their gentle sib fights were fascinating and alarming to me. I used to get popcorn and watch. When they caught me at it, they'd turn on me and gang up on me.

And as with the friend's older brother mentioned above, I looked at how they treated me vs. how they treated each other and decided I wasn't jealous. I'm still not: I have great adult relationships with both of them, but as much as we joke that I'm the third [Theirname] sister, we all know the difference, and none of us would trade what we have for that.

*This summer I made reference to, "My cousin is being stupid," and gaaldine demanded to know what on earth Kari had done. Kari and I both laughed and laughed over that, since I meant someone who was...y'know, actually my cousin and blood related and all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Whereas I just never learned to really like board games.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I'm one of two, with enough difference between us that I remember not having a brother. My Dad is an only and my mom's brother has never had a life partner or children. So I have a sib but otherwise a much smaller family than you do - the nearest relatives outside us five (mom, dad, brother, uncle, me) are second cousins and I haven't seen any of them in years, though my parents have. It's less of a pyramid than a thin line, and it feels a little that that it seems to be ending here. I don't have any children (or plans to have) and my brother is still single.

One odd thing about having sibs is that you may end up being the caretaker person for everyone but you're likely not to know that until it happens. In my case my brother is much closer by for daily interaction with the parents, but since he doesn't have a car they end up taking care of him at least as much as the other way around. I don't think he has enough cash or organizational abilities to help in a big crisis, though I may be wrong on that. On the other hand I'll likely be caretaker for my uncle because he and my brother just don't get along.

[bafleyanne.livejournal.com]

I am also an only. Unlike you, however, I have often wished for siblings. Each of my cousins came in a perfect set of two (I have 2 aunts/uncles on each side, and all but one of them has children). My house did end up being the favored one for sleepovers when we were younger because I was pretty much the only one of our friends not to have an annoying younger sibling, so that was kind of cool, but I was often desperately lonely as a child. Especially since there weren't very many kids in our neighborhood. I think I've tended to surround myself with friends throughout my life to make up for it, but I also have moments where I crave privacy intensely, which made it hard for me to get along with a roommate in college. :)

You know, I think I might make my own post about this, come to think of it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It sounds (from this comment but more from your entry) like you are somewhat more of an extrovert than I am, and it sounds as though more of the pressure on you has been external, and both of those things can make a huge difference.

I was always hurling myself full-tilt at things, from the very beginning. I think my parents probably would have made some expectations clear if I hadn't gone on setting up great big goals and then repeatedly battering them with my skull (goals, not parents). My kindergarten teacher told them to stop pushing me, and my dad said, "Pushing her? You try to stop her!" Which, unfortunately, the kindergarten teacher did, but he soon found it was no use. Anyway, the internal pressure has always been intense enough in here that external pressure hardly registered in things like school and music lessons and all.

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

I'm an only, and was an only grandchild for 14 years on one side and 20+ on the other. I didn't care one way or another growing up if other people were around. I had a few close friends that *almost* could have been siblings as we hung out so much :P From the time I was very little, I got along very well with adults. They always treated me as grown up and had adult conversations with me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of my friends was trying to tell me that this was a disadvantage to being an only child, that you didn't get "appropriate kid-level stuff." To me, "appropriate kid-level stuff" was always patronizing and stupid, and I would have immensely resented being held back to it instead of getting to have interesting, adult conversations.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

I'm an only child with many friends who are only children or children of very small families, and I'm getting to the age at which I'm starting to see my peers' parents go to nursing homes. I find that we bond together pretty well to support each other as our parents age. We may not necessarily be there to sponge-bathe somebody else's mother, but we help with the moving and offer emotional support.

As an only child I've learned to go to my "family of choice" for some things that some sibs get from their siblings. And I've learned to give those things as well -- when a friend fell seriously ill and her family wasn't there to support her, there were about twenty of us who rallied to help her and get her the assistance she needed.

I didn't grow up in a neighborhood where there were a lot of kids, but I can't remember being lonely. There was always so much to do, and I was always full of big plans. Now, if I hadn't been allowed to dig an enormous hole in the back yard, that would have made me feel deprived. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, please do quote me if you like.

My feelings on the idea of having a second child is that R. will be fine and loved whether you decide to give him a sibling or not. You should make that choice based on whether you and M. decide you want another child for his/her own sake, not based on what R.'s personality or social life might be with or without siblings, because you just can't tell.

