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Day 16 - Working for Women

2/17/2020

I grew up in a household of strong women, and my mother encouraged me to do anything I wanted to – not to limit my career by gender. She was fairly disappointed when I decided to become a teacher. She would have liked me to think bigger than a traditional woman’s job – but teaching was all I wanted to do.

On the way, however, I had some pretty interesting workplace experiences. My first job was at Pine Knoll Nurseries in Suffern, NY. I worked for the female accountant as a bookkeeper, adding rows of figures after school. Eventually I got scooped up out of there by the crazy, strong, wonderful Japanese florist named Mieko, who opened her own flower shop and took me with her. Mieko was amazing. Looking back, she was a bit like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. She scared her new customers (and me, initially) half to death, until she’d grilled you enough to decide she wanted your business. And then a better florist and boss you’d never seen. Her work was legendary in our area. I gratefully worked for her through my senior year of high school and for many summers thereafter.

In college, I worked for Paige’s Music – a huge Indianapolis-based music distribution company – in their music education department. There were a lot of men at Paige’s, particularly in the band department, but I reported to a woman. I came close to eschewing teaching and staying there to travel and give music education workshops at conferences, but my dream called.

I taught elementary music at St Paul’s School in Baltimore, where I stayed for the next 25 years. I worked under 3 female principals, and 3 male headmasters – but except for salary negotiations, 90% of my dealings were with the principals. After about 10 years there I made a conscious decision that I liked working with and for women. I heard my friends complaining in the business world about how hard it was to work for men, to get time off for family leave. I never had those issues. I was chronically underpaid, but it was worth it for the support I received.

Around the same time I switched all my doctors to females. I supported women-owned businesses whenever possible. I set about raising a strong daughter, making a point of giving her female-centric books to read full of strong heroines. Three female colleagues and I started a music teacher training program together.

Looking back, this was also the time period of my lowest sense of self-worth. I questioned myself constantly and needed to be “right” to feel safe and strong in my own life. Surrounding myself with other strong, confident women gave me role models and allowed me to not have to defend myself in a world of men. I was busy enough doing that at home, where every decision I made was usually deemed “wrong.” When that marriage ended, I finally understood the words of my therapist, who said “You can be right, or you can be in a relationship.”

Various moments from the end of my school teaching career, and the start of my Kodály teacher training programs.

Now, I work for myself. I direct a summer program for Kodály music teachers, and my university contact is a woman. I run my own business teaching Alexander Technique and piano lessons, out of a healing arts center owned by a woman. I am proud to have this legacy and to have supported and had the support of women for all these years. I no longer feel like I am running away from the world of men, but instead I can face it head on as a strong, experienced woman, confident in my own self-esteem.

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Day 15 - Paths to Independence

2/14/2020

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“I got a letter from Marie.”
“Oh, how is she doing?”
“Well, she and The Doctor are headed off on some cruise again.”

Growing up, my great-aunt Marie was a shadowy, mysterious glamour figure in my life. All I knew was that my grandmother and great-aunts envied both her beauty and her money. She was the eldest of my grandfather’s 9 siblings, and the only one to have moved away from our little corner of New York state – all the way to exotic northern California! Occasionally a present for me would arrive, accompanied by a scented note in Aunt Marie’s spidery handwriting. When I’d ask about it, my mother said presents came because my grandfather was Marie’s favorite baby brother.

What no one spoke about was that Marie and Pops (eldest daughter and youngest son) were the only two siblings who had broken out of their lower middle-class upbringing. They’d taken very different, gender-based paths to success. My grandfather worked hard to slowly rise up the corporate ladder. Marie “married up.” As a young woman, she worked in our new hospital and caught the eye of one of the founding doctors. I learned later that it was quite the scandal at the time, the rich older doctor leaving his wife to marry the beautiful girl from the other side of the tracks. Such a scandal, in fact, that when The Doctor was offered a job in Oakland, he took it and away they went. This left the rest of the family to imagine Marie in her furs, living a life of luxury with a wealthy man 20 years her senior.

