In Quillette, twin researcher Nancy L. Segal writes about the controversy over the 1960s researchers who deliberately split up four pairs of identical twin adoptees and one set of triplets (I reviewed the documentary Three Identical Strangers). I was struck by the last sentence of this paragraph:
Deliberately Divided is about twins adopted apart, but the story is scarred by secrets, coverups, and fractured lives. The controversy comes from Louise Wise Services’ (LWS) 1960s practice of intentionally separating newborn twins relinquished by single mothers. This policy was spearheaded by Columbia University psychiatrist, Dr. Viola W. Bernard, who served as a consultant to LWS (New York City’s preeminent adoption agency for Jewish families). Bernard’s belief was that (1) twins develop a better sense of identity if reared apart from their co-twin,
In the Freudian Era, it seemed common for Herr Professors of Psychiatry to authoritatively state as science whatever personal prejudices they had about anything.
and (2) raising one child at a time alleviates parental overburdening.
Which is true.
On the other hand, Margaret Thatcher told my wife that she was lucky she had twins because then she could get over raising her kids in one fell swoop. But, she had help.
According to archival materials I examined, her justification was based on the “child development literature of the time”—but as I note in my book, she never cited specific studies. That is because there were none.
Segal ends by mentioning a more broadly shared view of the time that you don’t hear much about anymore:
In an ironic twist, individual twins were placed with parents who had successfully adopted a child several years earlier, to prevent individual twins from growing up as only children.
That reminds me that I vaguely recall from when I was a child during the Baby Boom that there was a certain amount of prejudice against only children.
My friends told me that it was unfair that only children got more toys on Christmas.
And adults would tell me that being an only child was bad for one’s proper socialization and other quasi-Freudian psychological jargon of the times.
In an era obsessed with recalling the undying deleterious effects of some kinds of prejudice, it’s interesting that the old prejudice against only children is perhaps even more forgotten than the old prejudice against left-handers. Why am I not being constantly interviewed about my feelings were hurt by how people said bad things about only children, and then touched my hair?
On the other hand, perhaps because I’m not very self-obsessed, I can’t actually recall my feelings being hurt by the anti-only child bigotry of the times. My recollection is mostly that I thought other people’s assertions about the effects of being an only child were interesting, but hard to test. (Granted, that sounds extremely implausible for a child, but, then again, my personality hasn’t changed all that much over the last 50 years.)
And I did get a lot of presents on Christmas.
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My wife was an only child (unintentionally) and I was the youngest of four. We sometimes exchange ideas about that. I was certainly more used to “share”, but being the youngest I sometimes felt some envy or jealousy by the older siblings who had been more strictly educated and less spoiled.
But I remember that in such matters of “prejudice” I was like you, interested but unconvinced. It was, at that time, quite a normal reaction for children who were halfway intelligent. And didn’t the grown-ups set an example for us?
In a weird sense I identify with only children since while I do have three siblings, the age gap between me and my brothers and sister is so large as to be insurmountable. My sister was a college student when I was born and graduated and got married by the time I entered kindergarten. My eldest brother graduated high school when I entered grade school and my next eldest brother graduated college when I graduated grade school. So I have siblings but it's not like I have family bonds because by the time I was a teenager all of my siblings were adults and out of the house. My three siblings have a very close bond since they grew up together, I'm just their kid brother.
The Lovely 😊 Mrs. and I got married too late to have children of our own. Based on my own experience had we met earlier I would've tried my damnedest to make sure our children were within two or three years of age of each other so they'd have a familial bond.
And to be blunt, the pressure to not have "only children" can make people do dumb things. Going back to my wife's cousin and his wife they tried to have another child. In their mid to later 30s. Which meant IVF. Lots of issues occurred so they decided they'd adopt. So they adopted a Central American boy. In other words, an Amer-Indian. Dark hair, dark complexion, dark eyes. The two of them are Lily-white. My wife and I would talk and I'd ask "What happens when this kid looks around and realizes he doesn't look like anyone in the house?" Especially since his adoptive parents, figuring they don't have to worry about more children return to having married sexy time. And BOOM! Mom gets pregnant and they now have a third child. A lovely daughter. So they have:
Their eldest daughter
Another daughter with at least a ten year age gap between her and her older sister
And an adopted son who has turned out to be an absolute hellion. Apparently the birth mother and the father had some "issues" with drugs and alcohol. The kid lashes out and completely misbehaves.
Not surprisingly the eldest daughter is attending college out of state. I suspect she won't return home after graduation.
Sometimes leaving well enough alone is a good policy.
I'd have only children who were my friends or coworkers mention they wished they'd had siblings. I'd tell them it can be a blessing or a curse.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Anonymous
Off topic: Steve, have you seen Haim Saban’s latest contribution to American culture? “American Insurrection”
How many scary buzzwords can the writers fit in one sentence?
The "feminist" shirt seals it. Truly a masterpieces.
-- the Polish-born mother of Saban's girlfriend, 55-60 years ago
What a cute autistic boy
And 'Charlton Heston' a village in Cornwall.
I remember this prejudice being around when I was a kid growing up in the 90s. Kids who were only children were automatically marked as being different and there was an assumption that they were spoiled, not completely socialized or socialized differently, and would be somehow more difficult to deal with. This seemed to be a popular belief or assumption by kids, parents, and teachers. I can remember parents and teachers remarking that so and so was an only child to explain why he was a certain way or make various assumptions regarding personality and behavior. Of course all the parents and teachers were boomers, so these were beliefs they had grown up with.
Settled the question quite nicely I thought.
The disadvantage of being an only child is that he or she will be the only one to look after their elderly parents.
The phrase “If I were an only child, I would be a lonely child” is the opening line of a minor Debbie Gibson hit from 1988, “We Could Be Together.” So this idea was definitely floating around in the culture. Gibson had several sisters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_emperor_syndrome
I like to think ‘Autistic’ is a village in Brittany.
And ‘Charlton Heston’ a village in Cornwall.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-discovered-that-being-an-only-child-affects-brain-structure
***
The wellspring of the great river of loneliness that ran through Frank Sinatra’s life is not hard to find: he was an only child in a first-generation Italian-American family. Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, a city densely populated with immigrant Catholics of one ethnicity or another, in 1915, long before American Catholics had come to regard birth control as an acceptable (or even an available) option. Virtually every lad in the neighborhood was one of five or six or nine; Francis Albert, almost uniquely, was alone. The journalist Pete Hamill, in his research for Why Sinatra Matters, found that “Old-timers from Hoboken would remember him later as a lonely boy, standing in the doorway of his grandmother’s building, watching life go by without him.” Sinatra himself told Hamill, “I used to wish I had an older brother that could help me when I needed him. I wished I had a younger sister I could protect.” It could not have helped that his parents had wanted a girl instead of a boy.
***
https://www.vqronline.org/essay/frank-sinatra-loneliness-long-distance-singer
We got to increase that birth rate now, people. What the hell is the matter with s people who don’t breed for 50 fucking years? Why do those Amish get to breed like rabbits but we don’t? Gentlemen next time you see a woman walking down the street, yank her sleeve and inform her how selfish it is that she is doing anything other than having kids.
@martin 2
From my experience, it’s mostly one child who gets most of the burden of looking after an elderly parent anyway, no matter how many siblings there are. The others may turn up for special occasions, but the main and everyday responsibility tends to be with one person only.
I also remember the anti-only-children prejudices very well. There was also prejudice against children with working mothers, who were assumed to be sad and neglected creatures.
Let's not forget the poor children from broken homes.Replies: @Sick 'n Tired, @Paleo Liberal
From my experience, it's mostly one child who gets most of the burden of looking after an elderly parent anyway, no matter how many siblings there are. The others may turn up for special occasions, but the main and everyday responsibility tends to be with one person only.
I also remember the anti-only-children prejudices very well. There was also prejudice against children with working mothers, who were assumed to be sad and neglected creatures.Replies: @iffen, @Anon, @Anon
I also remember the anti-only-children prejudices very well. There was also prejudice against children with working mothers, who were assumed to be sad and neglected creatures.
Let’s not forget the poor children from broken homes.
Perhaps if you are a twin you are less likely to be bullied at school, if an only child more likely.
Not that I was bullied when I started school: my mother sent me to school in clogs. Deterrence works, you know.
I remember being well into elementary school before learning what an “only child” meant, because I guess a new kid in the class or something was introduced as such. “What does that mean?” “Oh, no brothers and sisters?” Yeah, the idea was new to me, really, as I guess all the kids I was friends with had brothers or sisters. That didn’t at all mean I thought there was something different about the kid, just that this was a new concept to me.
For the Chinese going back from pretty recently through the 1980s, it’s have been the opposite – “You got other kids in your family? Wow, that’s weird!”
Fascinating. Saban is hated by all lovers of animation for his stereotypically cynical and profitable ramping-up of Sandy Frank’s turnatound of low-quality Japanese children’s entertainment products in the 90s (although the decision to meld Elvis, Liberace, and Jay Leno into a single character represents a kind of singular moment of cross-cultural misunderstanding genius), but politically he is famous — and, really, known only — for quipping, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Why would a monadic Zionist care about demonizing putative Zionists whose most notable characteristic is their powerlessness?
Is “Bernard” a Jewish surname?
Why was there an adoption agency specifically for Jewish families?
The Three Identical Strangers movie is a feel good movie for its first half with the triplets finding each other, then it's anything but a feel good movie as it delves into what the adoption agency did.Replies: @Anonymous
Let’s build a monorail!
Looking back on my experience as one who grew up in a family of 3 children in the 50’s/60’s, the other kids I knew who grew up as only children definitely seemed to have some social issues, and seemed to still have some social issues into at least their teen years.
In much of the developed world one child has become the norm. At least for the native population. In Northern Europe. Even in Southern European in nominally Catholic countries where lots of kids were once the norm.
My oldest child, a 30’s year old daughter, recently had her first. Will it be their only child? I hope not, but there is a reasonable chance it will be. She’s not strongly religious, she’s a professional, she’s environmentally minded, etc. All correlate to having few children.
