“You don’t have any siblings? Do you never get lonely?” That’s the question my friends with siblings ask me the moment they find out I’m the only daughter of two loving parents. It always comes with a little tilt of the head, a little frown between their brows as they look at me as if loneliness is a tragic condition I barely survived. To them, growing up without siblings is like growing up without Wi-Fi, unimaginable, boring and sad.Â
But here’s the plot twist, they’re absolutely wrong. I never really felt that emptiness they imagine my life to be filled with. While their childhoods were full of squabbles over the last slice of pizza, mine was filled with my parents who treated me less like an only child and more like the missing member of a slightly chaotic band. If my friends had their siblings as their partners-in-crime, I had my mom and dad as my critics, therapists and cheerleaders all rolled into one.Â
Take movie nights for instance. My friends always told me that for them, watching movies meant making negotiations and sometimes full-blown arguments with their siblings just to pick a movie. For us, it was unanimous (almost always). In our home, we love Tom Cruise. If we couldn’t find a movie to watch, we just watched one of his movies, especially Valkyrie or Mission Impossible. But we didn’t just watch it, we lived it. I grew up watching Tom Cruise pulling off the most life-threatening stunts and soon my dad turned it into our little inside joke. Every time he asked me to do something, fetch a glass of water or hand him the remote, he’d drop his voice an octave and say “Your mission, should you choose to accept it….” like I was being sent to dismantle a bomb instead of just fetching the newspapers.
Family is a life jacket in the stormy sea of life.
J.K. Rowling
And the long drives. It’s not a weekend if our trio doesn’t step out of the house, if not for a dinner outing then an aimless long drive. My friends complained about road trips because being stuffed in the backseat with siblings inevitably led to someone crying or yelling. For me, drives were magic. We’d pack up, sometimes with no plan in our minds and just go. One hundred kilometres later (I am not exaggerating, I promise) we’d be parked at a random dhaaba in a town so tiny, you’d never find it on Google maps, eating dal tadka and bhindi do pyaaza with rotis dripping in ghee. The journey itself was half the joy. The three of us would take turns on the aux or at least pretend to. Officially, there were “time slots” but somehow, mine stretched longer than my parents’. Still my mom’s playlist has always been unbeatable, a perfect blend of Air Supply, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. She has this uncanny ability to pick the right songs for every stretch of road. When “My Love” by Westlife came on, the car went silent, the three of us just listening as the lyrics floated through the evening. Of course, I tried to shake up the mood a bit by sneaking in Playboi Carti, SZA or Ariana Grande but those experiments were short-lived. Somewhere along the way, even when I had the aux, I started playing the music my parents loved, because honestly, they were right. These songs are timeless. Â
Another perk of being an only child? My parents, as corny as it sounds, are my unpaid therapists. I can tell them everything and I mean everything. From tragic friend fallouts to college drama to my unhealthy obsessions with my celebrity crushes in my early teens, nothing is off-limits. There’s no topic that is too random or ridiculous. My mom listens like she’s storing every word in her heart and somehow always knows the right things to comfort me. My dad chimes in with advice that is wise but ends in a joke, and somehow between the two of them I always end up laughing and forgetting the problem at hand.
Sure, siblings give you chaos, a best friend and someone to blame when your mom’s favourite vase shatters into pieces. But I had something different, a tight-knit team of three, where love, laughter and countless little traditions made our days special.Â
So when people ask me “don’t you ever get lonely?” I tilt my head with a little frown between my brows and pause before I smile, because the truth is, loneliness never found me. Because while their memories are stitched together with their brothers and sisters, mine are woven just as richly with parents who never made me feel like I was missing anything. If anything, they just proved that three is the perfect number.
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