The other seven siblings married, had families and worked as bus drivers, small-scale farmers, merchants - the kinds of jobs that keep a community running. They lived lives with little room for luxury. My grandfather, on the other hand, retired as a bank Vice President. There were nice cars, golf vacations and, an eventual college education for me. In the rest of the family there was struggling to make ends meet, genetic obesity, diabetes, and even epilepsy. Despite the differences in their lives, the siblings relied on my grandfather for advice, and he was their executor as he gradually outlived them all.

The Rosenbrock siblings at a family reunion in 1972. From L to R - Top Row: Grace, Herman, Lilian. Bottom Row: Barbara, Ken. Missing: Marie. Deceased: Emmet, Fred, Alice and unnamed twins who died in infancy.

At family gatherings, no one talked about anything that wasn’t status quo, other than in whispers away from the children. So what was life like for Marie, living so far away, so removed from her close-knit family?

As a young woman, I found out. I was accepted to a graduate program at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. I went to meet the famous Aunt Marie. At this point, she was in her 90s, childless, and The Doctor was long ago deceased. I had no idea what I would find. Expecting a mansion, I was shocked when the taxi pulled up in a shabby neighborhood of small 1920s one-story bungalows. Was I in the right place?

I was indeed, and Marie was delightful. She made us tea and regaled me with stories of her many travels with The Doctor. They’d done very well for their day, but the picture of flaunted wealth my grandmother had painted was clearly not true. They’d lived in this little house since it was built. Sadly, drugs were changing Marie’s neighborhood for the worse. She was fearful, but she had good neighbors who remained to take care of her. I visited her several times during the year I lived there, and it was always the same – the frail, birdlike woman who had married for love and moved away to create a new life, happily sharing stories and tea with her great-niece from afar.

Marie's house, and a visit with my parents about 5 years before my move to Oakland.

When Marie passed away a few years later, she left me some money – enough for the down payment on my first house. I never expected that, but I was incredibly grateful for the gift that arrived at exactly the right time. In retrospect, I am more grateful for the opportunity to have met someone who courageously stepped outside the family box, who missed them but never looked back while following her own path. Our instantaneous connection remains and continues to lovingly inspire my own journey.

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Day 14 - From Loss to Resilience

2/13/2020

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A good friend left me a comment on my blog post the other day. She said, “Your writing is all about loss and resilience.” I was delighted to feel so “seen.” Not only was that a lovely compliment, it is the heart of my life’s work.

When I was nearing the end of therapy in my forties I literally used to say, “Loss is my issue.” At that point I’d dealt with the death of my mother at 26, the death of my grandmother 8 years later, almost losing my baby daughter to SIDS, the breakup of my first marriage, and finally, the death of my beloved grandfather. Of my little family of onlies, the only elder I had left was my father, and we had never been as close as I would have liked. I understood loss intimately.

In those days I never thought about myself as resilient. I knew I had to be strong to take care of my daughter as a single mom, and to keep my job for our income. I just put one foot in front of the other for as long as it took to come out on the other side of each wave of loss that hit me. I cried a lot and tried to be patient with myself to not rush the process of healing.

I’ve written extensively about all the forces that caused me to undertake my Alexander Technique training. Perhaps the most important thing I learned there was to value my own self-worth and to discover that yes, I am a very resilient person. Inside of me there is a well of strength and purpose that sees me through a crisis. All of my experiences with processing loss have made me sensitive and open to being gentle with similar loss in others.

One of the joys of Alexander Teaching for me is putting my life skills to work in helping others. I see that my strength is in helping people gain resilience for themselves. I help people to sit with loss and fear (it’s constant companion) and learn to trust themselves again. Got a new knee? Let me help you learn to trust how to use it and walk again without old habitual patterns of protecting. Let’s find a way to release fear from your mind and get you back to ease and comfort in your body.

It’s an honor to witness growth and change in people, and to be trusted with the stories of their life experiences. The work I do is an intimate expression of caring, being-with, honoring the individual and what has brought them here, and great joy in discovering a new way of being. If you’d like to explore this path with me, please contact me and we can set up a lesson for you.