From my experience, it's mostly one child who gets most of the burden of looking after an elderly parent anyway, no matter how many siblings there are. The others may turn up for special occasions, but the main and everyday responsibility tends to be with one person only.
I also remember the anti-only-children prejudices very well. There was also prejudice against children with working mothers, who were assumed to be sad and neglected creatures.Replies: @iffen, @Anon, @Anon
Agree it is mostly one child who gets most of the burden who looks after the eldery parent. And that parent is usually the mom, since they were usually younger than the dad when they married, and the moms usually live longer also. And the child looking after her is usually a daughter where there were both boy and girl siblings.
From my experience, it's mostly one child who gets most of the burden of looking after an elderly parent anyway, no matter how many siblings there are. The others may turn up for special occasions, but the main and everyday responsibility tends to be with one person only.
I also remember the anti-only-children prejudices very well. There was also prejudice against children with working mothers, who were assumed to be sad and neglected creatures.Replies: @iffen, @Anon, @Anon
They were.
“More Christmas presents”. My middle sister was always angry that us five kids only got three presents each from our parents, but they got one from each of us kids, so they ended up with five presents each and we only got three. Where’s the justice in that?!
Another get-over by those damn single children: Instead of 3:5, they got 3:1. Spoiled brats.
I was an unintentional only child growing up in the 80’s/90’s and now I use the stereotypes as humorous frontlash when flirting with girls, as in, “Yea, I’m an only child; that’s why I’m so spoiled and self-centered.”
I was a little weird growing up but I doubt it had to do with the lack of siblings so much as being the regular weirdness lots of smart kids display.
I vaguely recall some unease about being an only child in the Fifties. Still, almost every friend I have ever had who came from a big family had tales of vicious childhood rivalries, which often persisted into adulthood, manifesting in sometimes truly shocking cruelties. It also struck me how enormous the pressure to conform must be in large families, so you don’t end up being the odd one out in shifting sibling alliances. I don’t think I missed out on a thing, all things considered.
As an only child, my godmother (mother of her own 4 boys) would periodically remind me that only children were broken.
My mom had me when she was 25, remarried at age 33 and never had another. I’m pretty sure I was an accident was not exactly wanted at the time. But fortunately, my mom came to realize how awesome I really was.
“Which is true.”
My own experience (and Steve’s) aside, it seems in general under burdened parents to do a poorer job of raising their one kid than those who are burdened with multiple children do.
Who do only children share their memories with when their parents are gone?
My father’s only sibling died at 3 months, before he was born. He was an only grandchild on one side and 12+ years younger than his 3 first cousins on the other, with a childless aunt and uncle next door, so he was spoiled rotten. At 61, after my mother died, he married a narc lemon tart with Munchausen’s, who had him waiting on her for 24 years while she squandered his fortune on long trips to quacks. Karma. Now I’ve had to wait increasingly on him the last 8. At least he has a nice government pension (which attracted the narc). To answer my own question, half the time, he thinks his parents are still alive.
I’m an only child. In fact, three of my six first cousins are themselves only children. When I was younger, I always heard that the rap against only children is that they’re too egotistical because their parents could afford to give them all the attention and didn’t have to split it up between siblings.
My mother would’ve disagreed.
She said–aside from her assumption, her experience told her–“two are not twice one.” That is, two back-to-back (not twins), are not double the effort. Your childcare attention and efforts occupied with one: feeding, dressing, playing with, putting down for a nap, etc.–you do the same (or nearly so) with the other. It’s not really much more effort–certainly not doubled.
She had two children, a year apart in March, then four years later when the first two are off to nursery school and kindergarten, had two more in February, a year apart.
As she observed of her friends who gave birth every two years, as if spreading them out was the better approach, “you’re never done with changing diapers.”
And my mother was an only child. Another subject she had strong opinions on, but having four of her own is probably the best expression thereof.
Finally, a thread in which my biographical infodumps can be on-topic.
My mother has two siblings, but all three of them have only one kid each.
My older cousin and I were both spoiled rotten in the material sense. But we were both screwed over by our flaky boomer parents. She ended up a drunk like her folks; I ended up a fatty like my mother.
My mother had rage issues. So did I. One time she pushed me too far and I dislocated her shoulder. Another time I tried to choke her to death. I trashed the house too many times to count. She never called the police because she knew, deep down, that I was the only person who gave a shit whether she lived or died.
She told me many times that I was her biggest mistake, that I ruined her life, that she wanted to abort me but my grandmother talked her out of it. Honestly, she never should have had a child. Certainly there’ve been plenty of times when I’ve wished I’d never been born.
Mom taught me early on that the power dynamic in a relationship is based on need – if you need me more than I need you, then I have the power. That’s why I’ve never allowed myself to fall in love with anyone. “Freedom – to want nothing, to expect nothing, to depend on nothing.” Not the most heartwarming philosophy, but it works well enough for me.
I’ve done things for which I should probably rot in prison and/or burn in Hell. Perhaps one day I will.
My family was dysfunctional. My father had anger management issues, my mother was a self-righteous narcissist. None of us three children is able to form healthy attachments and we all loathe one another.
But your history is far more harrowing, I think, which make your comments here all the more remarkable for their saneness. I know damaged people can be intelligent, insightful and witty, as you are here, yet still strike people as deeply strange in a very unsettling way, even on a very superficial acquaintance. I don't get that from your comments. So you've managed to heal yourself or make some necessary adjustments to some degree. I admire that.Replies: @Stan Adams
I asked a mother of 4 how she managed to take care of them all.
She said that raising one child takes 100% of your time and raising 4 children takes 100% of your time, so there is no difference.
I remember a piece several decades ago on the evils of home schooling and the supposed improper socialization. In the comments, one guy, who claimed to be a plumber and I had no reason to doubt it (things you remember!) in response to some Ur-Karen said that he did not want his 12 year old son learning the correct attitude toward women from a bunch of 14-15 year old boys.
Settled the question quite nicely I thought.
“These are organized hunters, with assault rifles out for blood”
How many scary buzzwords can the writers fit in one sentence?
The “feminist” shirt seals it. Truly a masterpieces.
This is something I realize more and more as my parents (who are divorced and live on opposite sides of the country) are getting older.
Having lots of cousins or being part of a cohesive, homogeneous community insulates against the only child loneliness. Being an only child with no extended family in a diverse and divisive society is likely difficult.
Let's not forget the poor children from broken homes.Replies: @Sick 'n Tired, @Paleo Liberal
Latch Key kids was a term used when I was growing up.
https://comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2021-09-26
Everyone should grow up with an old brother and older sister and a younger brother and younger sister, so they have a complete set of familial relations and get proper socialization.
Some strong anti-only child content: https://www.truehoop.com/p/do-i-get-to-speak-now-its-been-like
Watching that trailer I know whose side I’m on. Saban may be giving people ideas but they may be neither the people nor the ideas Saban intends. History suggests fatal, catastrophic over-reach is a fatal flaw afflicting Saban’s people. Current and near future events may eventually provide yet another example.
I’m about the same age as you, Mr. Sailer, and I remember that mild, unspoken prejudice against only children and their families. There was a subtle feeling that the children were likely to be spoiled and less well socialized. There was also some subtle blame placed on the parents, e.g. they could have had more if they’d tried harder or they were selfish, choosing to have only one child so they could live better than multi-child families. In my suburban Boston neighborhood the taint wasn’t fully removed until a family had at least three children.
As other posters noted, there was also a prejudice against single parents, whether widowed, divorced, or by other means, and even working mothers.
As my old foundations of math professor, Jean van Heijenoort, might have pointed out, this would be a family with ordinality at least four times the ordinality of the integers.
I forgot to mention the most important difference. My wife, as an only child, was the constant object of parental education (critique, reproaches etc.), whereas I was happily ignored for a while, before I caught the eye of my mother again.
Let's not forget the poor children from broken homes.Replies: @Sick 'n Tired, @Paleo Liberal
The “only children” I knew growing up were usually either the rare adoptee or the rare kid from a broken home.
Some studies show that boys from single mother families fare much worse than girls.
Add to that the fact that boys, especially African American Junior Men, have a much harder time with the feminized school system of sitting for hours at a time and lots of busy work, is it any wonder that colleges are now 60% female?
Young American born black men are unfortunately getting very rare in colleges. They are at the top of the dating food chain, so many of them don’t form stable long term relationships since they can always find a one night stand.
Our society is rigged against most males. There are the exceptional males who succeed, which of course proves we are in a patriarchal something something
My sister was an only child. My sister is still a child. My other sister and myself were given the opportunity to observe the raising of an only child.
There is nothing wrong with being an actual only child, of course. Growing up in a seriously dysfunctional family, where’s that phrase again …. suckethed in excelsis deo.
Good puzzle. I don't know how to solve.
There’s only one thing that’s worse than being raised a single child: having an older sister. Don’t ask me.
Yes, there is always a Silver Lining.
Effective birth control didn’t really take hold until the late 50s and later.
So the Solo Child was either a result of some medical problem, a divorce or some problem in the marriage. These issues probably gave rise to a lot of gossip and speculation which then went on to “taint” the child socially. “What’s wrong with that family?”
Elementary school teachers are almost always females.
I don’t know if the Only Child stigma exists to much extent post Pill.
I was the next to the last in a very large family. My parents were both over 40 when I was born When I was young, and everyone was home, it was extremely exciting for a little boy. Some drama was always going on. But by the time everyone older had moved on and out, and it was only me and my younger sister, we had older parents who could not relate to us at all (they were much older than my friends’ parents). Money was also an issue having sent so many to college and peak earnings potential was past. This was of course much worse for my sister, after I left. She ended up spending most nights in high school at friends’s houses. Large families are definitely fun but being a lone teenager with 60+ year old parents has its issues.
What about the prejudice against “brains”. That’s the biggest, most common prejudice of all. And it is humiliating.
You benefit from having siblings. There are people who know how to rear an only child, and people who get stuck with a creature like Ann Dunham. Everyone benefits from siblings. Four child families are optimal.
