Long read: 'Why we decided to stop at one child'.

My one and ‘only’.

‘I wish I had a brother,’ he declares from the back seat. We are carefully pulling out of the school driveway, past kids chattering and shrieking at each other. In the relative serenity of our car, I run the old line: ‘I didn’t want to be anyone’s mum but yours, sweetie.’

‘Yeah, but if you have a brother then your brother’s friends become your friends,’ he replies. ‘Then you get to have lots of friends.’

‘Well, you do already have lots of friends and you can always make more.’ ‘I still want a brother.’ ‘I’m sure you’re going to have a best friend who will feel like a brother.’

‘No, I want a real brother.’ He has never been this persistent.

I start flailing. ‘Honey … Daddy and I wanted to make sure that we could give you all that you need and want, the best that the world could offer.’

‘I don’t want to be spoiled! I want a brother.’ The tears spill over. He is six and a half years old, heading home to a house where he gets to hang out with Mum until Dad arrives, then we all have dinner and he goes to bed. I pull over and turn off the engine so he can sit on my lap and sob it out. The only comfort I can offer is to say that I understand why he is upset, that being an only child will upset him every now and then and that I’m sorry that he has to put up with it, but that he’s going to be okay no matter what because we love him to bits. And hey, you know, what about the perks?

That my first child would be the last was not actually part of the plan. When I was a teenager, I had fully planned on having two pairs of twins plus one other child, so there was a tie-breaker in the competitive household that would ensue. That was important. I am one of exactly two daughters. This scaled up the conflict to Middle East-level proportions. We could have used a third party to break the impasse, but neither of our parents was particularly interested in the Nobel Peace Prize. I made a hobby of considering names for my five children. I even convinced Mum to buy me a baby names book, the sort that describes the origin and meaning of each name, because I needed one as a ‘reference’ for the ‘characters’ in my ‘stories’. I liked the idea of having masculine nicknames for girls—Andy for Andrea, Danny for Danica— because I wanted my daughters to surprise people who knew only their nicknames. For some reason, I despised my imaginary sons because I gave them names like Basil and Nigel. I don’t know why they were always Western names rather than Filipino, but let’s blame colonialism.

As it turns out, having a sibling doesn’t make you less lonely, especially if she’s the favourite. I love my younger sister (now) but when she was little, she was incredibly cute and everyone adored her dark ringlets and chubby cheeks. In fact in one photo that Mum sent to my lola (grandmother), the caption quite superfluously points out how adorable she is. I was in the photo, too, but whatever. As far as I can recall, my younger sister was never spanked or yelled at or banished. Perhaps she really was that angelic but I suspect there are other reasons, such as her being too cute to punish or her heeding lessons from my misfortune. I was the cautionary tale against bad habits, the anti-role model of don’ts, like don’t keep your face in a book for hours when you could sweep the floor or clean the bathroom. My sister became a deft cook and dutiful washer of dishes.

It took us a while to figure out how to be sisters in an environment where she was the model daughter. It turns out that living apart helps; our relationship improved when I moved to a different city to attend university. For a while, however, I thought the problem had been that there weren’t enough kids in the family. If we had had other sisters or brothers, then we would just be having fun all the time, getting up to mischief and investigating spooky mysteries at city hall. So I envisioned my future family with whip-smart, kooky and good-natured kids, who would drive me nuts but would make my heart burst from delight.

In the end, I could stand having only one. He took his time, at that. My husband and I got married in 2001 and our son was born in 2008. We put off trying to conceive for the first few years, naively thinking that we would become pregnant the moment we felt ready. We wanted to be ready. It didn’t seem fair to inflict amateurs on a helpless baby. However, as more friends welcomed their first child, we realised no one is ever completely equipped for the task of raising a human person. There seemed to be a fair bit of guesswork involved.

Deciding to become parents was one thing, becoming parents turned out to be another. The fecundity around us started to make us wince. Was it envy? Was it chagrin over being overtaken, our friends going where we could not follow? Or was it a contrarian response, an innate resistance to competitive conditions? In any case, we enjoyed being a couple and knew we had other options, such as adoption. We were young enough still, with nascent careers, and though we longed for a baby, we longed also for many other things, like owning a house and travelling overseas. It became obvious that things don’t happen all at once, or even in the order we plan. I think this is the principal insight of ‘adulting’.