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Growing Up Free-Range

2/12/2020

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I was part of a generation of Free Range Kids. I grew up at a time when children went anywhere and everywhere in the neighborhood by themselves. At first we walked, but then bicycles gave us a wider range and even more freedom to explore our own neighborhoods and beyond.

“Go outside and play” was perhaps the number one parental command. So, we did. Children who didn’t do this were talked about behind their backs, worried about by other parents. The cultural norm at that time was to get as much fresh air as possible while giving our stay-at-home moms some space and time away from children.

My mother had a large brass bell hanging on our back porch. When she rang it hard, I could hear it throughout my acceptable play range in the neighborhood. The bell’s signal was clear – “Robbin, come home NOW.” I never disobeyed, for to do so would have limited my freedom. In summers I’d go home for lunch or dinner and then be right back out there.

My neighborhood of tract houses meandered up a long hill, with two main roads in a V shape which came together at the bottom of the hill and connected by side streets of increasing width as you traveled up the hillside. I lived about a third of the way up the hill on the left side of the V. We had a side street in front of our house, and that’s where we spent a lot of time playing larger organized games like dodgeball, kickball, or softball. There was a large field at the bottom that had been cleared and dumped with fill dirt when our homes were constructed. It was the place to play if you wanted to do something outside of any parental eyes. I generally left it to the older kids smoking and drinking down there. I preferred traveling up the to the top of the hill and going to Foxwood pond. I spent many hours there watching the turtles, ducks and fish. It was full of abandoned turtles of all kinds, exotic greens from Asia, painted turtles, and even snappers. The pond was surrounded by a pretty wood where we liked to play. My friends and I jumped on skunk cabbage just to smell the acrid smells. We picked wildflowers and chased each other through the woods. We’d get home eventually. No one worried. In the winter our dads would drive us up there to ice skate when the flag was up to show it was safe.

My neighbor David Haas put together this video with footage shot by his father at Foxwood Pond. I would have been 5 during the summer scenes in 1964, and on any given day that could have been me feeding the ducks. Skip to 0:39 for the beginning of the pond scenes.

I took all of this for granted, and only took the time to process how lucky and safe I felt then when I had my own child and lived inside the city of Baltimore. There, we heard gunshots while sitting in our backyards at night. Our cars were rifled through for change. My neighbor was in her backyard with the children. Going back into her house, she discovered a man wandering around her living room! Our children never walked by themselves, and if they thought they did that was because there was a mom phone chain going on from house to house until they reached their destination. I felt badly that my daughter would never know the same freedoms I had.

Somehow, during my lifetime the cultural norms about safety have swung to the far opposite side of the pendulum. I know that a lot of bad things happened to kids, even back then, but they were the exception rather than the rule. What I mourn now is the overarching lack of trust in the fundamental goodness of all people. Children count on this to feel safe.

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Day 12 - Love, Faith and Hope

2/11/2020

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I despised the fake paper cross stitch pictures in my mother’s kitchen. There were three of them that she hung on the kitchen table wall in a triangle pattern – Faith, Hope and Love, with Love on the top. Every time I sat down to eat, I had to look at them because my chair faced that wall. The words burned themselves into my brain, even though there was no author citation on the “cross stitch.” I still recall exactly what they said.

There was never much of what today we call “Word Art” in my house growing up. Mostly what hung on the walls were paintings by my paternal grandmother, who preferred to paint in oils and was a bit of a folk artist, although she’d taken some classes over the years. Her best paintings were seascapes, as she lived in Maine and went often to the coast to sit and paint when the weather was good. She would freely admit that she couldn’t paint people in correct proportions, although there’s a couple of charming watercolors of me that she tried hard on when I was little.

When I was a young teen, my mother decided to redecorate the living area of the house. Out went all the cool fifties Modern furniture, like the pink boomerang shaped couch and the crescent moon lamps. In came Early American in avocado and orange. To go with the new look, my mother asked my Nana Irene to paint some new paintings for her in the Colonial style. She delivered a couple of really badly copied portraits of people in formal outfits, and a lovely still life of some oranges I enjoy having in my home today. And then my mother hit the kitchen as well. She hung colonial flowered wallpaper to replace the fifties farm scenes I’d loved as a child, and somewhere she found the awful paper cross stitch quotes in exactly the right colors to match.

