When I try to describe my family to anyone, it’s always pretty confusing. I often talk about my brother and my sister – who in truth were my half-siblings, although we never used that language – and remember them fondly even though they’ve both passed away.
But I also frequently describe myself as an only child, which is also true. w
Sometimes I’ll refer to myself as an only child to someone who will remember me talking about my siblings, and they’ll say, “Wait, but I thought you said …?”
The thing is: My brother and sister, children of my father’s first marriage, were much older than I was — my brother was 21 when I (a product of my father’s third marriage) was born and my sister was 19. So even though we were emotionally close, we did not grow up together, in the same household or even the same decade.
I was raised mostly by my mother, and I was her only child, so that’s what my childhood really reflected. I was a pretty typical only child — very close to my mom, comfortable around adults, sometimes lonely but also glad I didn’t have to share a bathroom with anyone.
And while the stereotype is that only children are often spoiled and overparented, I don’t think I really was, partly because it was the 1980s and 1990s and children were generally allowed to be feral and partly because my mom was a single mom working more than one job and she didn’t have the time or the money to put me in violin classes followed by SAT prep classes followed by sailing classes.
In my teen years, I recall two things: 1. I had a great deal of freedom, but my mom did want to know where I was at all times, so I was constantly stopping at pay phones and leaving messages on the answering machine updating her on where we were going (and mostly telling the truth) and 2. On the rare occasions when I didn’t tell the truth, I always got caught because when you’re an only child, you have to be sure to keep your story straight. There was no one else to distract my mom, no other kid I could claim she was confusing me with the way my friends in big families did.
Georgia, my younger daughter, now also finds herself in a blended family situation like I had. We don’t say “half-brother” or “half-sister” either, but from the moment she was born, Georgia lived one of three realities, depending on the day: She was one of three kids (during the half of the week we had my stepson, Elliot); she was one of two kids; or she was an only child (during the few weeks each summer that my older daughter, Rowan, stayed with her dad in Missouri).
Now, though, with Elliot at graduate school and Rowan at college, Georgia is, by default, an only child the majority of the time. And as the era of parental benign neglect has ended and I am not facing the same challenges my mother did, Georgia is now, I suspect, feeling distinctly overparented. I just have so much time on my hands now. No sooner does she discard a pair of pants than I have them spinning in the washer, without even asking if she planned to wear them again. Gone are the days when I was too busy to check if she had finished her science homework – instead I’m emailing her during the day to make sure she goes to office hours because these are the grades high schools are going to see. And activities? She’s doing robotics, volleyball, STEM Design + Build + Sail, and baby-sitting.
She misses her siblings. I think she misses her freedom to fly under the radar even more.
As we all start to get comfortable with this new reality, these new roles, these new expectations, I’m reminded that with a blended family, there’s never really a single truth. I’ve spent my life trying to describe my family in neat little terms that make sense to other people, but the truth is, I can’t. And maybe that’s the point: the messy, shifting, sometimes contradictory way we all relate to one another is really what makes a family a family. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. It just is what it is. And we are all in it together.