We'd be better off if productive, conscientious, intelligent, physically and mentally healthy couples had larger families of three or four or five kids. I.e. went back to this pattern.
There are always--and especially in this age of later marriage--going to be failure cases. Late starters running out of room, fertility issues, marriage breakups. Better to have children coming from larger but healthier families. A norm of "three" or "four" for the healthy, productive and financially secure and discouraging those who aren't productive who be a huge step forward. I.e. stable but eugenic fertility.
But the fertility issue is the 2nd issue. #1 is stopping the immigration insanity. Dysgenics and national, civilizational destruction on steroids.Replies: @Anonymous
Young American born black men are unfortunately getting very rare in colleges.
About 942,000 black males enrolled in post-secondary institutions in the fall of 2018. That’s about 4.8% of all those enrolling. About 484,000 enrolled in 1990, and, no, birth cohorts haven’t been getting larger. Note, about 7% of all those in late adolescent and young adult cohorts are black males and there are quite noticeable differences in standardized test scores and in degree completion rates when comparing blacks with the remainder of the population, so I’m not understanding why you fancy 4.8% is ‘very rare’.
What if one of the children talks bad about momma ? Ed Gein had to deal with this. Jimmy Page was an only child 🙂
I definitely remember the mildly negative perceptions that kids had of only children back in the 1960’s, at least in this conservative part of the world. It wasn’t so much a stigma that only children had, however, it was a stigma that spoiled children had. A fair number of kids in one child families were spoiled, in our youthful opinions. However, if only children weren’t spoiled (superior in attitude, demanding, complainers, etc.) then their lack of siblings was irrelevant to us. Some spoiled kids came from two children families, which were still tiny by our standards. There was a girl who lived behind us who fit that profile.
The kids who were most likely to be spoiled – or problem children – were those of divorced parents, as it was usually the fathers who were absent in their families. In these cases, problems were more apparent in boys than girls, but girls suffered, too. I was more empathetic towards girls who lived without a father than boys. The negative consequences of this living situation on girls were often turned inward. Boys from broken homes acted out, which made them generally unlikable to a lot of other kids. This is all very relevant to what’s happening in our sorry world today.
Having said all of that, there were also some emotionally or socially dysfunctional kids from large two parent households in our old neighborhood. Some of them were even good families where the other kids were fine. The nastiest kids on our block were from a gigantic Catholic family up the street. They weren’t spoiled, but “spoiled” would’ve been a big step up for them.
From a Darwinian standpoint, it would not surprise me if being an only were less than optimal. Let’s forget childhood, and move on to grown-uppedness. When the only has kids of her own, there are no aunts and uncles to help with childcare. There are no cousins with whom her children can bond and get hand-me-downs from.
Back to childhood. Evolutionarily successful people (and horse, and beetles, and…) come from families with more than two children, on average. Evolution would have a lot more practice optimizing people for larger families.
Face it, Steve, you’re a freak. Also, adopted?
I kid about adoption, but the phenomenon is something of an evolutionary puzzle.
I don’t know about being a single child as such, but do know that guys who grow up with a sister acquire a good knowledge of female psychology from an early age, which is very useful when they hit the dating market. Guys without sisters invariably have heads full of nonsense regarding women which they have to painfully unlearn.
Not invariably.Replies: @BB753
Only one in-state child, of a multiple kid family, should be allowed to attend public school tuition-free. Each of his siblings should be charged $15,000 per year to enroll; split-charge $10,000; out-of-state 33% more.
Among that separate adoption program, were any of the guinea pigs identical, where one went to private school and the other to public? Slam dunk: The public school kid would attain a significantly lower level of academic achievement, and demonstrate a much higher degree of sociopathic behavior.
You need to dial it back.
I didn’t have siblings but my parents had me late (my dad was nearly 49) and I agree it’s a little weird having older parents. But I didn’t know any different at the time. Probably the worst part was they were socialized into dating norms that quickly became outdated (heh) shortly after they married and consequently gave consistently bad advice on that front that I had to unlearn from my peers.
“everyone belongs to everyone else”
“we’re all happy now”
“even the Epsilons…”
Growing up on the North side of Chicago and attending parochial grammar school in the early Sixties I do not recall a single “only child” in my classes. I cannot recall any “only children” among the neighborhood friends. As far as I can recollect, most if not all families had at least two children.
I married an identical twin who is the youngest of eight children.My sister-in-law has always been involved in our lives and is a second mother to our children. In fact, she moved with us when we migrated to Minnesota and lives with us. Watching them through the years has been interesting. They are quite different in many ways but quite similar in others. Both are annoyingly positive and cheerful. One cooks quite well while the other can’t boil water. It’s always interesting in our home.
Now that I think about it I don’t recall knowing any twins during my childhood.
Why was there an adoption agency specifically for Jewish families?Replies: @Anon
They catered to primarily jewish families preferring to adopt jewish babies in the same way there were probably other agencies which catered to WASP families or Irish Catholic families or other groups.
The Three Identical Strangers movie is a feel good movie for its first half with the triplets finding each other, then it’s anything but a feel good movie as it delves into what the adoption agency did.
My sister was an only child. My sister is still a child
Good puzzle. I don’t know how to solve.
Can’t a boy without sisters learn about women from his mother? (and a girl without brothers learn about men from her father?).
Agree. Speaking as a father, I know teenage boys are tough on parents but a 60 year old father is bound to have less ability to relate to – to even suffer – a teenage boy. It took me a while to recover from it. I’m 60 now and my kids are grown up and out. The youngest is finishing up medical school and I think I’m kind of old to be having a son that age! The idea of me dealing with a 14 year old is incomprehensible.
that pic of Christmas morning is astonishingly classic
Mitt & Ann Romney had 5 boys … ’nuff said
Agree. Siblings are mentally and emotionally “good for you”.
We’d be better off if productive, conscientious, intelligent, physically and mentally healthy couples had larger families of three or four or five kids. I.e. went back to this pattern.
There are always–and especially in this age of later marriage–going to be failure cases. Late starters running out of room, fertility issues, marriage breakups. Better to have children coming from larger but healthier families. A norm of “three” or “four” for the healthy, productive and financially secure and discouraging those who aren’t productive who be a huge step forward. I.e. stable but eugenic fertility.
But the fertility issue is the 2nd issue. #1 is stopping the immigration insanity. Dysgenics and national, civilizational destruction on steroids.
My recollection is mostly that I thought other people’s assertions about the effects of being an only child were interesting, but hard to test.
Confirmed. Like, how the heck am I supposed to know? Therefore, so what.
But I remember that in such matters of "prejudice" I was like you, interested but unconvinced. It was, at that time, quite a normal reaction for children who were halfway intelligent. And didn't the grown-ups set an example for us?Replies: @mmack
My situation mirrors yours. My Lovely ☺️ Mrs. is an only child, I am the youngest of four children. Want to set m’lady’s teeth to grinding? Mention only children are apt to grow up spoiled. My wife has a cousin whose wife said to her they wanted to have a sibling for their daughter so she wouldn’t “grow up spoiled”. The car ride home from that party that evening was an absolute joy.
In a weird sense I identify with only children since while I do have three siblings, the age gap between me and my brothers and sister is so large as to be insurmountable. My sister was a college student when I was born and graduated and got married by the time I entered kindergarten. My eldest brother graduated high school when I entered grade school and my next eldest brother graduated college when I graduated grade school. So I have siblings but it’s not like I have family bonds because by the time I was a teenager all of my siblings were adults and out of the house. My three siblings have a very close bond since they grew up together, I’m just their kid brother.
The Lovely 😊 Mrs. and I got married too late to have children of our own. Based on my own experience had we met earlier I would’ve tried my damnedest to make sure our children were within two or three years of age of each other so they’d have a familial bond.
And to be blunt, the pressure to not have “only children” can make people do dumb things. Going back to my wife’s cousin and his wife they tried to have another child. In their mid to later 30s. Which meant IVF. Lots of issues occurred so they decided they’d adopt. So they adopted a Central American boy. In other words, an Amer-Indian. Dark hair, dark complexion, dark eyes. The two of them are Lily-white. My wife and I would talk and I’d ask “What happens when this kid looks around and realizes he doesn’t look like anyone in the house?” Especially since his adoptive parents, figuring they don’t have to worry about more children return to having married sexy time. And BOOM! Mom gets pregnant and they now have a third child. A lovely daughter. So they have:
Their eldest daughter
Another daughter with at least a ten year age gap between her and her older sister
And an adopted son who has turned out to be an absolute hellion. Apparently the birth mother and the father had some “issues” with drugs and alcohol. The kid lashes out and completely misbehaves.
Not surprisingly the eldest daughter is attending college out of state. I suspect she won’t return home after graduation.
Sometimes leaving well enough alone is a good policy.
I’d have only children who were my friends or coworkers mention they wished they’d had siblings. I’d tell them it can be a blessing or a curse.
These people are perps. But they are also victims of the anti-genetic blank-slate bullshit that Jewish "intellectuals" have continuously pushed to dominance in our culture. Against--i'll add--the prior WASP understanding and science which was empirical and on the whole rather accurate.
But really the goyim need to wake the heck up. I've seen way too much of this crap--including the the black baby or even the African baby--replacing what could have been another child of their own, especially from Christian virtue signalers. Even "conservative" ones. Willing participants in their own genocide. It's appalling.
White people need to understand actual biology, WASP biology. Your genes matter.
Having reared twins myself, I think that it is easier that rearing two kids of different ages.
My stepfather’s father was an only child. His mother had a brother who died before he could marry. Thus my stepdad had no aunts, uncles, or first cousins. If two only-children marry, this is what their own children will experience.
It’s a mistake to view one’s mating behavior in isolation. What happens to the rest of the family matters.
“If you bring that black animal into this house, I will throw myself off the balcony and kill myself!”
— the Polish-born mother of Saban’s girlfriend, 55-60 years ago
It’s been getting more and more common since the 70’s for kids to grow up in single parent families. But female mental health and socialization only was somewhat affected by this. Recently it’s social media and being stuck in cell phones that seems to be destroying girls.