This morning I finally took the time to look the quotes up. The Love quote I knew was one of my favorites from First Corinthians – “Faith, Hope, Love abide, but the greatest of these is love.” The Faith quote, I learned, was from Edna St Vincent Millay – “Faith can break the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.” Yawn. How hokey was that to a teenager? The third one, Hope, came from Alexander Pope. In the version on the wall, it had absolutely no punctuation and read “Hope springs eternal in the human breast Man never is but always to be blest.” This drove me crazy on a number of levels. Just look at all the ways you can punctuate that thing. Have fun. I also hated the idea that according to this we were NEVER blest. Say what? I live in a nice house, I have great parents, I go to an excellent school, I’m smart, I have a cute boyfriend, and you’re telling me I’m not blessed? That if I’m really lucky, I might be blessed sometime in the future?

I put up with the other two quotes, but I begged my mother for years to take that Hope quote down. We had many an existential argument over it. She liked it. I offered to actually cross stitch her a different quote about hope. Offer refused.

That quote was still hanging there years later when my father sold the house. Dad asked me if I wanted those pictures. I just laughed. I didn’t need the yellowing paper and plastic frames – all I have to do to see them is close my eyes. I’m thankful for all the love I received and the faith I learned in that little house. And I still don’t agree with Alexander Pope. I’m blessed every day I’m alive.

My grandfather's birthday. Even cynical teenagers like birthday cake.

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Day 11 - Expressing Emotion

2/10/2020

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“Well, as my mother said, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,’” I announced smugly, looking around the therapy room for approval. “That’s a terrible thing to say to a child!” said one of the other group members, as the rest nodded their heads in assent. “What do you mean? That keeps people from saying horrible things to one another!” “No,” my therapist said gently, “that keeps children from learning to appropriately express what they feel.”

For many years I have followed the rule of “What’s said in therapy stays in therapy.” My wonderful therapist passed away several years ago now, and I hope any of my old group members who might read this post will forgive me for sharing what was an important wake-up call for me.

I grew up as a people pleaser. Even writing those words feels strange now; I’m such a different person than I was a quarter of a century ago. I’m growing more and more into my crone energy, and frankly, I don’t give a shit what people think about me anymore. If you can’t be yourself by the time you’re sixty, when are you going to do that? It took me years to learn to love myself, to see the value in myself, to learn to express my true feelings. What a relief to finally be on the other side of all that crap.

Rocking my purple hair and my inner crone energy. This is what 60 looks like.

But back in my mid-thirties, that wake-up call had just begun. Learning to express my feelings was painful and did not come easily to me. I was constantly afraid that I’d be picked on, laughed at, or told that my feelings other than anger were just plain wrong. Putting a toe into the water of saying what I wanted, what I needed, or how it felt to not have that in my life rocked my entire world from top to bottom.

After my mother died, my local support system vanished. I had learned to speak such a convoluted language, and the only other person who understood it was my grandmother. We couldn’t talk without fighting, because I simply refused to put up with her constant attempts to manipulate me through guilt. Being with my daughter was a daily joy, but I certainly wasn’t going to try to rely on a 5-year-old for support. I’d been a teacher for long enough to know what a bad idea that was. So, I was very thankful to find my therapy group. It was a handpicked group containing people working on similar issues, and we were encouraged to support each other outside of our weekly meeting. And we did, in ways large and small for which I am eternally grateful. The generosity there was something I hadn’t much experienced in life. While going through my divorce I started to see the world as a place of abundance, instead of scarcity. I also came to understand that there were people I could trust to call me on my bullshit, time after time, until I learned to find a healthier way to express my emotions. Slowly, I healed.

Now, I spend a lot of time listening to other people. I’m not a therapist, but old stuff comes up for people in their Alexander lessons. My job is to witness them while they process. I’m thankful for all my previous life experiences as they serve me well in my work. Ultimately it was my understanding how to be an embodied person through Alexander Technique that gave me the skills to process my emotions and stay with myself through trauma. I am grateful for the opportunity to teach those skills to others.

