Page 35 - WhyAsInY

ManHattan BeaCHeD
important. When I was fourteen or so, and my father and I were engag- ing in an argument, presumably about the way he felt that I had been treating my mother at the time, I inferred from his ill-chosen language (“and when you almost killed your mother . . .”) that, contrary to prevail- ing medical science and any ethical doctrine of which I was aware, on some level he actually believed that I bore responsibility for placing my mother in danger at Doctor’s Hospital. On hearing what he had blurted out, I burst out into tears.
I never became aware of any impact that my father’s absence had on me. Moreover, I don’t recall even noticing that I was an “only child” until I was a teenager. On the other hand, as I was writing the beginning of this book (at the age of sixty-nine), I realized for the first time not only that I was an only child (which I knew) but that, in the eyes of my parents, I was an only child virtually from the moment of my birth. There is no doubt that many people attribute numerous characteristics, many of them negative, to only children. For example, only children are thought to be selfish and quite egotistical, with little ability to test real- ity. Recent scholarship does not support those hypotheses (and any objective observer will agree that I don’t have any negative traits). As you may be able to infer from what follows, the fact that I was to be, and was, an “only child” from the very first undoubtedly affected my parents and, thereby, as some would allege, significantly affected me.
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