When I was a tot, I wanted a sibling. Partly because I wanted someone who had no choice but to hang out with me (I was unclear on the concept, obviously), and partly because I wanted my mom and dad to yell at someone who wasn’t me once in a while. (They argued with each other, but that didn’t count because that was always slightly alarming. I wanted someone else to get in my kind of trouble.)

Then I hit grade school and realized that being an only child was pretty awesome. I didn’t have to share a bedroom or toys or clothes, like my friends did. I had the full focus of both my parents, all my grandparents, an uncle, and a bunch of my parents’ friends—which was good and bad, but at least I didn’t get in trouble for things my sibling did. I didn’t have some Tasmanian devil whirling through the house destroying my stuff. I counted myself lucky.

Then my parents went through a real dark spell and I started to regret that I was the only other person in the house. At one point, they contemplated divorce and I thought about how nice it would be to have a sibling to help examine the situation. I had imaginary conversations with a formless being in the bunk bed above me as I drifted off to sleep: “They’re both nuts, right? He’s a jerk. She’s a shrew. How did we turn out so normal? It’s a miracle.”

Eventually my parents sorted out their differences. I hit puberty and the whole tight-knit family unit thing stretched a little. I had friends who treated me like a sister and vice versa. I stopped thinking about it.

Then I met the hubs. Before he proposed, we had a lot of long discussions about whether to have kids, how to raise kids, what if we couldn’t have kids, blah blah blah.

We were old, but we had a kid. Just the one. He was perfect. He was a handful. He was expensive. He was everything, and he was enough.

I asked him if he’d ever wanted a sibling, and his story was similar to mine. “I did, sometimes. Then I saw my friend and her brother. Too loud, too hostile too everything.”

When my dad died, my mom and I spent the next week at her house drinking heavily, looking at photos, and telling stories. It occurred to me then (and has popped to mind intermittently since that time) that when my mom dies, my only recourse for shared memories will be to barge in on my uncle. I am pretty sure his wife would find it hilarious, but it can take a while to crank-start my uncle before the stories start coming, and I honestly don’t know if he or I have that much time left.

So I will probably wish I had a sibling when all that goes down. Assuming our next-gen only child is off living his own life, the hubs will be the stuckee. Anyone want to start a pool on how long he’ll put up with drunken wallering before he takes the path of sanity and flees for the golf course?