The other day I was casually denigrating an only child in front of a friend who I didn’t realise was also an only child. I probably said something like, “I love her, but she’s a bit of an only child,” meaning, well, whatever nonsense I meant. I’ve got a whole bunch of siblings and step-siblings, as well as more than one kid, so I clearly wasn’t talking about my own lived experience. It opened up a conversation that we don’t normally have in front of one another – people with siblings, people without – because we’re too polite.
My friend said he understood everything: how to share, how to negotiate, how to think of others, how to look at things from another’s perspective, how to resolve conflict, how to have conflict in the first place – all the things only children were supposed not to get, he got. “But I do not get siblings. I just don’t understand why you put yourselves through it.”