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Day 10 - No More Llamas, Please

2/7/2020

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I subscribe to a daily email message from the TUT (The Universe Talks.) It’s an inspirational message from Mike Dooley that in some way teaches if you visualize what you want with positive intention, you’ll get it. Yesterday’s message (below) literally had me laughing out loud.

If there’s one thing I know I’m not very good at, it’s asking for what I really want. I set myself up to get a lot of llamas. Just ask Dave. If there’s anything I do that drives him crazy, it’s that.
I’ll say, “It would be really nice if somebody would close that door.” He’ll huffily respond, “If you want me to get up and close the door, just ask me to do it.” Or, in a flat tone, “Uh huh. It would.” He’s tried to train me for 15 years to say exactly what I want and it hasn’t worked consistently yet.

When I ponder why I don’t feel comfortable asking for what I want directly, the answer is related to both the way I was parented and my first marriage. In my parents and friends houses in the 1960s, children were to be seen and not heard. I certainly never interrupted adults to ask for something I wanted. I waited, and then when I got glared at for standing there while an adult conversation was going on, I tentatively put out some feelers about what I’d like to have. If it went well, I’d be specific. If it didn’t, I left the room. In school, girls never asked for something they wanted to be explained clearly during class, especially if the teacher was a man. Girls waited until later and spoke privately to the teacher. In my first marriage, nothing ever succeeded if it was my idea, so I learned how to plant seeds that would make what I wanted his idea. It was crazy, it was convoluted, it was “How to Deal with a Narcissist 101.” I don’t recommend it. All told, forty years or so of this kind of “training” left me pretty debilitated in the asking for what I want department, particularly from men.

I’ve processed the “why” thoroughly since meeting Dave, who would be happiest if I could just let my habitual responses to these old messages go. I can, and sometimes I do, but I really have to notice consciously before I open my mouth. I also know that if I think he will disagree with me, I shrink back into old behaviors. Alexander Technique helps when I remember to pause before speaking, let go of habitual indirect questions, and then ask clearly for what I want.

My daughter was here at Christmas for a visit, and Dave got very frustrated with me about something I was being unconsciously indirect on. I had to laugh, because Anne came to my defense and translated perfectly to him what I was actually saying. Then she said, “Geez, Dave, you’ve been together for 15 years. You can’t figure out Mom-speak by now? Are you still trying to change her?”

It’s amazing how powerful the core language of a family can be. It persists despite our best efforts to change it. In our family of origin we understand one another perfectly, yet to others we can sound totally unclear. What quirks do you have in your family language? What old messages do you carry around with you?

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Day 9 - The Womb Story

2/6/2020

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“Mrs. Rosenbrock, you lost your baby. What you’re telling me is impossible.”
“But Doctor, it’s true! I still feel life!”

The climax of the story of my mother’s birth is imprinted upon my DNA indelibly. It’s a story I heard over and over from the time I was old enough to understand human reproduction, and it’s a story that has had lasting ramifications for my entire family. If you know me well, you know this story. I’ve processed it for years. It’s time to write it down.

The facts are this. Unbeknownst to anyone, my grandmother had a double uterus. In 1934 she and my grandfather conceived two children, one in each uterus. She was unable to carry both children to term and miscarried a child very early in the pregnancy. As far as the medical establishment was concerned, the miscarriage was the end. But my grandmother knew differently. She knew she still was pregnant. When she finally convinced her doctor to look at her more carefully, he did a thorough internal exam and discovered that she was correct – and, a medical marvel.

At that time my grandparents were just starting out. They had very little money and none to spare for special medical care. The doctor, who worked at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, made them an offer. If my grandmother would consent to weekly examination by residents, she could stay in the hospital for free for the duration of her pregnancy (about 6 months). The decision they made to say “yes” affected everything that was to follow for the next 60+ years. The hospital, which was about 7 years old and state of the art for the time, had just purchased some amazing new equipment called the X-ray machine. Using this, the residents could actually see the baby developing and see both uteruses inside my grandmother without the trauma of repeated internal exams. My grandmother’s abdomen was x-rayed (without the benefit of lead shields) more times than she could remember. Yet, in the immediate, the extraordinary care she received resulted in her being able to carry my mother safely until she was born at about 8 months. My grandmother was strongly advised not to have any more children.

