the only child

my mother wrote me an email last night in which she called my attention to an article about the only child.

oddly, this is a subject that has been in and out of mind for days now. and something that I think i’d like to write about on here. (or rant, if you prefer).

you think being an only child is a good thing? well, it can be. you get all the attention lavished on you. if there is anything to get, you get it. oh, it’s nice I will admit. as an only child, I got so much that sometimes I think I am at odds with most of my peers never having had the opportunity to experience some of the things I did.

my father travelled a lot. every year, at least once a year and sometimes more. in the summer, I got to go along with them. i’ve been to trinidad, barbados, grenada, panama, the US, Canada, England and many times over in some of those places. every year, in may, we’d go to the north coast for a weekend meeting which meant all I had to do was sit around the pool or beach all day for 3 days and do nothing but have fun. I always got to go for 2 reasons: there was no choice, I couldn’t be left behind with a babysitter, and it really doesn’t cost that much extra to take an underage child.

I was the only child in the household, so when I got sick, I got all the attention. I had my forehead stroked, my tummy rubbed, I got stories read to me (and later on, I got avalanched with books to read to myself). you could pretty much say I got it all.

BUT

do you know what I didn’t get? I didn’t get the chance to learn how to deal with rivalry. I never got the chance to interact with others my own age much, at a point, everyone who I played with had to “go inside for dinner”, or bed, or something. at the end of the day, I went to bed alone. no pillow fights, no fighting to see who would get the last goodnight, no middle of the night raids on the fridge (cos it’s kinda boring to raid the fridge on your own), and certainly, no one else to blame when something broke. even if the wind was the culprit, it would always be my fault.

as an adult, it’s even worse. there are no siblings to complain about the parents, there’s only me when the parents want to talk, if they get sick, it’s just me. when they get old and unable to take care of themselves, it’ll be just me. a decision to be made, it can’t be made unless I am there – cos there are no other children to speak for me if I am not. no older children to teach them that insistent worry and attention is not necessary since I am a grown woman and can indeed make my own decisions, make my own mistakes, and experience my own hard-earned lessons. don’t call for a week, and I get accosted as having “divorced my parents”. parents want to travel, they can’t unless they know I will be able to housesit.

the whopper is the realization that only children probably don’t make the best parents. this last week, I had a conversation with a woman who is lamenting her choice to have a child because “i can’t take the constant chatter and attention that children demand. I live for those few moments when I can get some alone time.” we have been alone for so long, that being depended on every minute of every day is stressful.

an only child, living in this world takes a lot of adjustment and a lot of internal compromise. most of us are deep thinkers, so mindlessness is an abomination to us.

bored? never. we’ve had to learn to entertain ourselves from a very early age and maintain that for all our lives. entertain others? umm… how? if they don’t enjoy what we enjoy, how do we think outside the “box”? we only know what’s good for us, what we’ve come to expect, respect and love – how can we adapt to how others think? that’s a lesson we missed. we never had any siblings, so we never learned how to adapt to others – it’s always been just us. we’ve never HAD to.

get along with others? ok, we’ll try. but we know that at some point our individualism will cause friction.

want to pick out the only child in a crowd? i’ll tell you how: it’s the one who is sitting in the corner seemingly in another world. it’s the one at the airport who is quietly sitting reading or observing what’s going on around us. it’s the one who is doing for themselves what could be better done by asking for help. and oh, btw, it’s the one who never ever asks for help when CLEARLY they could use it.

you think being an only child is nice? it’s only nice SOMEtimes. mostly, it’s just a pain in the butt.