Only the Lonely
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 21, 2013

“So, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asks the school mum I’m standing with.

We’d been chatting, this new friend and I, waiting for our six-year-olds to come barrelling out of class. I feel a thud of embarrassment at her question, but I force a smile and reply: “I’m an only child.”  

I say those four words with a shrug so they’ll appear weightless, but they drop between us like stones. I see on her face that peculiar mix of curiosity and suspicion. She can’t hide the look I know so well.

“Wow!” she says, “I wouldn’t have picked you for one of those,” and our conversation skids in a direction that makes me feel exposed.

“What was it like growing up?” she asks.

“Oh fine!” I reply, “You don’t know what you’re missing if you never had it.”

She looks at me expectantly, waiting for more, but I’m saved by the bell as kids come swarming through doorways.

On the walk home through the park with my son, I feel a familiar pang of alienation, an uneasiness at having been outed. Even as an adult, a single childhood still feels like something to hide.

My mum wanted lots of babies, but she and my dad divorced when I was three. No matter – I had a long-suffering Siamese kitten who filled the role of baby sister. I’d squeeze her into dolls’ dresses and wheel her up the street imprisoned in my toy pram.

As a kid, I’m not sure I even knew what ‘lonely’ felt like. I was just alone, and I was very good at it. Inventing ways to compete against myself turned into elaborate tests of endurance. (I was a fierce opponent). My nanna gave me a plastic kitchen timer which I put to work, furiously pedalling my blue bike around the block, trying to beat yesterday’s record.  

Obstacle courses were my specialty. I mapped them out with an eight-year-old’s precision:  start at the thunderbox, swing once around the Hills Hoist, sprint to the back fence, twice down the slide and leap onto the veranda to finish. 53 seconds – not quick enough. (Losers got eaten by the crocodiles who lived in the cracks in the pavement.)

 We had little spare money for toys, so I grew expert at collecting odd things. I sorted buttons by colour into glass jars and curated coin exhibitions on bedspreads. I invited beetles into plastic containers fitted with five-star cotton-wool day beds and leafy gazebos .

Sleeping over at my cousins’ house, the noise of their big family was overwhelming.  Tormented by her big brother, my girl cousin would unleash her ear-piercing shriek:

“Mum! Christopher yanked my hair!”  

“I did not, you dobber!” he’d bellow in protest.

I’d be scared witless but secretly thrilled as he chased us down the hallway. My role was reluctant witness for when brother whacked sister, or sister pinched brother. My Aunty would storm out of the kitchen with flour on her hands and shout at us over the ruckus: “ENOUGH! All of you – outside and sort it out!

I was worn out from the rioting but even so, I hated being detached from the herd. In the quiet at home, I’d head for my room and dive back into The Famous Five. Books transported me into other teeming families where I could observe the action without feeling compelled to join it.

But my favourite story was about an only child who lived in a third storey apartment in New York, just as Mum and I had lived in a third-floor flat in South Perth. The girl in the book had strung a makeshift sign out of the window, hoping the people walking below would look up. “Hello!” the sign said. “Wave to me if you see this.” When we moved into a duplex, I scolded myself for not playing that game when I’d had the chance. In my teens, it dawned on me the story’s theme was isolation.

In high school, I worried that a kid with no siblings would be branded a misfit. But I wasn’t. Friendships came easily and I cherished girlfriends like sisters. (I still do). But I envied their take-for-granted solidarity with siblings. They always had someone to watch their back or take their side.

I carried into adulthood those traits often ascribed to only children:  over-achieving, over-sensitive, over-indulged, self-centred. I’ve tried to rub out those tics, tried not to conform to stereotype, lest someone point a finger and say: “See!”

Now, when I meet another only child, we make an instant connection. Feeling safe, I’ll plough straight in and ask: Did you feel lonely growing up?” Almost always the answer is “No,” followed by a pause: “But now that I think about it, maybe I was.”

And then I go home to my own brood of three, cavorting and messing up the loungeroom and yelling: “Mum! Come into our cubby!”

I put my childhood aside and concentrate on theirs.