Then there’s my mother, running a pet-sitting business while caring for my 95-year-old grandmother, who recently broke her pelvis and is at home but virtually immobile. My mother, too, is drained physically and emotionally. But there’s a difference: She has two brothers sharing the work.
The writer Mark Steyn warns that Western civilization will soon be destroyed by our steadily shrinking families, as fertility rates in more nations drop below the replacement level, as they have in Spain, Russia, and Italy. But America’s only children, of which I am one, won’t notice. By then, we’ll have all gone mad, not from our lonely childhoods populated pathetically with imaginary friends, but from the stress of dealing with our long-lived but health-challenged parents.
And we won’t even have a spouse around to help us, since most of us will be divorced. (You may have heard: We’re hard to live with because we never learned to share.)
Call it the omnichild’s dilemma, the incredible heaviness of being all things to two people.
Sure, it sounds great at the time. Have one child! Pay for just one college tuition, one set of braces! Suffer through the Terrible Twos just once, attend only one third-grade spelling bee! Experience all the joys of parenthood quickly and then get back to your regular life!
But it’s like the “Bill Me Later’’ option on PayPal. It’ll get you eventually — and hurt much more then.
The only child suffers not from the lack of built-in playmates but from the emotional burden called “It’s All Up to Me.’’ The singleton is the only child available to produce grandchildren. The only child who can come home for Thanksgiving. The only child who can make Mom feel fulfilled on Mother’s Day. The only child to lay awake nights agonizing over whether it’s time to put Dad in a nursing home.
The parents suffer when their only child, no matter how devoted and well-meaning, can’t deliver because of the stresses of his or her own grown-up life.