I had two. Trouble in real time, but not retrospectively. Again, with siblings, less is not more. More is more.
I don’t know about being a single child as such, but do know that guys who grow up with a sister acquire a good knowledge of female psychology from an early age, which is very useful when they hit the dating market.
Not invariably.
Only one in-state child, of a multiple kid family, should be allowed to attend public school tuition-free. Each of his siblings should be charged $15,000 per year to enroll; split-charge $10,000; out-of-state 33% more.
You need to dial it back.
Countervailing advantage: Will inherit everything.
Yes, everything is pretty much screwed up and there’s not really much hope on the horizon except for “And this too shall pass”.
Thank god, we are now much more enlightened and our ruling elites “believe in science”.
In the ’60s, Louise Wise had a policy of lying to prospective adoptive parents about the biological parents’ background. This was in keeping with the then-predominant blank-slate philosophy of human development.
One family sued the agency after their adopted son, born to a schizophrenic mother, ended up committing suicide:
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/14/magazine/what-the-jumans-didn-t-know-about-michael.html
In a weird sense I identify with only children since while I do have three siblings, the age gap between me and my brothers and sister is so large as to be insurmountable. My sister was a college student when I was born and graduated and got married by the time I entered kindergarten. My eldest brother graduated high school when I entered grade school and my next eldest brother graduated college when I graduated grade school. So I have siblings but it's not like I have family bonds because by the time I was a teenager all of my siblings were adults and out of the house. My three siblings have a very close bond since they grew up together, I'm just their kid brother.
The Lovely 😊 Mrs. and I got married too late to have children of our own. Based on my own experience had we met earlier I would've tried my damnedest to make sure our children were within two or three years of age of each other so they'd have a familial bond.
And to be blunt, the pressure to not have "only children" can make people do dumb things. Going back to my wife's cousin and his wife they tried to have another child. In their mid to later 30s. Which meant IVF. Lots of issues occurred so they decided they'd adopt. So they adopted a Central American boy. In other words, an Amer-Indian. Dark hair, dark complexion, dark eyes. The two of them are Lily-white. My wife and I would talk and I'd ask "What happens when this kid looks around and realizes he doesn't look like anyone in the house?" Especially since his adoptive parents, figuring they don't have to worry about more children return to having married sexy time. And BOOM! Mom gets pregnant and they now have a third child. A lovely daughter. So they have:
Their eldest daughter
Another daughter with at least a ten year age gap between her and her older sister
And an adopted son who has turned out to be an absolute hellion. Apparently the birth mother and the father had some "issues" with drugs and alcohol. The kid lashes out and completely misbehaves.
Not surprisingly the eldest daughter is attending college out of state. I suspect she won't return home after graduation.
Sometimes leaving well enough alone is a good policy.
I'd have only children who were my friends or coworkers mention they wished they'd had siblings. I'd tell them it can be a blessing or a curse.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Anonymous
I didn’t even need the rest of the story.
These people are perps. But they are also victims of the anti-genetic blank-slate bullshit that Jewish “intellectuals” have continuously pushed to dominance in our culture. Against–i’ll add–the prior WASP understanding and science which was empirical and on the whole rather accurate.
But really the goyim need to wake the heck up. I’ve seen way too much of this crap–including the the black baby or even the African baby–replacing what could have been another child of their own, especially from Christian virtue signalers. Even “conservative” ones. Willing participants in their own genocide. It’s appalling.
White people need to understand actual biology, WASP biology. Your genes matter.
Are you serious about this?
The Three Identical Strangers movie is a feel good movie for its first half with the triplets finding each other, then it's anything but a feel good movie as it delves into what the adoption agency did.Replies: @Anonymous
Unlikely.
We'd be better off if productive, conscientious, intelligent, physically and mentally healthy couples had larger families of three or four or five kids. I.e. went back to this pattern.
There are always--and especially in this age of later marriage--going to be failure cases. Late starters running out of room, fertility issues, marriage breakups. Better to have children coming from larger but healthier families. A norm of "three" or "four" for the healthy, productive and financially secure and discouraging those who aren't productive who be a huge step forward. I.e. stable but eugenic fertility.
But the fertility issue is the 2nd issue. #1 is stopping the immigration insanity. Dysgenics and national, civilizational destruction on steroids.Replies: @Anonymous
How are these failure cases? Are you saying it is better they not have children, than have 3-4?
In a weird sense I identify with only children since while I do have three siblings, the age gap between me and my brothers and sister is so large as to be insurmountable. My sister was a college student when I was born and graduated and got married by the time I entered kindergarten. My eldest brother graduated high school when I entered grade school and my next eldest brother graduated college when I graduated grade school. So I have siblings but it's not like I have family bonds because by the time I was a teenager all of my siblings were adults and out of the house. My three siblings have a very close bond since they grew up together, I'm just their kid brother.
The Lovely 😊 Mrs. and I got married too late to have children of our own. Based on my own experience had we met earlier I would've tried my damnedest to make sure our children were within two or three years of age of each other so they'd have a familial bond.
And to be blunt, the pressure to not have "only children" can make people do dumb things. Going back to my wife's cousin and his wife they tried to have another child. In their mid to later 30s. Which meant IVF. Lots of issues occurred so they decided they'd adopt. So they adopted a Central American boy. In other words, an Amer-Indian. Dark hair, dark complexion, dark eyes. The two of them are Lily-white. My wife and I would talk and I'd ask "What happens when this kid looks around and realizes he doesn't look like anyone in the house?" Especially since his adoptive parents, figuring they don't have to worry about more children return to having married sexy time. And BOOM! Mom gets pregnant and they now have a third child. A lovely daughter. So they have:
Their eldest daughter
Another daughter with at least a ten year age gap between her and her older sister
And an adopted son who has turned out to be an absolute hellion. Apparently the birth mother and the father had some "issues" with drugs and alcohol. The kid lashes out and completely misbehaves.
Not surprisingly the eldest daughter is attending college out of state. I suspect she won't return home after graduation.
Sometimes leaving well enough alone is a good policy.
I'd have only children who were my friends or coworkers mention they wished they'd had siblings. I'd tell them it can be a blessing or a curse.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Anonymous
What age do you consider to be too late, if you don’t mind my asking?
How old was the wife when she got pregnant with the daughter? If they needed IVF before, how were they able to conceive years later?
I’m not going to quote an age, but my wife’s doctor flat out told her to conceive children she’d need medical treatments. We talked it over honestly and decided the risk of health issues and complications was too dangerous. Plus as others posted up thread you ask yourself do I really want to raise small children in my forties, fifties, or sixties? My best friend and his wife had their only child when he was in his mid forties. More power to him, and I love him like a brother, but he seems exhausted. My parents had me in their forties. And a memory for me was having my father die of natural causes when I was a teenager. I didn’t want to subject any children of mine to that risk. Perhaps it’s a foolish fear.
I could’ve married a woman who wanted children when I met her in my late twenties. The fact that she was a year older than me and graduated college, been married, and divorced by the time I’d met her colored my view of her, along with the full court press she put on me to marry her or at least shack up and make babies. She remarried and has children. Perhaps it was a dumb decision to not marry her, perhaps not. I have The Lovely ☺️ Mrs and we’re closing in on twenty years of marriage.
“How old was the wife when she got pregnant with the daughter? If they needed IVF before, how were they able to conceive years later?”
Doing back of the napkin calculations late thirties/very early forties. Their youngest daughter was conceived within a year of adopting their son, and within two years of ditching IVF. My working theory has always been when women want to get pregnant, obsess over getting pregnant, and need medical help to get pregnant, they may stress so much they actually do harm to themselves and prevent pregnancy.
Many years ago my late mother went to our family doctor, Old Doc Wagner. She and my father were worried: they’d had my sister and like good Catholics they were trying for baby #2. But it wasn’t happening. Doc Wagner examined her, found nothing wrong, and sent her to a specialist who found nothing wrong. Per my mother Doc Wagner advised her “Go home and enjoy having sex with your husband. Don’t worry, it’ll happen. Just enjoy it.”
A year or so later my eldest brother appeared.
So I think with the stress of IVF over and thinking they had their second child, they thought they were free and clear to enjoy sexy time and BOOM! Their second biological daughter appeared.
Not invariably.Replies: @BB753
Sisters stop giving you inside information about the fair sex when they reach puberty. From then on, their loyalty lies with the sisterhood. “You’re on your own, ‘bro!”
There are actually a lot of studies showing than an only child, or an oldest child, is likely to have higher IQ and more success in life. See this video:
The studies also shows that twins, reared together, have lower IQ. So maybe the better strategy might have been to split the twins, and adopt them out to childless couples.
Gee, Steve, I’m the first to admit my idea of humor can be thorny, but it was just a joke, for God’s sake. No need to obliterate every last trace of it.
On to more important topics:
Could you – or anyone – please let us know the provenance of this pic? It’s appeared a few times on your corner of the Unzsite (thus I used to think it was a pic of you) – in fact I might never have noticed it except I remembered seeing that green Naugahyde monstrosity on the right-hand edge everywhere during the 60s and early 70s, when this neo-ottoman could be found in two out of every three homes, though I couldn’t recall for love or money what said Naugahyde monstrosity was called (PS: turns out it’s called a ‘hassock’….and deservedly so).
I ask because I’ve since seen this photo many many times, so it’s clearly not Christmas morning at Chez Sailer. Any idea where this weirdly-nostalgic photo originated from? Or did it just come with every wallet manufactured in 1961?
It’s the cover picture on the single “What Is Winter Good For?” by Sudden Death of Stars. That’s me in the mid-1960s and my cocker spaniel Topper.
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-single-is-dropping.html
OT:
LICORICE PIZZA | Official Trailer | MGM Studios
Sep 27, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licorice_Pizza
https://twitter.com/EW/status/1442521946000822276
LICORICE PIZZA | Official Trailer | MGM Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofnXPwUPENo
Sep 27, 2021https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licorice_PizzaReplies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
A friend’s uncle was Paul Thomas Anderson’s high school best friend in the 1980s San Fernando Valley, so there’s likely a character somewhat based on him in “Licorice Pizza.”