When my grandfather got his first look at the wizened little preemie that was my mother, he recoiled. All these months of worry and now, there was the ugliest child he’d ever seen. As the nurses cooed, “Isn’t she beautiful?” he fled. He ran out of the hospital and down the street to take solace in the barbershop. Outside the door, he simply panicked. He couldn’t breathe. How was he going to take care of his wife and this ugly child? What if he wasn’t strong enough? How could he go on? He told me that he walked for miles that day until he ended up at his mother’s house, where he broke down and cried. She comforted him and told him to be strong and go back to the hospital. From that day forward, he was. And he needed to be.

My grandfather was the family photographer. It's telling that the first existing photo of my mother, who was born in May, dates from August of that year.

The future would include simultaneous breast and uterine cancer for my grandmother, who found the will to survive thanks to my mother becoming pregnant. I heard over and over that the only reason Nana was alive was because of me. My mother died of ovarian cancer at 50 after living her adult life legally blind due to a very rare condition attributable to radiation and premature birth. My grandmother outlived my mother and never forgave herself for simply doing the best thing that was possible at the time. There was never any solace for her after my mother’s death.

I spent much of my adult life with the fear of ovarian and breast cancer hanging over my head. Thanks to DNA testing I’ve known for about 15 years that my family’s cancers were environmentally caused and not hereditary. I still go for a pelvic ultrasound every year because logical knowing only goes so far in eradicating deep-seated fear. Losing my mother when I was just 26 changed my perspective on life. I miss her every day. The loss never gets easier, just different.

Of all the stories, of all my life experience, this one is the primary story. The story that accompanies my family from womb to womb. I feel it in my bones every day.

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Day 8 - The Dance of a Long Life

2/5/2020

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My grandfather taught me to dance by standing on his feet. When I was four or five, small enough that my little feet fit on top of his big ones, we’d dance to songs on the Lawrence Welk show in our TV room. I remember feeling so grown up. Afterwards, we’d tumble onto the couch and I’d snuggle up in his lap to watch the rest of the show.

Pops was an oasis in a home filled with sharp-tongued women. Every Thursday evening, he would bring my Nana over to spend the night at our house. On Fridays she got her hair done downtown. After work on Friday evening Pops would come to our house for Family Dinner. Then they’d go home. While with us, Nana talked incessantly. She gossiped, she was mean, she lived her life as it were a soap opera. It was widely acknowledged that my grandfather “couldn’t get a word in edgewise” living with my grandmother. When Pops had something to say, it was generally said thoughtfully and quietly. We listened.

Pops was the first in his family of 11 children to graduate from high school. He read voraciously. I listened to classical music at his house with him. He encouraged me to learn more about music, and he subscribed me to the entire set of Reader’s Digest Piano books, which were collections of songs from the 20th century by decade. He’d pull out his trumpet and we’d play together. Consequently, I know more about Cole Porter, Gershwin, and Rogers and Hammerstein than most people of my generation. I remember all the words to those old songs because my mother would come in and sing with us while we played. The joy of making music inspired me to become a professional musician.

My Well-worn Readers Digest Songbook collection

My grandfather was also extremely well-coordinated. He played baseball in high school. He was so good that he was recruited by a bank in New York City to play for their team and hired as a teller. From there, he was scouted by the New York Yankees, but he turned them down because in the 1920s the bank paid better than the major leagues! I remember him doing all sorts of magic tricks with a baseball for small children and dogs – he could completely spoof you. I was in awe of his athleticism.

