What I Learned From Being an Only Child

Life without a sibling

Photo of author with father

Being an only child has meant different things at different ages. As a child, it was never needing to share. It was having a large bedroom to myself. It was parents who never needed to divide their parenting between me and another.

It wasn’t until I was 10 that a new side of the experience began to dawn. I was at my older cousin’s glitzy bat mitzvah in their lavish home, a hot tub trickling water over a man-made mountainside and into their heated pool. Its entire circumference was intricately lined with stones. In the pool were candles that floated delicately across the placid water on little lilies. A noctilucent glow emanated through the chlorinated waters as the lilypads circled one another in a gentle frenzy.

A colossal cake sat inside the dining room as the mother of the bat mitzvah girl fastidiously paced through the house. Chairs were lined up in neat rows along the grass beside a makeshift stage. It had been painstakingly erected for that momentous day.

Spotlights gleamed toward my two cousins — the bat mitzvah girl, 13, and her younger brother, 10. He had a prepared speech for her. And he said the loving things that siblings do.

And something unfamiliar began to well inside me. I started to violently cry. In one moment, I gained a sudden glimpse into the life full of meaningful moments that I could never share with a brother or sister at my side. I ran sobbing from a crowd full of confused faces, nearly halting the ceremony in the process. I could feel the weight of my two cousin’s concerned looks penetrating through the crowd full of people.

My father turned toward me, nearly as confused as all of the others. And after a moment’s hesitation, he sprang from the pageantry and ran to console me.

He and I quietly left the party. We walked along opulent streets and past gated homes. Away from the commotion, there was an oppressive stillness to the sultry summer night. He asked what was bothering me. I didn’t have the composure to answer.

After a few minutes, I’d finally run out of tears to cry. Through stifled sobs and labored breaths, I asked him if I’d ever have a sibling. If there’d ever be another person in the family that I could share life’s moments with. I wanted to know if there’d ever be another like me. If I’d always be the only one — the only existing combination of he and my mother.

I wanted to know if I’d be the sole person to emerge from the world of possibilities that exists between them. Would all of these features, traits, loves, quirks, and aversions be only mine forever? Would there ever be another to exude a different balance, to emerge from the genetic roulette wheel a slightly different me?

It was one of the rare moments in which my father didn’t have an answer to my questions. I scarcely had the words to ask them.

He didn’t quite know how to tell me that another kid at his age just wasn’t in the cards — that there’d never be a little brown-haired brother for me with my father’s eyes and my mother’s memory. That I would remain the only existing sum to the strange equation that is my parents. He hugged me as I cried what few tears lingered inside.

I can’t fault them for having a child later in life. It’s because they did that they each were who they were.

In parenting, you each bring to the table the wisdom of your experiences. It’s a sort of gamble — to live your own life and go through the events that will shape you before raising children, or to be there for them as they grow old beside you. To go through life’s formative moments with children at your side.

My parents chose the former and in many ways, I’m better for it. With each issue that arose in life, it was invariably them that I turned toward. With crushes and breakups and bullies, most of my advice came from two people who’d already had a life full of failed relationships and challenges before I’d even entered into the world. Maybe it’s their aged wisdom that shaped me into the “old soul” that I’m often labeled.

But I’ll never have the privilege of knowing those younger people. I’ll never be there for those early adversities that made them who they are. Large parts of my parents’ lives will always remain mysteries.

One of the hardest aspects of being an only child is never being able to share the burden of aging parents. I don’t have a sister who will take my mother to her appointments. And I don’t have a brother who will help my father with speaker equipment as his career in music grows more onerous.

I don’t feel as though I have the freedom to live my own life and be my own person. The thought of ever turning my back on my parents is simply more than I can stomach. Each day spent with them is a day I can’t figure out the world on my own.

And each day traveling is one that won’t be spent reveling in life’s little moments with the loving pair that raised me — going to the movies with my father. Walking the dog with my mother. Talking about some silly thing we saw on social media. Sitting in silence together by the fireplace on a dreary winter night. There will never be a correct answer to the question of how to spend my time here on this blue little dot.

But that’s the thing about life. We’re torn between roads whose paths don’t intersect.

To write for a living is to turn my back on the world in which I carry on my father’s band. His music career was at the expense of the career he could have had in psychology, after all.

For me to live my own life, see the world, and experience everything I want to experience runs the risk that I might be backpacking through Nepal when I get the call to learn that my dad has cancer.

I might be teaching English in Bali when I get the terrible news my mother can no longer walk. I might be climbing a mountain when I hear word that my father’s played his final note and his fingers can bear no more. That my mother can no longer create art.

But these challenges are universal, too. Each life lived is at the expense of every other. The decades we have begin to feel finite when the years start ticking by. The naive notion that the world is our oyster begins to evaporate once time races, melds, and blurs. 80 years seems like a long time until the days within the months reveal that they’re as fleeting as each and every passing moment.

When you’re still a child, it’s hard to notice that there aren’t enough hours in the day. We long to turn 10 and 16 and 18 and 21. We romanticize the future. We imagine a faraway place with a child-like hope. It hovers above us like a concept, a distant reality that we can mold at our leisure.

But the dates that seem unapproachable have this odd way of arriving. And on late nights, I wish there were another like me to share in that fact. Another who sees the world through an aperture only a few shades different than my own.

It’s a difficult reality to face. That I’ll never have a sibling with whom I can commiserate over time’s relentless flow. To wallow and dance in the oddity of it all.

I’ll never have another who will understand the weight of the specific losses I still have in store — what it will be to lose my parents. The horrible void it will leave. The impact crater will be my own to understand.

The memory of the people they were in their most private moments is something that will die with me. There’s no one else in the world who can say, “Remember how Mom used to talk to Butters?” or “Remember how she held onto that old iPod for a decade too long just so she could shuffle her 10,000 songs on her dated old speaker dock?” And there will never be another who will reflect “Remember the way Dad used to cut his pizza and burgers with a fork and knife?” or “Remember the way he used to always say ‘I love you?’”

But having a person to share grief doesn’t remove it. It might lessen the load or it might widen the crater. There’s just no knowing the life in which I’d have a little brother to share in that loss. Or to be a bad role model for. Or to transcend the tumult of adolescence with. To abruptly end up adults alongside.

I’ll never have an older brother to be inspired by. Nor will I ever understand the older sister experience.

I’ll never have a female sibling to tell me how to talk to girls — to traverse the dystopian world of online dating. I’ll never have a younger sister to protect from a broken heart. I’ll never have to intimidate her cheating boyfriend. I’ll never understand the pain of a sibling in duress.

But if I had a sibling, I wouldn’t be the person that I am.

My parents may have had me at a younger age. My father may not have brought his world travels to the table in raising me. He might have been the affable psychologist in the community and never the musician. He might have stayed with his first wife.

And my mother might not be the artist that she is. She might not have the education that she does.

Maybe my parents wouldn’t have bonded at all if they’d met a few years younger. But if they’d waited until a few years later, they may have lost hope of ever raising a child of their own at all. Maybe I would have remained a mere idea. An inchoate soul never to be consummated.

I’m thankful for the privilege it is to be the only person ever raised by Ken Ulansey and Cynthia Heller. I’m thankful that — of all the people in the world — I’m the only one who knows what it is to be their son. That one of the possibilities between them was realized. I’m thankful for this journey that’s so uniquely mine out of every possible might-have-been.

Originally published on Medium