When a Child is Born

Happy New Year, everybody! I wish I could celebrate it in Boston, but all in good time. There's this weird vibe that comes with being at home: I love having this big house of space, but then I also miss being around people. Which is a healthy viewpoint; but now that I'm home from an apartment where I actually have my own space, and not a dorm room, there's not a real big transition. The best part of home life: when your parents decide you need all sorts of new clothes/snow boots/grapefruit spoons.

College let me become more extroverted, and sometimes I wish (in that crazy city up north) there were more people around. Maybe we should rent out our walk-in closet; fifty bucks a week, no questions asked. But I do cherish my personal space. It must be that only-child syndrome. You see, people often ask me what it was like as if I'd been afflicted. No, I didn't find it detrimental to my social development or mental well-being, and though I had ample opportunities to connive my parents and become corrupted without a sibling tattling on me, I didn't take advantage.

Here's what you learn as the One and Only Child: You do expect to be Colossally Important; there's no lineage that you're born into, where you must grapple all your days to achieve your place in the ranks. You're allowed to pretty much eat whatever food you want; I refuse to eat shrimp, so my mom doesn't serve it when I'm at home. You can usually seize the remote, as long as there's no football game on TV. When you leave for college, your room has no value to your parents -- no jacuzzi or exercise equipment went in -- so it remains a shrine to the Wonders of You.

On the flip side, I didn't really learn how to argue, how to compete, how to manipulate, how to set something on fire and blame it on the younger brother. It seems only children have it rough if they want to be lawyers, or arsonists.

And back to my point, though I love people, I need my personal space. This reminds me: I was in a restroom, thankfully very clean, a few weeks ago at a Wendy's. It had one of those setups that bemuses me, where there's a urinal and a toilet in a single-person restroom with a lock on the door. If my tone is querulous, it's because you don't logically need both, unless you're trying to direct the, uh, flow of things. But this Wendy's restroom had a divider nailed between the urinal and a toilet otherwise out in the open, free of stall doors. Maybe because I'm an only child and like to keep my single-person restroom experience to myself, but do they expect people to share the room because of their sad little divider? Am I the only one who finds that strange? Are there ladies' rooms out there with no stall doors, just a vast room of pots waiting for you to park yourself?