This week, my older daughter goes on a sailing with her 6th grade class, leaving her younger sister to experience life as an only child for the first time. Already, I can see the compensation the younger one has made to counter the loneliness: moving to the middle of the back car seat, keeping herself busy with internal monologues, even volunteering to go on boring adult errands.
These are the little adjustments an only child makes to feel a reassuring connectedness to the world, a sibling sentiment to acceptance. To be able to connect is to feel accepted in some tangible way, no matter how small. Yet acceptance for an only child is a peculiar concept in that you are always graded on a curve. People underrate your accomplishments because success is expected when children have undiluted attention and resources. Conversely, they turn your failures into blameless, self-fulfilling parables of exceptional opportunity gone awry.
But the loneliness is the worst part. Growing up as an only child, I yearned for any moment where I didn’t feel like a musical instrument with nothing to tune to except myself. My parents’ reticence for social activities and devotion to Buddhist meditation only made matters worse. I scavenged for opportunities to connect with others, and finally found my salvation in elementary school.
“Talks too much, and doesn’t pay enough attention in class,” reported my 2nd grade teacher.
Fair enough, but if only my teacher knew how I lived in a mausoleum of joy, aka “living the way of the mindful Buddha in noble silence”, she might have been more sympathetic to the running of my noble mouth.
This may start to sound like a diatribe against Buddhism, but let me put that fear to rest by maintaining that the Buddhist ideal of moderation must surely extend to the enforcement of Noble Silence as well. Of all the religious ideas that I’ve heard so far, the Buddhist emphasis on the “Middle Way” resonates with my own belief that humanity must learn to find compromise to evolve. In many ways, I see the middle way as a natural resting position in the Hegelian dialectic between thesis and antithesis.
Alas this would be the adult version of me speaking of moderation and the synthesis of opposing ideas. The child version mostly saw the world in extremist tones of pleasure and pain. The pain of loneliness was especially acute when my dad refused to let me come along on one particular shopping trip. The ten year old me felt the pain of rejection to such a degree that I stormed into my dad’s room with a pair of scissors, pulled down his best pair of work pants, and cut them until they were short as capris. It was truly therapeutic as I felt the thickness of the fabric fall away under the crisp blade.
“So the plane that went down, in the movie, did they have to pull it up before the screen went black?” interrupted my younger daughter, as we discussed the new United 93 movie.
I turned my head back, and looked upon my ten year old. She was sitting on her knees, in the middle of the back seat, with her head tilted, desperate to catch some part of our front-seat conversation. I smiled inwardly to myself before answering.