Only The Lonely? - October 2004

by Karen Moss

When I was single, people asked, “When are you going to settle down and get married?”

When I settled down and got married, they hounded, “When are you going to have children?”

About an hour after I gave birth to our daughter two years ago, people started in: “So, when is the next baby coming?”

The American Dream is to have the house with the white picket fence and the requisite two children (the official census statistic is 1.86, but I don’t want to think about that .86!). So when we say that we may not have another, they are aghast. Their reasoning is that Sara will never be properly socialized if she does not have a little brother or sister to pick on, and when she grows up she will end up in a belltower with an AK-47 screaming, “I was an only child!” -- or at best, she will just resent us the rest of her life.

I make a concerted effort to socialize Sara with other children, and it seems she has mastered the skill of picking on other kids even without the benefit of a younger sibling. And no matter what we do or don’t do, Sara will grow up to resent us anyway.

Before we had Sara, people would ask us why we didn’t have kids yet. What they didn’t know was that we had suffered a miscarriage and had to go through a year of fertility treatments. When we told them we were, uh, “working on it”, they chided, “Well, at least you’re having fun trying, eh, nudge, nudge, wink, wink?”

Anyone who has struggled with fertility knows that it’s anything but fun. It can put a strain on even the strongest marriages. I know of a few couples with “onlies” who say, “We can have another child or we can stay married.”

Another friend, who works full time and has a son Sara’s age, is also getting pressured to have another child. “Right now, with my job, I already feel my son is getting cheated. If I have another baby right now, I’ll have even less time with the poor little guy.”

At the other end of the spectrum are couples that have three, four, five or more kids, and get those nasty glares and underhanded comments from people as if to say, “Haven’t you heard of birth control?” (The answer is, “Yes, that’s why we have 5 kids, not 6!”)

Family planning is a personal decision, and sometimes just what is what it is for every family, whether they have one, two, six or no children.

Right now, we’re sticking with one, but the door is not completely closed on having another. That decision will be made by us and the Powers That Be. But one thing is certain. It won’t be long before friends and family start asking, “So, when are the grandchildren coming?”