Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [61]
But research can show you whatever you’d like to see: of the first sixteen studies of China’s burgeoning population of only children, two found they displayed more ‘socially desirable’ behaviour, one found they were more spoiled and selfish, and less independent and emotionally healthy, and the vast majority—the remaining thirteen—found there was no appreciable difference between the onlies and the severals at all. A connection was drawn between an increase in the Chinese crime rate and an increase in single children. The preponderance of males compared to females that was the perhaps unintended result of the policy could be responsible, it was suggested, for almost two-fifths of the surge in crime the country was experiencing. But then another connection was drawn between the one-child policy and any positive contribution China was making to address climate change: 300 million fewer births meant 300 million fewer people making their demands on the world’s resources.
More than a decade ago, American environmental writer Bill McKibben approached parenthood from an ecological angle. The world and its resources had played a large part in the decision he and his wife made to have Sophie, a single child, and he wanted that world, those resources, to at least figure in the thinking some other people gave to the important question of their family’s size. ‘I’m not saying that my friends, or anyone else, are wrong to have several children,’ he wrote, ‘or that they should feel guilty or defensive . . . all I’m saying is that we live at a watershed moment in our ecological history when we need at least to consider this question, a question we almost never talk about.’
But alongside his concerns about the world’s food, the world’s energy, the world’s space, the world’s future, he grappled with the authority he had—and as someone with his own sibling—to decide that his daughter would be siblingless. Beside all the familiar concerns—would she be shy, selfish, spoiled, unpopular?—he asked whether she would have to endure an especial loneliness after he and his wife had died.
I understood how much he worried about Sophie and the state of the world and its future. But the idea of especial loneliness, especial orphan-ness, had never occurred to me. Everyone is orphaned when their parents die, irrespective of how many brothers or sisters they have, just as every first-born child gets to be an only one . . . for a while. And only children—at least in my experience—tend to be good at accumulating people, at creating their own quasi-families, at bulking up their numbers with a profusion of friends with whom they often have closer relationships than the ones they see over in sibling-world.
I asked my one-of-five husband if it would matter to him that this one-of-one child of ours had no siblings.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all.’ As simple and definitive as that.
I am thirty-seven years old and lying on an operating table at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital, unexpectedly caesareaned, unexpectedly delivered. My head is turned to my left, and my nose is centimetres away from the nose of our tiny baby, looking to his right, looking at me while my husband leans in from the other side. This person we’ve spent nine months wondering about, imagining. For most of that time, chatting away to him, telling him stories, it felt like he was the latest in my long line of imaginary friends.
‘The look on your faces,’ says the anaesthetist, clicking our camera, ‘the look on your faces: look what we made.’ The three of us, framed in our hospital blues, together in the world for the first time.
Later, in one dead-of-night feed, I look at this little being lying in my lap, his father lying next to me. In the half-funk of darkness, I wonder about the genetics of this, and whether I see my son not as the amalgam of two people, two families, two clear and distinct lines of descent, but as some kind of sibling—a sibling through vertical generations, rather than the more usual horizontal