On being one and done

The joy and grief of having an only child when you always pictured more

I sometimes feel sad that my daughter will grow up missing something that I can’t imagine my own childhood (or my adulthood, honestly) without.

When we made the decision to have children, my ex-husband and I had always agreed that we wanted more than one. We’d both grown up with siblings, both yearned for the chaos and camaraderie of a home full of children, both thought (naively) that ‘only child’ was synonymous with ‘spoiled child’.

As you can tell from the “ex” part, the way I had initially pictured raising children hasn’t quite gone to plan. There are plenty of small joys and unexpected moments of grief that have come along with separation and coparenting—maybe one day I’ll write about more of them—but right now, the grief I find myself returning to again and again is for the siblings my daughter will never have.

I found pregnancy and postpartum very hard. Between that and managing my daughter’s medical needs, I don’t know that a sibling would have been on the cards even if her father and I had stayed together. But divorce has put a decided full-stop on the end of a sentence that had always been an open question.

Perhaps I’m channelling all the sadness that comes with the ending of a marriage and the dissolution of a family unit into this one thing because it’s easier than feeling a vague sadness about something that was both the correct decision and a difficult one. Or perhaps, as my daughter gets older, more of my friends have already had second or third kids, and a small part of me worries that I’m being left behind.

My life with my daughter is beautiful. She is enough (she is more than enough), and I can’t imagine how I’d do it with another baby in the mix (except, of course, that I’d just get on with it, because that’s what you do when you’re the mum).

Anyway. After asking on my Instagram story recently about people who were raised as only children, or are raising only children, multiple people asked me to share some of the responses. So here we are.

On being one and done

(according to now-adult only children, and parents of only children)

“You can’t miss what you don’t know”

Multiple people reminded me of this, and it’s true, in so many ways. I’m looking at how my daughter’s childhood will differ from mine. Divorced parents, a different suburb, the internet! Siblings or not, it inevitably would anyway! By definition, only children don’t know whether or how their lives would have been altered with siblings. Being an only child will (hopefully!) feel normal to my daughter.

Time with chosen family

A friend currently considering her third child recently told me that she’s worried about how it might affect her older children’s social lives. “Who’ll invite us over with three?” Without multiple schedules to manage, I can choose to spend time with my daughters’ peers, in a way that people with two or more kids aren’t as easily able to.

Multiple people mentioned how easy they have found it to make and keep friendships as an adult—something I struggled with until I had my daughter. I never connected it to having a kind of built-in social network growing up, but this makes sense. It’s important to me that I give my daughter opportunities to make friends and model what it means to be in community with other people.

Siblings don’t guarantee built-in relationships

I have a close relationship with my sisters, but that isn’t always the case. Many people with siblings messaged to remind me that a sibling isn’t necessarily a “built-in friend.”

Siblings can cause rivalry, pressure, and various other forms of drama both in childhood and as adults. There’s no guarantee they’ll get on, so having a second child to “give your first a sibling” may not be the gift we frame it as.

The sandwich generation as an only child

I worry about my daughter feeling somehow responsible for me as I get older (both for my emotional-social wellbeing and for my care). To be clear: she absolutely is not responsible for either of those things. Nonetheless, adult children (and particularly adult daughters) do tend to feel some responsibility for the care of ageing parents.

As the only daughter of a single mother, I worry that my girl will feel the weight of expectations around elder care. I’m combating this by building a strong social network. The women who have been my village as a single mother are the same women I plan to grow old with.

Less division of parents’ attention and resources

It’s basic maths that parents with more children must, to some extent, divide their attention and resources. That isn’t to say that either way is worse or better—what children with siblings may lose in one-on-one time with parents, they make up for with attention from siblings, an early education in sharing and fairness, and (hopefully!) a lifelong relationship with their sibling.

And, as a mother of one, my daughter gets much more focused attention and quality time with me than I could otherwise give her. I am able to drop everything and support her medical needs, without arranging alternative childcare. There is more money in the budget for one set of clothes, one plate at meals, one bed on trips, one place in the extracurricular class, than there would be for two.

Life with siblings is rich, but life without them can be, too. It turns out that giving children your attention and fulfilling their need for connection is possible whether or not they have siblings—and certainly isn’t going to ‘spoil’ them.

My daughter may get step-siblings or half-siblings one day, from me or from her father. But for now, she has cousins, friends, and classmates. She has a mother who isn’t completely burned out by parenting. She has my (mostly) undivided attention. And that’s going to have to be enough.

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