My husband moved from graphic design back into IT development. I undertook a teaching qualification while working part-time. We lived in a nice house in an okay suburb, and had a nuclear physicist as a landlord who did not raise our rent in the four years we were there. We had a cat, a dog and a barbeque, as well as an army reserve on the other side of the back fence. Who could ask for more? By the time we had a positive pregnancy test, my husband had changed companies twice, I was teaching at a state school, and we were living in a cookie-cutter house in the middle of an empty block, 180 degrees southwest of our previous address. Life has a way of prodding you like that before it trips you up.

We had been planning a holiday in Hobart. My husband’s family is from Tasmania, and we thought it would be lovely to visit without a funeral being involved. I had been feeling strange for a couple of weeks but my menstrual cycle had always been something like a drunkard playing darts at 2am. It is erratic. I remembered the pregnancy test kit in the back of the toilet cupboard. ‘Might as well use it before it expires,’ I thought. I went through the motions, then stared at the plastic stick. I read and re-read the packaging, trying to decipher the drawings, wondering whether my eyesight had deteriorated and I was seeing or imagining a second line that wasn’t there. But it refused to disappear. I took a moment, as the afternoon sun streamed through the window, to stand still on the edge. The border between Before and After. I wanted to lengthen the instant. It felt as if as soon as I stepped across the doorway, the rest of my life would begin. So I did not, dared not, move.

••

Nothing in pregnancy prepared me for the aftermath of childbirth. I barely got morning sickness. I ate an unprecedented number of McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish and drank milk by the gallon though I previously only it with coffee. I glowed. People gave up their seats and opened doors and smiled openly at me. I turned enormous. Late in the pregnancy, we went to Queen Victoria Night Market, where my belly would literally part the crowd as if I were carrying Moses himself. It was something to behold. A couple of weeks later, my waters broke around 2am. My son wasn’t born until 3.26pm. So that was not as fun.

He arrived two weeks early. Only a few days prior, I had to have a pelvimetry scan because the obstetrician was concerned about cephalopelvic disproportion. It’s a fancy way of saying your pelvis might not be wide enough for your baby’s head. The scan indicated there was a slight margin and because I was still pumped on hormones, I was completely optimistic that I could pop him out, no worries.

More than twelve hours into labour, with only nitrous oxide for relief, the doctor asked, ‘Do you want help delivering this baby?’ I wanted to shriek, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you ask me that ten hours ago?!’ But I didn’t. I was exhausted from sleep deprivation, breath-stealing contractions and hunger, and possibly high from gas. The doctor got his suction pump. A few final pushes, fuelled more by stubbornness than energy, then I heard a cry. My son was placed on my chest. I gazed into his big, dark eyes.

It is really the oddest magic when you finally see your baby. Newborns are new and old at once—the most intimate companion of many months and yet the deepest mystery. ‘I know you and I don’t know who you are.’ ‘We’ve been inseparable and I have been waiting for you.’ Time and meaning are suspended between these simultaneities.

Everything seemed calm in the aftermath of protracted and wrenching labour. When I asked if I could have a shower a few hours after giving birth, the nurse didn’t seem concerned. My husband helped me to the bathroom and out of my clothes. I leaked some blood, which I thought was normal under the circumstances, but then I became so overwhelmed by weakness that I asked to be immediately taken to bed. I felt cold. A different nurse took one look and checked my blood pressure. She could barely find a pulse. She called in an emergency team. I had anticipated a quiet evening bonding with my son, but instead fell into an episode of ER. I was poked everywhere with needles. They called back the obstetrician. They got me X-rayed and MRI-scanned. I was hooked to a drip. I was mostly limp but coherent. In the end, they weren’t confident that they had the facilities to deal with whatever was wrong with me, so I was taken in an ambulance to a larger hospital where a doctor eventually said, ‘We think they overreacted.’ I had only been a mother for less than half a day. My baby was in the other hospital, kept there by medical staff who thought I might pose a threat. They had floated the possibility of an infection. The assessment at the second hospital, however, was that I had had primary post-partum haemorrhage resulting in anaemia and hypotensive shock. I could have used a blood transfusion, that’s all. In fact, that is how they put me back together over the course of three days, pumping life juice into me and supplying iron tablets.

But that first morning after giving birth, I woke up alone in a ward, a childless mother. I sobbed all over the breakfast tray, absorbing the full impact of the previous day. It felt so wrong. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. I wanted my baby.

When my husband was finally able to bring him to me, I could not even breastfeed straight away, based on advice given when I was injected with dye for the scans. The delay and stress brought on inevitable milk-supply issues. I sometimes wonder now whether a less tumultuous start to his post-womb life would have made for a less anxious, cantankerous baby. He was so angry at the world.

