Can a member of a pack ever understand an only child?

Three writers get me thinking about "onliness"

Before we begin…

When you encounter someone who is an only child what thoughts, if any, cross your mind? Are you in the presence of a kindred spirit or an alien being?  If you are an only child, what do you encounter from people who grew up with siblings? If you grew up with siblings, what do you love about it, hate about it?

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This week, a few random reads and re-reads hit on a theme close to my writing and close to my heart. Somewhere in here, there’s an essay trying to get out. I’m still figuring out what I want to say but here are some of my initial thoughts. Please share yours!!!!

Writer # 1: Ann Patchett

“Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said, “What do the only children do?”

“We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said. - Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

The five of us, holding on

For several years I’ve been writing a book that began life with the working title, “Only Child,” because each of the main characters share this trait. I wanted to see how the dynamics unfolded when they were placed together under a single roof. The title and the focus has changed a bit but the characters remain only children and they remain under that same roof. It’s not so easy - for them or for me.

I have thought a lot about only children ever since I gave birth to one. More than once over the years I’ve wanted to apologize to my son for stranding him with no one to shield him from, well, me. More than once he yearned for a sibling so “there would be more going on” in the house – meaning someone who could share the burden of my expectations, interventions, worries, and attention. More than once I despaired that the world might treat him more harshly if he missed the lessons that siblings teach you whether you want them or not. 

Writer #2: Lauren Hough

This week, in her essay, “Maybe We Are All Only Children Now,” Lauren Hough lands hard on this last point. She writes about the only kids she has shared space with over the years and says they are “a little underdone. There were things they never learned and probably never will.” The list is a long one:

“They don’t know how to share a bathroom, a room, a kitchen, a fridge, a space. They don’t know how to fucking share at all. I don’t think they understand the concept. 

“Never been forced to swallow a worm in penance for breaking the tape player. Never spent a Saturday pulling weeds, not because they’re in trouble, but their brother is and weeding the whole yard seemed excessive. …Never had someone drop legos in their mouth because they were snoring. …Never heard someone start giggling on the other line when talking to a boyfriend.” 

More importantly, they’ve never learned to love their worst enemy, who eats cereal wrong, who does everything wrong. They never learned to take the blame to save someone who doesn’t need any more trouble. They don’t know how to end a fight just by sitting down in the same room and watching a show. They don’t know you can.” - Lauren Hough, “Maybe We Are All Only Children Now” 

When I was growing up, the only child seemed exotic. Even two-child families were a little unusual in the fifties and sixties when all the mothers we knew had at least four kids and bellies swollen with the next addition to the clan. They called it the baby boom for a reason. Catholics like us were especially prolific. My mother produced five of us in as many years and still wound up with one of the smallest families among those we knew. She made up for it by later marrying a man with six of his own. 

I was hard on only kids back then. For one thing, they didn’t seem to know they were kids. My best friend from sixth through ninth grade was the only child of older, divorced parents. Her mother would ask her what she wanted for dinner and my friend would actually ponder the question and then make her choice in the same civilized tone her mother had used. Then they would move on to conversation about their days, make sophisticated little jokes, and bask in the quiet clean living room that no one had to vacuum very often because no one messed it up. I never knew how to participate in these dinner-table conversations. Just as she never knew how to stick a fork in a brother’s hand when he grabbed her last french fry and then, give him the damn thing anyway. 

Writer #3: David Sedaris

Having brothers or sisters is like growing up in an exclusive club you can never entirely leave - even if you don’t speak, even if you move far away and never go back again. If you’re lucky, you end up loving each other even if you also hate each other. Either way, you are connected. There is someone out there who knows your history in a way that no one else ever will. The loss of one of you leaves the rest incomplete. 

“How could anyone purposefully leave us—us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?” ― David Sedaris, Calypso

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Another way to look at this

There’s another side to all of this, of course and I’ve seen it play out. Deprived of siblings - at least for the first 19 years of his life until his father remarried and had a couple more – my son built a network of friends he could call or who could call him day or night. He met a girlfriend in high school whose parents made him part of her family. He went away to school as a teenager and attracted other adults who could mentor him. He chose a nontraditional path in his work that has required fortitude, creativity, tolerance and has suffered setbacks that have required him to learn and test his resilience. He knows how to connect with others and he knows how to be alone. He’s done pretty well, all things considered. 

In the years ahead, there are going to be more people like my son, and fewer people like me. That’s what the statistics say and that’s what I learn when I look at my own family. None of my siblings or step siblings has more than two kids and most of us do not have any. Their own children have been even less willing to reproduce; of all my nieces and nephews, only two have kids of their own, a tidy pair apiece. 

I think about this a lot and I worry for my son. I know what’s coming. My parents have shown me. My father is gone. My mother and her husband are getting older every day. Soon it will be just my siblings and me. We each live thousands of miles apart now but, increasingly, we huddle together for support like we did decades ago when our parents fought and the world seemed to be ending.

Each Sunday we gather on Zoom, something we started during the pandemic and now it is like church for me. One by one, each brother and sister pops up on the screen until it is filled with the faces of those who knew me at my most unformed. There is the brother who taught me to drive when my parents failed, the sister who never told anyone the secrets that spilled out of me when I was fourteen and drunk at my uncle’s wedding, the brother who tried to teach me how to whistle, the sister who strapped on roller blades neither of us had tried before, grabbed my hand, and said, “let’s go.” Our hair is white. Our glasses glint on the screen. Invariably there are technical issues that get in the way. We all live in different states but on Sundays we are together, reaching across the miles and the years, holding on. 

Some links:

• In 2013, journalist Lauren Alexander took on the myths of being an only child and choosing to have only one child in her book, One and Only: The Joys and Myths of Raising Just One. In this interview with NPR, she explores how only doesn’t necessarily mean lonely along with the stereotypes she met with when people responded to her decision to have only one child. 

• Two more writers take on the question of being and having an only child. The Guardian’s Maddie Thomas asks, “Being one and done is certainly more common , so is it good or bad to be an only child?”. Alexandra Schwartz of the New Yorker not only explores her own thoughts on this but points out that children’s literature is packed with heroes who are only children – Lyra Bevlyacqua (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials), any one of Roald Dahl’s protagonists, for example. Perhaps the hero’s journey is not so easily taken in a pack. 

• With that in in mind, here are 7 Book Characters Who Are Only Children by ‘Sheree” on Goodreads 

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