What I Learned From Being an Only Child
Life without a sibling
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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.