“What age do you consider to be too late, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I’m not going to quote an age, but my wife’s doctor flat out told her to conceive children she’d need medical treatments. We talked it over honestly and decided the risk of health issues and complications was too dangerous. Plus as others posted up thread you ask yourself do I really want to raise small children in my forties, fifties, or sixties? My best friend and his wife had their only child when he was in his mid forties. More power to him, and I love him like a brother, but he seems exhausted. My parents had me in their forties. And a memory for me was having my father die of natural causes when I was a teenager. I didn’t want to subject any children of mine to that risk. Perhaps it’s a foolish fear.
I could’ve married a woman who wanted children when I met her in my late twenties. The fact that she was a year older than me and graduated college, been married, and divorced by the time I’d met her colored my view of her, along with the full court press she put on me to marry her or at least shack up and make babies. She remarried and has children. Perhaps it was a dumb decision to not marry her, perhaps not. I have The Lovely ☺️ Mrs and we’re closing in on twenty years of marriage.
“How old was the wife when she got pregnant with the daughter? If they needed IVF before, how were they able to conceive years later?”
Doing back of the napkin calculations late thirties/very early forties. Their youngest daughter was conceived within a year of adopting their son, and within two years of ditching IVF. My working theory has always been when women want to get pregnant, obsess over getting pregnant, and need medical help to get pregnant, they may stress so much they actually do harm to themselves and prevent pregnancy.
Many years ago my late mother went to our family doctor, Old Doc Wagner. She and my father were worried: they’d had my sister and like good Catholics they were trying for baby #2. But it wasn’t happening. Doc Wagner examined her, found nothing wrong, and sent her to a specialist who found nothing wrong. Per my mother Doc Wagner advised her “Go home and enjoy having sex with your husband. Don’t worry, it’ll happen. Just enjoy it.”
A year or so later my eldest brother appeared.
So I think with the stress of IVF over and thinking they had their second child, they thought they were free and clear to enjoy sexy time and BOOM! Their second biological daughter appeared.
My mother has two siblings, but all three of them have only one kid each.
My older cousin and I were both spoiled rotten in the material sense. But we were both screwed over by our flaky boomer parents. She ended up a drunk like her folks; I ended up a fatty like my mother.
My mother had rage issues. So did I. One time she pushed me too far and I dislocated her shoulder. Another time I tried to choke her to death. I trashed the house too many times to count. She never called the police because she knew, deep down, that I was the only person who gave a shit whether she lived or died.
She told me many times that I was her biggest mistake, that I ruined her life, that she wanted to abort me but my grandmother talked her out of it. Honestly, she never should have had a child. Certainly there’ve been plenty of times when I’ve wished I’d never been born.
Mom taught me early on that the power dynamic in a relationship is based on need - if you need me more than I need you, then I have the power. That’s why I’ve never allowed myself to fall in love with anyone. “Freedom - to want nothing, to expect nothing, to depend on nothing.” Not the most heartwarming philosophy, but it works well enough for me.
I’ve done things for which I should probably rot in prison and/or burn in Hell. Perhaps one day I will.Replies: @Kylie
I recalled your sharing some of your family history before so I was wondering when you’d show up in this thread.
My family was dysfunctional. My father had anger management issues, my mother was a self-righteous narcissist. None of us three children is able to form healthy attachments and we all loathe one another.
But your history is far more harrowing, I think, which make your comments here all the more remarkable for their saneness. I know damaged people can be intelligent, insightful and witty, as you are here, yet still strike people as deeply strange in a very unsettling way, even on a very superficial acquaintance. I don’t get that from your comments. So you’ve managed to heal yourself or make some necessary adjustments to some degree. I admire that.
My mother has two siblings. She's the eldest - indeed, she's the reason why my grandparents got married. (More about that below.) My mother still talks to my aunt (the youngest) on occasion, but neither sister has anything to do with my uncle. My aunt and my cousin, in particular, categorically refuse to acknowledge his existence. When my grandmother died, I was the one who had to make the call (at two o'clock in the morning) to tell him. At the funeral, my aunt flat-out refused to exit the limousine during the burial ceremony, simply because he was there. So my grandmother went into the ground without her youngest daughter present.
According to my mother, my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic who routinely beat the crap out of her throughout her childhood. My grandmother did nothing to protect her. My mother claims that her siblings used to make up stories about her to get her in trouble to deflect their father's anger away from them.
I grew up idolizing my grandfather. He was wonderful to me. He loved his Scotch, to be sure, but even when he was drunk he never raised a hand to me. I cannot recall ever hearing him raise his voice.
My mother, on the other hand, routinely subjected me to Mommie Dearest-style breakdowns. (When I say routinely, I mean just about every day.) If we were in public and I did something that displeased her, she would wait until we were alone in the car to unload on me. In retrospect, the it wasn't that bad - she slapped me on occasion, but she never broke my skin or gave me a black eye or anything like that - but seeing her pure, unbridled rage unleashed against a little kid was something to behold.
To this day I still maintain that my grandfather is the only member of my extended family who ever amounted to anything. That includes my father and his family - most of them are drunks. My mother and my father are both teetotalers from alcoholic families. Both of them were the least-favorite siblings. My father never understood why his father didn't seem to like him very much. Then he found out the reason - just before his mother died of cancer, she told him that his father was his stepfather. Everyone had known it all of those years, and no one had ever told him. He did not take the news well. He was still recovering from this blow when he married my mother. Then his sister committed suicide. He firmly believed that she was murdered, and he was never the same after that.
Back to my grandfather, though. Even now, 25 years after his death, he's still keeping us going. My mother is living in a house that she would have lost to foreclosure if I hadn't convinced my grandmother to pay it off, and my grandmother wouldn't have had that money if she hadn't inherited it.
Right now my mother is anxiously awaiting a (very small) inheritance from my grandmother. Every penny has already been spent.
After my grandfather died, my mother used me as an instrument to get money out of my grandmother. Grandma would do things for me that she wouldn't do for my mother, and my mother took full advantage of that fact. If my mother wanted to go out to eat, or if she wanted to go shopping, she would have me ask Grandma for the money. Grandma would tell me, "This is for you, not your mother." And then, as soon as we were out of her sight, my mother would snatch the money away from me. She even did this with my Christmas money a few times. I resented it, but it wasn't a major problem. Grandma handed out money like candy and there was always enough for me.
My mother justified it by saying, "I never got any money from Grandpa and Grandma when I was growing up. It's not fair that you get to have all of the things that I never had. They owe me, and so do you."
After my grandfather died, my grandmother, who had never so much as set foot in a church during the first eleven years of my life, suddenly became extremely religious. For about ten years she was the most insufferably holier-than-thou person you could meet. But as her Alzheimer's progressed, her religiosity receded.
I discovered some years ago that my grandmother was already pregnant with my mother when she married my grandfather. They married in June and my mother was born in October. By piecing together various scraps of information, including some things that my grandmother told me when her mind was starting to go, I've concluded that there was another man in my grandmother's life around the time that she got involved with my grandfather. He lived in Sacramento. I doubt that my grandfather ever felt entirely certain that my mother was, indeed, his child. Maybe one day I'll break down and do a DNA test.
My grandfather was born in Kansas but grew up in Miami; my grandmother was from Nevada. He was in the Navy when they met. (He dropped out of high school and lied about his age to join the service at 17.) My grandparents were married in San Francisco. My grandmother gave birth to my mother in Nevada while my grandfather was at sea; the three of them moved to Florida when he was discharged a few months later. My father is from northern Minnesota. My parents met in Vermont.
(My grandmother's sister lived in the Bay Area for many years. She narrowly escaped death in the '89 quake - she was driving home on the bridge that collapsed.)
A few months ago, one of my grandmother's relatives got drunk and told my cousin that my grandmother was a "slut" just like her mother. My cousin, who idolizes Grandma, went ballistic, got totally smashed herself, and then subjected me to a two-hour freakout (over the phone) in the middle of the night.
She has a habit of terminating calls in mid-sentence, without any indication that she wants to end the conversation. If you try to call her back, the phone goes to voicemail. Presumably she's too drunk to keep tabs on her phone battery.
One night my aunt called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because, among other things, she feared her cancer had returned and she couldn't bear to go through chemo again; then, the same night, my cousin called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because she couldn't bear to go through the grief of losing Grandma. I told both women the same thing: "Think about the kids. They need their mother and their grandmother." (My cousin has two kids.)
My cousin did kill herself, once. She died after an overdose and was resuscitated at the hospital. Unlike my grandmother, who claimed to have glimpsed through the gates of heaven after almost bleeding to death while giving birth to my aunt, my cousin had no visions of the afterlife.
One time a friend asked me if I thought I was going to Hell. I smiled and said, "I think I'm already there."
Incidentally, in the annals of Stan Adams, September 2021 will rank as the month of the epic iSteve confessionals. You know a hell of a lot more about me now than you did several weeks ago.
This was a weird month - the end of a weird summer, midway through a weird year. Summer is always the worst time of the year for me, but fall is usually the season of good fortune. (Not always - my grandfather died in October.)
November is usually the best month of the year for me. In fact, in years when November 1 falls on a Monday (as it does this year), I tend to have extraordinarily good fortune. In November 1993, for example, I rode on an airplane for the first time. This marked the beginning of the happiest years of my childhood.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in November 2010, I made an extremely fortuitous discovery that led to major material gains in the summer of 2011 and then, in the fall and winter of 2013/14, to the biggest financial windfall of my life. 2015 and 2016 were miserable years, during which I was mired in the hell of Grandma's Alzheimer's disease. 2017 was a lean year of rebuilding. 2018 was a good year; the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 were two of the best seasons of my adult life.
Surprisingly, 2020 wasn't half-bad, During the chaotic period of the first few weeks of the shutdown, a phenomenal, miraculous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fell into my lap. It allowed me to complete a project I'd been working on for many years. It was the culmination of decades' worth of striving and dreaming, and it just might have been the singular achievement of my life.
