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It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year to Not Have Family
More and more Americans are single and childless. This is why the holidays are great for us.
“Im so sorry you have no family,” an old friend said to me this fall. We were having coffee, catching up after many years while I was visiting her city. She made the statement without judgment or pity. And while I felt her empathy, I also felt like she was talking about someone else. People who don’t have families live in orphanages. Oliver Twist had no family. Cosette from Les Miserables was so familyless as to have no surname. I am a middle-aged adult living a comfortable, independent life. Not having a family at this age feels akin to not having a car and living in Manhattan. It isn’t a loss, because it isn’t applicable to my situation. Besides, it’s not even true. I do have a family.
“I have my brother,” I said to my friend.
“I know,” she said. “But that’s not what I mean.”
“I have cousins,” I continued. “I have an aunt left. And actually an uncle, too, now that I think of it.”
“Yeah, but…,” she said.
What my friend meant by having no family is that my parents are dead and that I have no kids or life partner. These conditions, on their own and even in combination, are nothing out of the ordinary. Plenty of people are single and childless, and most of us, unless tragedy strikes, outlive our parents. But it’s not just immediate family ties that are sparse. My brother, who lives on the opposite coast, is also childless, so I have no nieces or nephews. We have a bunch of cousins, but they lived far away from us when we were growing up, and for reasons that are mysterious, maddening, and not really worth going into here, we never really got to know them.
Please understand, I grew up in an intact family: two parents, two kids, the occasional cat. Though my parents split up when I was in college and my brother was in high school, no one technically abandoned anyone or ran away from home. (Several of our goldfish flung themselves out of the bowl, but let’s not read too much into that.) We were not wanting for food, clothing, or music lessons. We just weren’t, as I’ve often put it, a…