Pops retired at 65 as Vice President of HR for that same savings bank, having spent his entire career there. I was blessed to have him in my life for another 28 years, 10 of those without my grandmother. Those years were when we really talked about everything. One day he confessed to me that when he was in his 20s he’d had a mental health crisis, suffering panic attacks after becoming a new father. He’d held that inside for 70 years – afraid to talk about it due to fear of losing his job. My grandfather refused to get a haircut professionally for 20 years because he’d had the panic attack outside the barbershop door. The odd thing was that I’d had a panic attack a year before. I’d read that they could be hereditary, but I never expected that my strong grandfather was the one who had had that experience. I was so glad he trusted me to help him finally process that experience aloud. Our mutual experience brought us even closer together.

Pops and I during a vacation in Maine.

My grandfather was my rock, a constant in my life for 43 years. His passing was a huge loss for me. I gave the eulogy at his funeral and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I felt him supporting me the entire time I spoke. I was that little girl again, standing on his feet while we danced.

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Day 7 - Understanding Onliness

2/4/2020

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“You’re just a spoiled only child!” Tears sprang to my eyes as yet another classmate on the playground delivered the trump card at the end of a spat. These people had no idea how hard it was to stick up for myself, to not have brothers and sisters to help me out when I was being picked on and bullied. I knew I wasn’t spoiled, but my Onliness was undeniable.

Years later I asked a girlfriend with lots of siblings what it was that people envied most about only children. She answered that it was two things – people see Onlies as able to have all their parent’s available resources, their time and attention as well as all the money budgeted for children’s expenses. This makes people with siblings jealous, and they perceive Onlies as being spoiled because they get “everything.” This made sense to me, and also made me laugh.

I did have the entire focus of my parent’s attention, which had both up and down sides. There was never one day that my parents were alive that I didn’t know that I was loved and wanted beyond measure. (When my mother died young, I fell into a deep depression fearing I’d never have that kind of love on earth again.) Unfortunately, there was also a hyper-focus on what I was doing in any given moment. Sneak out the window to join my teenage friends? You’ve got to be kidding. My mother heard every sound and there was only me to make them. Not going to happen.

Above all, I was taught the value of self-reliance at an early age. I learned to be independent. I learned (with difficulty) how to stick up for myself on the playground. I didn’t ask for help from my mother because it just upset her. I didn’t ask for help, period. I learned to do and fix everything myself, a mixed blessing that had ramifications later in my life.

My parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t get a lot of presents and toys from them. I got an allowance at the going rate of the day and bought my own things, just like my friends did. I learned the value of saving for what I wanted, and the excitement of finding a bargain. I think what my friends envied the most was that my toys were in great condition. Without siblings to destroy them, my Barbies had perfect hair and all their shoes.

The "Creepy Barbie Graveyard" as my daughter calls it. Did I mention she hates Barbies?

Perhaps I wasn’t “spoiled” in the conventional manner because we had a lot of Onlies in my family. My mother’s mother was an Only child who spent her childhood sadly neglected by her stepmother. In her turn she enjoyed overindulging my mother, her Only, who hated it. My mother was having none of that with me, and frequently told her mother to stop buying me things. My father, also an Only, grew up poor and was extremely frugal. In my house, being an Only was just normal. I didn’t mind not having siblings, but I wished for first cousins at family get togethers.

When it was my turn to have a child, I had another Only. It was not intentional, but that’s how it turned out. I didn’t spoil her. I like to think I taught her to ask for help when she needed it. She has a passel of first cousins, two of whom are more like her big brothers.

Each of our four generations of Only children changed something significant from the parenting of the generation before. Our shared understanding of Onliness remains the common factor, the rock on which our little family was built.

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Robbin Marcus

A new 21 weekday blog series on Processing will begin on Monday, January 28!
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An occasional post from me, about stuff that interests me.

2020 - Processing - Experience, Thought, Action

Day 16 - Working for Women

Day 15 - Paths to Independence

Day 14 - From Loss to Resilience

Growing Up Free-Range

Day 12 - Love, Faith and Hope

Day 11 - Expressing Emotion

Day 10 - No More Llamas, Please

Day 9 - The Womb Story

Day 8 - The Dance of a Long Life

Day 7 - Understanding Onliness

Robbin Marcus

2019. - Exploring the Power of Habit Blog Series

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