2021 has been a fairly crappy year. Life in Biden's America is a real drag.
At the moment I'm at a total dead end in life. Sometimes I feel that it really is over for me. (Don't worry - I'm not going to jump off a bridge.) I feel like I've already blown my wad and I'm just treading water as I stumble into middle age. I'm sitting in a boat with no oars and no sails on a calm sea with no land in sight, and I seem to have misplaced my fishing rod.
But, hey, at least I don't have tons of baggage. No alimony payments, no child support, no ex-wife telling my son that he'd better not grow up to be like Daddy, a worthless piece of shit who ruined Mommy's life. (That's what my mother told me.)
I own just about all of the material objects I've ever really wanted. My thirst for things has been quenched. It's one of the reasons I've been in such a deep funk. "Stan wept, for there were no more eBay auctions to win."Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Kylie
My generation is almost completely one of only children, due to fertility collapse after the fall of Communism and its pro-natal, anti-contraception policies and also due to the economic crisis accompanying transition, which took between 10 and 15 years in most countries.
I remember hearing the same thing back then and I mostly hear the same thing now, but it is mostly conversational since most people still have one child. A growing proportion are having 2 again, I know a few couples my age that have three, but I think they are balanced out by the growing childless group (because of medical and career issues).
My family was dysfunctional. My father had anger management issues, my mother was a self-righteous narcissist. None of us three children is able to form healthy attachments and we all loathe one another.
But your history is far more harrowing, I think, which make your comments here all the more remarkable for their saneness. I know damaged people can be intelligent, insightful and witty, as you are here, yet still strike people as deeply strange in a very unsettling way, even on a very superficial acquaintance. I don't get that from your comments. So you've managed to heal yourself or make some necessary adjustments to some degree. I admire that.Replies: @Stan Adams
Thanks.
My mother has two siblings. She’s the eldest – indeed, she’s the reason why my grandparents got married. (More about that below.) My mother still talks to my aunt (the youngest) on occasion, but neither sister has anything to do with my uncle. My aunt and my cousin, in particular, categorically refuse to acknowledge his existence. When my grandmother died, I was the one who had to make the call (at two o’clock in the morning) to tell him. At the funeral, my aunt flat-out refused to exit the limousine during the burial ceremony, simply because he was there. So my grandmother went into the ground without her youngest daughter present.
According to my mother, my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic who routinely beat the crap out of her throughout her childhood. My grandmother did nothing to protect her. My mother claims that her siblings used to make up stories about her to get her in trouble to deflect their father’s anger away from them.
I grew up idolizing my grandfather. He was wonderful to me. He loved his Scotch, to be sure, but even when he was drunk he never raised a hand to me. I cannot recall ever hearing him raise his voice.
My mother, on the other hand, routinely subjected me to Mommie Dearest-style breakdowns. (When I say routinely, I mean just about every day.) If we were in public and I did something that displeased her, she would wait until we were alone in the car to unload on me. In retrospect, the it wasn’t that bad – she slapped me on occasion, but she never broke my skin or gave me a black eye or anything like that – but seeing her pure, unbridled rage unleashed against a little kid was something to behold.
To this day I still maintain that my grandfather is the only member of my extended family who ever amounted to anything. That includes my father and his family – most of them are drunks. My mother and my father are both teetotalers from alcoholic families. Both of them were the least-favorite siblings. My father never understood why his father didn’t seem to like him very much. Then he found out the reason – just before his mother died of cancer, she told him that his father was his stepfather. Everyone had known it all of those years, and no one had ever told him. He did not take the news well. He was still recovering from this blow when he married my mother. Then his sister committed suicide. He firmly believed that she was murdered, and he was never the same after that.
Back to my grandfather, though. Even now, 25 years after his death, he’s still keeping us going. My mother is living in a house that she would have lost to foreclosure if I hadn’t convinced my grandmother to pay it off, and my grandmother wouldn’t have had that money if she hadn’t inherited it.
Right now my mother is anxiously awaiting a (very small) inheritance from my grandmother. Every penny has already been spent.
After my grandfather died, my mother used me as an instrument to get money out of my grandmother. Grandma would do things for me that she wouldn’t do for my mother, and my mother took full advantage of that fact. If my mother wanted to go out to eat, or if she wanted to go shopping, she would have me ask Grandma for the money. Grandma would tell me, “This is for you, not your mother.” And then, as soon as we were out of her sight, my mother would snatch the money away from me. She even did this with my Christmas money a few times. I resented it, but it wasn’t a major problem. Grandma handed out money like candy and there was always enough for me.
My mother justified it by saying, “I never got any money from Grandpa and Grandma when I was growing up. It’s not fair that you get to have all of the things that I never had. They owe me, and so do you.”
After my grandfather died, my grandmother, who had never so much as set foot in a church during the first eleven years of my life, suddenly became extremely religious. For about ten years she was the most insufferably holier-than-thou person you could meet. But as her Alzheimer’s progressed, her religiosity receded.
I discovered some years ago that my grandmother was already pregnant with my mother when she married my grandfather. They married in June and my mother was born in October. By piecing together various scraps of information, including some things that my grandmother told me when her mind was starting to go, I’ve concluded that there was another man in my grandmother’s life around the time that she got involved with my grandfather. He lived in Sacramento. I doubt that my grandfather ever felt entirely certain that my mother was, indeed, his child. Maybe one day I’ll break down and do a DNA test.
My grandfather was born in Kansas but grew up in Miami; my grandmother was from Nevada. He was in the Navy when they met. (He dropped out of high school and lied about his age to join the service at 17.) My grandparents were married in San Francisco. My grandmother gave birth to my mother in Nevada while my grandfather was at sea; the three of them moved to Florida when he was discharged a few months later. My father is from northern Minnesota. My parents met in Vermont.
(My grandmother’s sister lived in the Bay Area for many years. She narrowly escaped death in the ’89 quake – she was driving home on the bridge that collapsed.)
A few months ago, one of my grandmother’s relatives got drunk and told my cousin that my grandmother was a “slut” just like her mother. My cousin, who idolizes Grandma, went ballistic, got totally smashed herself, and then subjected me to a two-hour freakout (over the phone) in the middle of the night.
She has a habit of terminating calls in mid-sentence, without any indication that she wants to end the conversation. If you try to call her back, the phone goes to voicemail. Presumably she’s too drunk to keep tabs on her phone battery.
One night my aunt called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because, among other things, she feared her cancer had returned and she couldn’t bear to go through chemo again; then, the same night, my cousin called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because she couldn’t bear to go through the grief of losing Grandma. I told both women the same thing: “Think about the kids. They need their mother and their grandmother.” (My cousin has two kids.)
My cousin did kill herself, once. She died after an overdose and was resuscitated at the hospital. Unlike my grandmother, who claimed to have glimpsed through the gates of heaven after almost bleeding to death while giving birth to my aunt, my cousin had no visions of the afterlife.
One time a friend asked me if I thought I was going to Hell. I smiled and said, “I think I’m already there.”
Incidentally, in the annals of Stan Adams, September 2021 will rank as the month of the epic iSteve confessionals. You know a hell of a lot more about me now than you did several weeks ago.
This was a weird month – the end of a weird summer, midway through a weird year. Summer is always the worst time of the year for me, but fall is usually the season of good fortune. (Not always – my grandfather died in October.)
November is usually the best month of the year for me. In fact, in years when November 1 falls on a Monday (as it does this year), I tend to have extraordinarily good fortune. In November 1993, for example, I rode on an airplane for the first time. This marked the beginning of the happiest years of my childhood.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in November 2010, I made an extremely fortuitous discovery that led to major material gains in the summer of 2011 and then, in the fall and winter of 2013/14, to the biggest financial windfall of my life. 2015 and 2016 were miserable years, during which I was mired in the hell of Grandma’s Alzheimer’s disease. 2017 was a lean year of rebuilding. 2018 was a good year; the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 were two of the best seasons of my adult life.
Surprisingly, 2020 wasn’t half-bad, During the chaotic period of the first few weeks of the shutdown, a phenomenal, miraculous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fell into my lap. It allowed me to complete a project I’d been working on for many years. It was the culmination of decades’ worth of striving and dreaming, and it just might have been the singular achievement of my life.
2021 has been a fairly crappy year. Life in Biden’s America is a real drag.
At the moment I’m at a total dead end in life. Sometimes I feel that it really is over for me. (Don’t worry – I’m not going to jump off a bridge.) I feel like I’ve already blown my wad and I’m just treading water as I stumble into middle age. I’m sitting in a boat with no oars and no sails on a calm sea with no land in sight, and I seem to have misplaced my fishing rod.
But, hey, at least I don’t have tons of baggage. No alimony payments, no child support, no ex-wife telling my son that he’d better not grow up to be like Daddy, a worthless piece of shit who ruined Mommy’s life. (That’s what my mother told me.)
I own just about all of the material objects I’ve ever really wanted. My thirst for things has been quenched. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been in such a deep funk. “Stan wept, for there were no more eBay auctions to win.”
I'm older than you and recall feeling adrift in early middle age. I found it passes. If you cultivate new interests, you wil need new things. Don't give up on ebay just yet.Replies: @Stan Adams
My mother has two siblings. She's the eldest - indeed, she's the reason why my grandparents got married. (More about that below.) My mother still talks to my aunt (the youngest) on occasion, but neither sister has anything to do with my uncle. My aunt and my cousin, in particular, categorically refuse to acknowledge his existence. When my grandmother died, I was the one who had to make the call (at two o'clock in the morning) to tell him. At the funeral, my aunt flat-out refused to exit the limousine during the burial ceremony, simply because he was there. So my grandmother went into the ground without her youngest daughter present.
According to my mother, my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic who routinely beat the crap out of her throughout her childhood. My grandmother did nothing to protect her. My mother claims that her siblings used to make up stories about her to get her in trouble to deflect their father's anger away from them.
I grew up idolizing my grandfather. He was wonderful to me. He loved his Scotch, to be sure, but even when he was drunk he never raised a hand to me. I cannot recall ever hearing him raise his voice.