I don't think you should feel guilty and selfish if you want to retain some of an adult life of your own. If it meant that you were ignoring R. or making him miserable in order to achieve that, that would be cause for some guilt. But you're not. No one is obligated to devote every ounce of energy to parenting. It may be "more challenging" on the parents to have more kids, but it's not a challenge that has to interest you. And it's not a challenge that has to not interest you, either. You can be a good, loving, and moral parent either way, and it's okay to do what you want to (with input from M., of course!). It doesn't make you a bad person either way.

[isquiesque.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'm an only child, and mrissa makes a lot of great points. I'm the person I am today in part due to my growing up an only child, and I was never lonely, I don't remember boredom. I think it made me grow up quicker and more responsible and more peaceful, and I wouldn't change it for the world. I worry about my parents growing older, yes, but both have done well enough and put enough away that the burder will only be emotional, and regardless of how many siblings I have, emotional burden doesn't lighten when it's shared. What I worry a bit more about now is that I'm pretty certain I won't have children of my own, and I must admit growing old without anybody rooting for me is a little unsettling; but then, it's also no reason to have a child (in my case, that is... if you're doing it in part to lessen the burden on a child that already exists, that's totally different).

Maybe I'll get lucky and have some great relationship with a younger person like in Fried Green Tomatoes or Something.

(Hi, mrissa! Here via Yoon!)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(Hi, isquiesque! Any frienda Yoon's etc. etc.)

Most of the important people in my life are older than me. At this point, that looks like simple statistics. Last week timprov asked if I thought I'd be taking care of some of our friends when they get old (sooner than us), and I thought, y'know, I'd help them out now if they needed it, so I don't see why that'd change when they're old.

I try to be parts of mechanisms whereby people find people they need. It seems to work out okay.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Another happy only here, who's never wanted a sibling. Well, except in the "hey, someone ELSE can give them grandchildren instead of me" way.

I have a lot of cousins, and the ones I was closest to as a kid were three younger girls (same parents). I always assumed cousins were like the siblings you didn't have to live with, and yay to that. I am so glad I don't have to deal with sibling dynamics. I'm positive if I'd had a younger sibling s/he would have been the automatic BAD ONE, since that seems to be how it runs in the family. (Unless you're an almighty BOY, that is.) My friends all had siblings, and NOBODY I knew liked theirs much, if at all. This is still pretty much true for the most part. Why would I want to have someone else to fight with all day and night? I'd rather be looooooooonely (as others put it) than that.

I never got a whole lot of bitching to my face about being an only child. I could always drop the "Yeah, Mom's labor was life-threatening, thanks" bomb on 'em.

I entertain myself well, and I'm used to being alone. I don't crave the company of others particularly, and when I do feel lonely (not often), I don't think "Hey, let's find someone to hang out with!" because as a kid I couldn't do that whenever I wanted. So I just entertain myself. Then again, I've had so many people go in and out of my life (usually not under my control) that I tend to think of people as unreliable and "easy go". I don't know what that means, really.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Fandom is the domain of oldest-or-onlies. Not that fandom is *all* those, but there's a decided concentration. Our household here is made up of 4 of them.

I think of myself mostly as an only, although in fact I have a younger sister. She didn't come to live with us until I was 12 or so, though, so it hardly counts. (She's adopted, to complicate things even more.)

Seems to me that families with lots of kids use up a lot more of the kids' time with chores and general caretaking help, which is traditional and no doubt appropriate, but I can't conceive of that time being ripped out of my schedule without a tremendous fuss.

I didn't get any weird remarks from people about being an only. It all seemed normal. Friends had siblings, but the ones I knew always tried as much as possible to keep out of each other's way, at least when friends were present (don't know what it was like with just the sibs of course). So I never thought of siblings as being particularly friends or companions.

My father was the second of 5 children, and was the best person at keeping track of friends I've ever met. I think of myself as an only, and I've mostly had social situation where my social life just happened, with very little effort on my part, and I'm rather bad at keeping track of people at any distance. Possibly, however, I'm unusual in one or more ways.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Possibly, however, I'm unusual in one or more ways.

Yes, dear, and more to the point, you may be unusual in one or more relevant ways.

I wonder how much the lack of weird remarks is due to your growing up in a college town. Some of my professors had big families and some small ones, but they were all a good deal more tolerant of each other's choices that way than the adults in the neighborhood where I grew up.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

this is good to hear. if, as is my current plan, i end up a single parent, i will likely have only one, so as not to be too badly outnumbered.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You know how in baseball they say "the tie goes to the runner"? We feel that way about numbers of kids, around here. We have friends who have a household of four adults and four children. The kids outnumber the adults.

But you're right, there's a difference in degree. Four kids outnumbering four adults is still moderately manageable; four kids outnumbering one adult takes some pretty special talents from the adult to work out all right.