I think I always wanted a large family.

Growing up, I was an only child. I guess I continue to be one, if you can be a ‘child’ in your thirties. I have no sisters or brothers, but I did have a lively imagination that came in handy, and parents who threw books at me like others would offer up Complan.

But when it was me against the world — like when the children I played with every evening went home in twos, or when I sensed I’d never be as close to someone as their sibling was, that’s when I wished I had a whole brood of siblings. Even my favourite characters in books had large families: Jo March and her three sisters, Laura Ingalls Wilder with three others, the Five Little Peppers, The Family at One End Street, the Pevensies who go off to Narnia, Katy Carr, Ramona Quimby, and my first, favourite chapter book: My Naughty Little Sister , which was all about the eponymous brat and the things she got up to.

More problematic were the Enid Blyton books, I couldn’t in all good conscience, cast myself as Fatty or Julian or even Jo from the Faraway Tree series, and in reading those books, I’d have to be the boring girl, told to stay home and mind the house while everyone was off having an adventure. No, much more fun was St Clare’s, where you got to be a twin, a girl, and go off doing interesting things.

I suppose I hadn’t been paying attention to only children in literature up until then, although they were everywhere. Mowgli in Jungle Book , poor, precious Snow White, put-upon Cinderella, my fairy tales were full of characters that triumphed sibling-less. (It is telling that my favourite fairy tale was, of course, one of the few that featured a brother and a sister: Hansel and Gretel)

But by the time I began to look for role models, heroines like me, I started to notice the single child motif in more places than one. Anne, of course, was first, or was it Mary from A Secret Garden ? Or even Heidi, sent off to live with a dour grandfather. Here were girls having adventures which had nothing to do with their families and their foibles. Most books stopped just at that enchanted moment between adulthood and childhood, where you see your heroine gaze at the world before her and contemplate conquering it. It was a world that didn’t need anyone else — no bratty sisters, no sudden illnesses, nothing but her and her own sweet will.

And then, as characters do, they grew up. Anne was the first to let me down — she moved from a whimsical magical heroine to a woman insistent on popping out children — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, when would this woman stop? And then the books became about her children, a childish book for someone who had followed Anne the whole way. Anne of Ingleside and Rainbow Valley are the weakest of LM Montgomery’s books because they speak of children in the voices of adults, and yet there’s not enough going on with the grown ups to keep it interesting. Best to leave Anne at Anne’s House of Dreams, fresh after a stillbirth, and the romance of her neighbour to make things spicy.

Even Jo March, who swore to wear her hair in two tails till she was 20, turned out to be as dull as the rest of them once she popped out children. There she was presiding over a table of young boys, and the book was once again about the children. The authors were very clearly telling me something: once you have children, your story is over. It’s not just the classic authors either: even Harry Potter turned into a boring dad, marrying his high school sweetheart and immediately fathering a passel of children as soon as his Voldemort days were behind him.

It’s probably not surprising then that I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about having children, with the idea of “no kids at all” becoming more and more a real possibility. Children mean you’re no longer the heroine of your story — and perhaps in a circle of life kind of way, that’s meant to be. But what if you’re not quite ready to put yourself out to pasture and let someone take over from where you left off? This may be a completely selfish gesture, but I wanted to be the one with the adventures, not sit quietly knitting from the sidelines, forever ‘Mother’.

I was meant to be a sibling — one of five or six — but I don’t think I was meant to be a parent. I know as a woman I don’t have the luxury of time on my side, my eggs are finite and drop each month like clockwork, but I am not Anne or Jo or Harry at the end of their careers, I like to think I’m still on book three of my life, with several more to go before I hand over authorship to someone else.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is an author, most recently of Before And Then After

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