My mother, on the other hand, routinely subjected me to Mommie Dearest-style breakdowns. (When I say routinely, I mean just about every day.) If we were in public and I did something that displeased her, she would wait until we were alone in the car to unload on me. In retrospect, the it wasn't that bad - she slapped me on occasion, but she never broke my skin or gave me a black eye or anything like that - but seeing her pure, unbridled rage unleashed against a little kid was something to behold.
To this day I still maintain that my grandfather is the only member of my extended family who ever amounted to anything. That includes my father and his family - most of them are drunks. My mother and my father are both teetotalers from alcoholic families. Both of them were the least-favorite siblings. My father never understood why his father didn't seem to like him very much. Then he found out the reason - just before his mother died of cancer, she told him that his father was his stepfather. Everyone had known it all of those years, and no one had ever told him. He did not take the news well. He was still recovering from this blow when he married my mother. Then his sister committed suicide. He firmly believed that she was murdered, and he was never the same after that.
Back to my grandfather, though. Even now, 25 years after his death, he's still keeping us going. My mother is living in a house that she would have lost to foreclosure if I hadn't convinced my grandmother to pay it off, and my grandmother wouldn't have had that money if she hadn't inherited it.
Right now my mother is anxiously awaiting a (very small) inheritance from my grandmother. Every penny has already been spent.
After my grandfather died, my mother used me as an instrument to get money out of my grandmother. Grandma would do things for me that she wouldn't do for my mother, and my mother took full advantage of that fact. If my mother wanted to go out to eat, or if she wanted to go shopping, she would have me ask Grandma for the money. Grandma would tell me, "This is for you, not your mother." And then, as soon as we were out of her sight, my mother would snatch the money away from me. She even did this with my Christmas money a few times. I resented it, but it wasn't a major problem. Grandma handed out money like candy and there was always enough for me.
My mother justified it by saying, "I never got any money from Grandpa and Grandma when I was growing up. It's not fair that you get to have all of the things that I never had. They owe me, and so do you."
After my grandfather died, my grandmother, who had never so much as set foot in a church during the first eleven years of my life, suddenly became extremely religious. For about ten years she was the most insufferably holier-than-thou person you could meet. But as her Alzheimer's progressed, her religiosity receded.
I discovered some years ago that my grandmother was already pregnant with my mother when she married my grandfather. They married in June and my mother was born in October. By piecing together various scraps of information, including some things that my grandmother told me when her mind was starting to go, I've concluded that there was another man in my grandmother's life around the time that she got involved with my grandfather. He lived in Sacramento. I doubt that my grandfather ever felt entirely certain that my mother was, indeed, his child. Maybe one day I'll break down and do a DNA test.
My grandfather was born in Kansas but grew up in Miami; my grandmother was from Nevada. He was in the Navy when they met. (He dropped out of high school and lied about his age to join the service at 17.) My grandparents were married in San Francisco. My grandmother gave birth to my mother in Nevada while my grandfather was at sea; the three of them moved to Florida when he was discharged a few months later. My father is from northern Minnesota. My parents met in Vermont.
(My grandmother's sister lived in the Bay Area for many years. She narrowly escaped death in the '89 quake - she was driving home on the bridge that collapsed.)
A few months ago, one of my grandmother's relatives got drunk and told my cousin that my grandmother was a "slut" just like her mother. My cousin, who idolizes Grandma, went ballistic, got totally smashed herself, and then subjected me to a two-hour freakout (over the phone) in the middle of the night.
She has a habit of terminating calls in mid-sentence, without any indication that she wants to end the conversation. If you try to call her back, the phone goes to voicemail. Presumably she's too drunk to keep tabs on her phone battery.
One night my aunt called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because, among other things, she feared her cancer had returned and she couldn't bear to go through chemo again; then, the same night, my cousin called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because she couldn't bear to go through the grief of losing Grandma. I told both women the same thing: "Think about the kids. They need their mother and their grandmother." (My cousin has two kids.)
My cousin did kill herself, once. She died after an overdose and was resuscitated at the hospital. Unlike my grandmother, who claimed to have glimpsed through the gates of heaven after almost bleeding to death while giving birth to my aunt, my cousin had no visions of the afterlife.
One time a friend asked me if I thought I was going to Hell. I smiled and said, "I think I'm already there."
Incidentally, in the annals of Stan Adams, September 2021 will rank as the month of the epic iSteve confessionals. You know a hell of a lot more about me now than you did several weeks ago.
This was a weird month - the end of a weird summer, midway through a weird year. Summer is always the worst time of the year for me, but fall is usually the season of good fortune. (Not always - my grandfather died in October.)
November is usually the best month of the year for me. In fact, in years when November 1 falls on a Monday (as it does this year), I tend to have extraordinarily good fortune. In November 1993, for example, I rode on an airplane for the first time. This marked the beginning of the happiest years of my childhood.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in November 2010, I made an extremely fortuitous discovery that led to major material gains in the summer of 2011 and then, in the fall and winter of 2013/14, to the biggest financial windfall of my life. 2015 and 2016 were miserable years, during which I was mired in the hell of Grandma's Alzheimer's disease. 2017 was a lean year of rebuilding. 2018 was a good year; the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 were two of the best seasons of my adult life.
Surprisingly, 2020 wasn't half-bad, During the chaotic period of the first few weeks of the shutdown, a phenomenal, miraculous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fell into my lap. It allowed me to complete a project I'd been working on for many years. It was the culmination of decades' worth of striving and dreaming, and it just might have been the singular achievement of my life.
2021 has been a fairly crappy year. Life in Biden's America is a real drag.
At the moment I'm at a total dead end in life. Sometimes I feel that it really is over for me. (Don't worry - I'm not going to jump off a bridge.) I feel like I've already blown my wad and I'm just treading water as I stumble into middle age. I'm sitting in a boat with no oars and no sails on a calm sea with no land in sight, and I seem to have misplaced my fishing rod.
But, hey, at least I don't have tons of baggage. No alimony payments, no child support, no ex-wife telling my son that he'd better not grow up to be like Daddy, a worthless piece of shit who ruined Mommy's life. (That's what my mother told me.)
I own just about all of the material objects I've ever really wanted. My thirst for things has been quenched. It's one of the reasons I've been in such a deep funk. "Stan wept, for there were no more eBay auctions to win."Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Kylie
Mr. Sailer posted an old bit of school-newspaper rock criticism from his college days a while back, and he is certainly not kidding about having a consistent personality over the years.
My mother has two siblings. She's the eldest - indeed, she's the reason why my grandparents got married. (More about that below.) My mother still talks to my aunt (the youngest) on occasion, but neither sister has anything to do with my uncle. My aunt and my cousin, in particular, categorically refuse to acknowledge his existence. When my grandmother died, I was the one who had to make the call (at two o'clock in the morning) to tell him. At the funeral, my aunt flat-out refused to exit the limousine during the burial ceremony, simply because he was there. So my grandmother went into the ground without her youngest daughter present.
According to my mother, my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic who routinely beat the crap out of her throughout her childhood. My grandmother did nothing to protect her. My mother claims that her siblings used to make up stories about her to get her in trouble to deflect their father's anger away from them.
I grew up idolizing my grandfather. He was wonderful to me. He loved his Scotch, to be sure, but even when he was drunk he never raised a hand to me. I cannot recall ever hearing him raise his voice.
My mother, on the other hand, routinely subjected me to Mommie Dearest-style breakdowns. (When I say routinely, I mean just about every day.) If we were in public and I did something that displeased her, she would wait until we were alone in the car to unload on me. In retrospect, the it wasn't that bad - she slapped me on occasion, but she never broke my skin or gave me a black eye or anything like that - but seeing her pure, unbridled rage unleashed against a little kid was something to behold.
To this day I still maintain that my grandfather is the only member of my extended family who ever amounted to anything. That includes my father and his family - most of them are drunks. My mother and my father are both teetotalers from alcoholic families. Both of them were the least-favorite siblings. My father never understood why his father didn't seem to like him very much. Then he found out the reason - just before his mother died of cancer, she told him that his father was his stepfather. Everyone had known it all of those years, and no one had ever told him. He did not take the news well. He was still recovering from this blow when he married my mother. Then his sister committed suicide. He firmly believed that she was murdered, and he was never the same after that.
Back to my grandfather, though. Even now, 25 years after his death, he's still keeping us going. My mother is living in a house that she would have lost to foreclosure if I hadn't convinced my grandmother to pay it off, and my grandmother wouldn't have had that money if she hadn't inherited it.
Right now my mother is anxiously awaiting a (very small) inheritance from my grandmother. Every penny has already been spent.
After my grandfather died, my mother used me as an instrument to get money out of my grandmother. Grandma would do things for me that she wouldn't do for my mother, and my mother took full advantage of that fact. If my mother wanted to go out to eat, or if she wanted to go shopping, she would have me ask Grandma for the money. Grandma would tell me, "This is for you, not your mother." And then, as soon as we were out of her sight, my mother would snatch the money away from me. She even did this with my Christmas money a few times. I resented it, but it wasn't a major problem. Grandma handed out money like candy and there was always enough for me.
My mother justified it by saying, "I never got any money from Grandpa and Grandma when I was growing up. It's not fair that you get to have all of the things that I never had. They owe me, and so do you."
After my grandfather died, my grandmother, who had never so much as set foot in a church during the first eleven years of my life, suddenly became extremely religious. For about ten years she was the most insufferably holier-than-thou person you could meet. But as her Alzheimer's progressed, her religiosity receded.
I discovered some years ago that my grandmother was already pregnant with my mother when she married my grandfather. They married in June and my mother was born in October. By piecing together various scraps of information, including some things that my grandmother told me when her mind was starting to go, I've concluded that there was another man in my grandmother's life around the time that she got involved with my grandfather. He lived in Sacramento. I doubt that my grandfather ever felt entirely certain that my mother was, indeed, his child. Maybe one day I'll break down and do a DNA test.
