I grew up as an only child and I desired a brother or a sister to have a play fellow and somebody with which to create a special relation of affection, friendship and trust. This, until the age of 10-11.
Sometimes, when the older boys of the square in front of the Church where I used to play targeted me with their mocking, and bad tricks, I desired to have had an elder brother that could defend me from them.

Surely, with at least one brother or sister, my psychological development would have been different, but who can say if better or worse?

But things among my parents went badly since the beginnings of their marriage (1962), 1 year before my birth (July 7th, 1963) and having a brother or a sister would have helped me psychologically.

When, eventually, my parents arrived to separation, (November 1976), two years after the definitive introduction of divorce in Italy and it was stated by the tribunal that I could live with my mother, as I then wanted, I realized that it was a luck that I hadn't another brother/sister or more, because, given our precarious economic conditions (we lived with the alimony from my father that had to go in another house), my mother would have had much more problems.

In September 1978, when I was 15, my father died of brain cancer and, also with the widowhood pension of my mother, our economic conditions didn't improve much in the following years, so that I didn't change my recently acquired opinion that it was better to have been an only child, also because the difficulties could enforce the relation with a brother or sister, but also wear it down; being a teenager in such situation has been difficult and, however, very little could be enough to create tensions and misunderstanding.

Being an only child also meant that my mother discharged only on me, for all the following years since my father's death, many of her frustrations and failed ambitions of a housewife widow woman, desiring that I were or become what she wanted; but I soon begun to follow my own way, in the good and in the evil and she didn't liked it at all.
This created a progressive increase of frictions between she and me, until the total break of our relations in the last years.

She desired I were a lawyer or a doctor and, instead, I become a chemist after graduating in 1990; she wanted that I got into a political party "to find better a good job and have influent friends", but this was disgusting for me; I then become vegetarian (1993) and she told me that I were a foolish fanatical, bound to die of malnutrition, while, instead, I had and have a perfect health and so on.
The largest part of what I choose or was was wrong for her.

Then, I found myself unemployed or precariously worker for years, still obliged to live in the same home with her (1994-2001, a real torture, believe me!) and she claimed in every occasion that I was a failure, a parasite and so on.

Surely, if I had a brother/sister and he/she had been more lucky than me in work, as very likely, given what I had to suffer, my mother would have matched our situation by the point of view of her expectations at every occasion, telling me: "Oh, your brother/sister is really good, skillful and smart, not like you, no good at anything!".
She would have tried to put us in competition, willing or not and I can say this because I know well my mother.

In any case, I'm an only son only because my father obliged my mother to abortion in 1964, (when abortion in Italy was still outlaw) while she was really waiting her second son after me, because my father, very stingy and selfish, didn't want another child.
I learned this "particular" from my mother only when I was 12.

Learn more about this author, Aldo Bonincontro.
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