I was too, once I figured out that we all suffered needlessly in those critical first few days. I don’t think my body entirely recovered until he was five months old.

There is a horrific physicality involved in being a mother, one that demands Herculean stamina. I was sleep deprived, out of my depth, perplexed that my friends who became mothers before me had such cooperative babies. Mine refused to be put down and demanded to be fed after being fed. I had a crying jag in the shower once, raw and tired, my sense of time suddenly, fundamentally tethered to someone else’s needs. One morning, in the pre-dawn darkness, my husband and I looked at each other after finally getting our baby to sleep, and agreed. We were having only one child. I happily let go of the fantasies I had about having a big family. The mechanics of it were just too overwhelming.

We passed it off as a joke at first. ‘Nope, this is it folks, turns out we’re not cut out for it,’ we’d tell friends bearing the inevitable question. ‘Besides, having one child is more environmentally friendly!’ We’d press our case in terms of water and energy bills, the exponential increase in consumption and waste. People understood this even if they didn’t quite accept that anyone would deprive a child of a sibling. But the idea made more sense to us as it sank in. We wanted to be able to give our son the best start in life, and in some respects that requires money. We considered our finite resources. We wanted to be able to offer the things that would enrich his life, such as learning a musical instrument, playing sport, attending good schools or travelling overseas. This was our preferred position.

The deeper truth was that we were too immersed in the experience of becoming parents to think beyond this baby. We were smitten. We fell in love in the gulag of that initial period of adjustment, and we all know that that kind of love is indissoluble. This is the literary and cinematic lesson of adversity. It seemed inconceivable that we would ever love another child as much as we did our firstborn. We didn’t want to test it, anyway.

The decision has not come without challenges, including the moments where we’ve had to soothe our son’s loneliness. He’s had to be resilient, which elicits a mix of guilt and pride. When he was a toddler, he took to calling his stuffed toy companion his ‘brudda’. He populated his imagination with a cast of brothers, which over the years has morphed to a Ninjago-like team where he is the sensei. I still occasionally get updates on the progress of his ninja brothers. He has an enduring fixation with reflective surfaces, which I suspect is not just due to being a complete and utter ham. In a household where he is outnumbered by adults, the kid in the mirror or the shower door is a semblance of company, and indeed he used to deliver bathroom monologues that made teeth-brushing a half-hour affair. We have had to teach him how to moderate his feelings around not getting things right or perfect straight away. It is hard when the only people with whom you can compare yourself at home are Mum and Dad, who are able to tie their shoes, have a wider vocabulary for Scrabble and better eye-hand coordination. We are his competitors. It’s not fair.

It is of course hard to tell what impact being an only child will have, among other variables that make a childhood. He is rambunctious in a group but is comfortable in his own company. There is a patience and gentleness in the way he interacts with kids who are much younger than himself, even as he is eager to learn from those who are older. He relishes his independence, and is inquisitive and imaginative. We don’t seem to be doing any damage.

That’s what I used to say when I was pregnant, whenever I fell into a conversation about parenting: ‘I just hope I don’t do too much damage!’ Though I had fantasised about my two sets of twins and tie-breaker; though I must’ve thought I could undo the loneliness of not being the favourite child by having an odd number of children; though I tried to be blasé about not conceiving as quickly as I thought I would, I was afraid that as soon as I became pregnant I would stuff something up. Having an only child does not give me favourable odds. If we’d had two children or more, we could perhaps compensate our failings somewhere, or somehow dilute the effects in the distribution.

But I think, on the whole, our son likes having the full measure of our devotion. He never has to wonder whether we love him more or less than anyone. I hope that this puts him in good stead as the march of time pulls him away from me. Something in this carries the same sense of simultaneity that attended his birth. My place in his life is temporary and permanent. My love binds him and sets him free. He is but one and my all.

Are you a proud parent of an ‘only’ child?

Flick through the gallery below to find out which celebrities are only children. 

Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based writer with a focus on sociopolitical issues. She is a consulting editor at Eureka Street, and can be found on Twitter as @foomeister and her blog This is Complicated.

This essay ”The Full Measure of Devotion” by Fatima Measham appears in the book Mothermorphosis published by MUP, RRP 27.95 available here https://www.mup.com.au/items/154694

Looking for more book extracts? Try these:

Kristy Chambers book extract: ‘It’s Not You, Geography, It’s Me.

Latika Bourke releases her first book: From India with Love.

An extract from Never Forgotten, support in coping with stillbirth.