My grandfather was born in Kansas but grew up in Miami; my grandmother was from Nevada. He was in the Navy when they met. (He dropped out of high school and lied about his age to join the service at 17.) My grandparents were married in San Francisco. My grandmother gave birth to my mother in Nevada while my grandfather was at sea; the three of them moved to Florida when he was discharged a few months later. My father is from northern Minnesota. My parents met in Vermont.
(My grandmother's sister lived in the Bay Area for many years. She narrowly escaped death in the '89 quake - she was driving home on the bridge that collapsed.)
A few months ago, one of my grandmother's relatives got drunk and told my cousin that my grandmother was a "slut" just like her mother. My cousin, who idolizes Grandma, went ballistic, got totally smashed herself, and then subjected me to a two-hour freakout (over the phone) in the middle of the night.
She has a habit of terminating calls in mid-sentence, without any indication that she wants to end the conversation. If you try to call her back, the phone goes to voicemail. Presumably she's too drunk to keep tabs on her phone battery.
One night my aunt called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because, among other things, she feared her cancer had returned and she couldn't bear to go through chemo again; then, the same night, my cousin called me to tell me that she wanted to kill herself because she couldn't bear to go through the grief of losing Grandma. I told both women the same thing: "Think about the kids. They need their mother and their grandmother." (My cousin has two kids.)
My cousin did kill herself, once. She died after an overdose and was resuscitated at the hospital. Unlike my grandmother, who claimed to have glimpsed through the gates of heaven after almost bleeding to death while giving birth to my aunt, my cousin had no visions of the afterlife.
One time a friend asked me if I thought I was going to Hell. I smiled and said, "I think I'm already there."
Incidentally, in the annals of Stan Adams, September 2021 will rank as the month of the epic iSteve confessionals. You know a hell of a lot more about me now than you did several weeks ago.
This was a weird month - the end of a weird summer, midway through a weird year. Summer is always the worst time of the year for me, but fall is usually the season of good fortune. (Not always - my grandfather died in October.)
November is usually the best month of the year for me. In fact, in years when November 1 falls on a Monday (as it does this year), I tend to have extraordinarily good fortune. In November 1993, for example, I rode on an airplane for the first time. This marked the beginning of the happiest years of my childhood.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in November 2010, I made an extremely fortuitous discovery that led to major material gains in the summer of 2011 and then, in the fall and winter of 2013/14, to the biggest financial windfall of my life. 2015 and 2016 were miserable years, during which I was mired in the hell of Grandma's Alzheimer's disease. 2017 was a lean year of rebuilding. 2018 was a good year; the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 were two of the best seasons of my adult life.
Surprisingly, 2020 wasn't half-bad, During the chaotic period of the first few weeks of the shutdown, a phenomenal, miraculous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fell into my lap. It allowed me to complete a project I'd been working on for many years. It was the culmination of decades' worth of striving and dreaming, and it just might have been the singular achievement of my life.
2021 has been a fairly crappy year. Life in Biden's America is a real drag.
At the moment I'm at a total dead end in life. Sometimes I feel that it really is over for me. (Don't worry - I'm not going to jump off a bridge.) I feel like I've already blown my wad and I'm just treading water as I stumble into middle age. I'm sitting in a boat with no oars and no sails on a calm sea with no land in sight, and I seem to have misplaced my fishing rod.
But, hey, at least I don't have tons of baggage. No alimony payments, no child support, no ex-wife telling my son that he'd better not grow up to be like Daddy, a worthless piece of shit who ruined Mommy's life. (That's what my mother told me.)
I own just about all of the material objects I've ever really wanted. My thirst for things has been quenched. It's one of the reasons I've been in such a deep funk. "Stan wept, for there were no more eBay auctions to win."Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Kylie
Thank you for elaborating on the Stan chronicles. It’s astonishing how resilient some people–you, for example–are when born into and raised in what really is a hellish family situation.
I’m older than you and recall feeling adrift in early middle age. I found it passes. If you cultivate new interests, you wil need new things. Don’t give up on ebay just yet.
My mother did try her best. She could be very affectionate. But her constant outbursts were extremely frightening, and I could never predict exactly when one might occur. The slightest thing might set her off, and then she would scream at me until I broke down in tears.
To this day I get extremely agitated whenever I see her frown, because when I was growing up an abrupt change in her facial expression was the first (and often only) indication that a freakout was imminent. She would go from (apparent) dead calm to frothing rage in a matter of seconds. I learned to read her face well enough to know when I had to brace myself for a full-scale meltdown.
She always blamed me for making her angry. For years I would lie awake at night and pray to God to fix all of the flaws that she kept using as an excuse to rip me to shreds. Over time I came to realize just how sick she really was. For years I harbored an intense degree of anger, even hatred, toward her. But now I see that my feelings of rage were misguided. She's not a bad person, just a broken one.
https://i.ibb.co/Q932XHs/IMG-1055.jpgFor only $10,000 this autographed Joe Biden action figure can be mine.
https://i.ibb.co/rcjXK80/biden-figure.jpg
I'm older than you and recall feeling adrift in early middle age. I found it passes. If you cultivate new interests, you wil need new things. Don't give up on ebay just yet.Replies: @Stan Adams
Thanks for reading. I appreciate the support.
My mother did try her best. She could be very affectionate. But her constant outbursts were extremely frightening, and I could never predict exactly when one might occur. The slightest thing might set her off, and then she would scream at me until I broke down in tears.
To this day I get extremely agitated whenever I see her frown, because when I was growing up an abrupt change in her facial expression was the first (and often only) indication that a freakout was imminent. She would go from (apparent) dead calm to frothing rage in a matter of seconds. I learned to read her face well enough to know when I had to brace myself for a full-scale meltdown.
She always blamed me for making her angry. For years I would lie awake at night and pray to God to fix all of the flaws that she kept using as an excuse to rip me to shreds. Over time I came to realize just how sick she really was. For years I harbored an intense degree of anger, even hatred, toward her. But now I see that my feelings of rage were misguided. She’s not a bad person, just a broken one.
For only $10,000 this autographed Joe Biden action figure can be mine.
I thought everybody thought that?
I’ve never seen it Freudianised, I just thought the idea was that only children are more likely to grow up selfish or spoiled; that children with siblings naturally learn at a very young age that they aren’t the centre of the universe, but only children might have to find this out the hard way, when they’re older.
Anecdotally, I’m not sure it makes much difference.
Steve, did you have any cousins? My older (by two years) cousin and I spent all of our weekends and holidays at my grandparents’ house, so we were very close. We always opened our presents together on Christmas.
Christmas ‘93. I was 8:
https://i.ibb.co/YjLs2NB/IMG-1080.jpg
Yeah, I was jealous.
We are sitting in the "Florida room" overlooking the pool, which is behind the person taking the picture. You can see my grandparents' large (for the time) TV on the right edge of the picture. In the background is the "living room" where we usually held our Christmas celebrations. This picture was taken in summertime.
My grandparents' house was an orgy of earth tones, to be sure. The brown carpet covered the original late-'50s terrazzo flooring. I still own that piggy bank. And see that long black flashlight standing upright on the ledge? My uncle once unironically referred to it as a "n***er buster."
My guess is that this photo was taken in 1990 or 1991. How old do I look? In '90 I would have been just shy of five; in '91, just shy of six. I think '91 is more likely.
I got my NES for Christmas in '91. (Unlike my cousin, mine didn't come with the gun attachment.) So I didn't have to wait long.
The SNES replaced the NES in the fall of '91. Presumably the NESes still in stock would have been sold at a discount. So Santa probably got a good deal that year.
In 1992, Santa gave both of us Sega Genesises (is that the plural of Genesis?) for Christmas, so there was no cousin rivalry that year.
In '93, he got us Sega Game Gears. You can see the two of us playing with them in Comment 99. (My God, I'm posting so many comments that I have to refer to them by number.)
I never had an SNES. Most of my classmates did, so I was the oddball.
In '96, my older cousin and I both got Nintendo 64s. (I can't remember if my younger cousin got one. He would have been four, so maybe not.) By that time I was spending more time playing computer games than video games. But I didn't neglect the N64, to be sure.
Christmas ‘93. I was 8:
https://i.ibb.co/CMXmFMF/90-D16-D64-61-E8-47-A3-A4-F6-9-FF32-AC58-C21.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/4VgdjPH/21-F39-E85-6-CC4-43-AC-9-E19-ECF6-E5-E4723-F.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/3CWdphY/69-E26-E7-D-8939-46-A6-9119-5-F148371-D6-CB.jpgReplies: @Stan Adams
In this picture my older cousin is getting an NES for her birthday. You can see how happy I am for her:
Yeah, I was jealous.
We are sitting in the “Florida room” overlooking the pool, which is behind the person taking the picture. You can see my grandparents’ large (for the time) TV on the right edge of the picture. In the background is the “living room” where we usually held our Christmas celebrations. This picture was taken in summertime.
My grandparents’ house was an orgy of earth tones, to be sure. The brown carpet covered the original late-’50s terrazzo flooring. I still own that piggy bank. And see that long black flashlight standing upright on the ledge? My uncle once unironically referred to it as a “n***er buster.”
My guess is that this photo was taken in 1990 or 1991. How old do I look? In ’90 I would have been just shy of five; in ’91, just shy of six. I think ’91 is more likely.
I got my NES for Christmas in ’91. (Unlike my cousin, mine didn’t come with the gun attachment.) So I didn’t have to wait long.
The SNES replaced the NES in the fall of ’91. Presumably the NESes still in stock would have been sold at a discount. So Santa probably got a good deal that year.
In 1992, Santa gave both of us Sega Genesises (is that the plural of Genesis?) for Christmas, so there was no cousin rivalry that year.
In ’93, he got us Sega Game Gears. You can see the two of us playing with them in Comment 99. (My God, I’m posting so many comments that I have to refer to them by number.)
I never had an SNES. Most of my classmates did, so I was the oddball.
In ’96, my older cousin and I both got Nintendo 64s. (I can’t remember if my younger cousin got one. He would have been four, so maybe not.) By that time I was spending more time playing computer games than video games. But I didn’t neglect the N64, to be sure.