Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [56]
Our son. Our only child.
I was evangelical about it, always leaping against the assumption that this child was bound to be the first of several.
‘Of course,’ said the lady in the baby-stuffs shop, ‘the advantage of this pram is that when you have your next child, you can clip on one of those skateboard attachments and your toddler can ride there while your newborn’s safe in here.’ She executed a smooth sort of reverse-park glide designed to show off the stroller’s handling, its manoeuvrability.
And although I should have just smiled, kicked the wheels, looked under the bonnet—or the equivalent for stroller appraisal—I felt the words take shape in my mouth, heard them push into the air to disrupt the shop’s bustle of other bumpy women like me, other neat and tidy assistants: ‘We’re not having any other children. Just this one.’
‘No, you’ll have another,’ said the sales lady, patting the pram’s handle as if to reassure it that it wouldn’t be a one-use purchase.
‘Of course,’ said the lady at my childhood beach, tickling our baby under his chin, ‘what you have to do is have another one as soon as you can.’
‘We’re not having any other children. Just this one.’
‘You need to have the next one as quickly as possible,’ she replied, unflappable in her flapping towel.
‘But it’s so much nicer to have siblings,’ said a variety of people, perhaps thinking this was a less proscriptive way to make us see the error of our ways. ‘So much nicer, and so much easier.’
And, ‘Once you’ve got the first one, you’ll end up wanting more, no matter what you think now.’
And because of the evangelism, I jumped each time, trying to explain, to justify. For the most part, I stuck to the numbers. How old I was; how old my husband was. That we were no spring chickens was, I thought, pretty unarguable. People demurred.
I tried a more mathematical approach and came up with a model of hands—our child could hold my hand and my husband’s, and still leave us both with a hand free for each other. This represented a kind of perfection in my head, a kind of complete and safely enclosing circle. People shook their heads again.
Then I tried pointing out that I was an only child, that a family of three had served me perfectly well, that I’d had a ball.
Which only made me more suspect again.
‘Don’t you find it remarkable,’ another only child whispered to me at a dinner party, ‘the things that people feel able to say when they find out you’ve got no brothers or sisters? About what you must be like, and must feel like, and must wish for? And just how rude they can be?’
You must have been spoiled. You must have been so lonely, bossy, selfish, precocious, self-important. You must be antisocial—you must be a loner; you must find it hard to make friends. You must wish you had a sister, a brother.
You must feel like you’ve missed out on so much.
Such a set against singular creatures: I read somewhere that the decision to have one child is even less acceptable to most people than the decision to have none at all. I read somewhere about a woman who was tempted to divorce her pro-single-child husband because she was so ‘terribly worried’ about her son growing up with no siblings. I read somewhere about a mother who felt that with just one child her family was still, somehow, a childless family of single people. But with three children, well: ‘Now I feel like I am a mother,’ she said.
It’s a funny word, ‘only’. It can ring with drum rolls and acclamation— ‘the one, the only’; it can echo with the isolation, the emptiness of lonely, alone. The English-speaking world is rare, having separate words for only’s ‘one-off’ connotation and for its ‘alone’ one. The English-speaking world is rare, too, for the deep suspicion the majority