Mum of One.

As the mum of an only child, it pays for me to remember that not only am I the parent in the home, but I am the friend too. The missing sibling. The one who hears all the random silly thoughts, the fears and…the fart sounds.

Without that at ease connection that you have with a sibling growing up (because we all know as you get older, it doesn’t always feel that easy anymore), who else are you to share the silliness with?

What does this silliness look like? Pillow fights, sneaky snacks, cubby houses, board games, as I mentioned – fart sounds….and real farts! Late nights talking about nothing and being tired, but content the next day. Saturday morning cartoons in darkness, in your PJ’s eating cereal on the couch.

How lucky are we? As a Mum & Dad you’d think those days of fun are long gone. But when you have just one little one, it’s quickly that you realise there is a bigger gap to fill.

We are a small family, and we are different to most. We’re close. We don’t really like spending time away from each other too often. We do things together that other families with a 7 year old might not do.

He has seen most of the Marvel movies at the cinema, and 90% of the time is the youngest one there.

He eats at restaurants with us and always has done. He enjoys and has his favourite Thai food, Indian food, Portugese chicken, Japanese, street food at the markets and openly and happily tries new things. He also conducts himself appropriately in these places, says thank you to those that serve us, asks politely for tomato sauce for his chips (he is seven remember) and has grown accustomed to the sharing of plates.

We travel reasonably often with no worries, not overseas, but long road trips, interstate, weekends away. He has stayed in more hotels than some kids have by the time they’re adults. He has learnt to respect other people’s things on these trips. We often use Stayz, he knows these are other people’s homes. He cleans up as much as we do before we leave.

Some of all of these luxuries are easier for us from a financial perspective than for other families, as we don’t have multiple children. But it’s more than that; there is just three of us. It’s just simply easier logistics when you have two parents + one child. Oh and the two dogs too.

There are times when others may view these things as him growing up too quickly, and there are often comments around “well it’s easy with just one”.

For all of these things, we do still have our own struggles. We both still work close to full-time hours, he still goes to after school and vacation care, we still struggle at times to have dinner on the table at a reasonable time, and there have been many weeks there aren’t any clean school shorts or the Little Athletics shirt is in the bottom of the basket after a week.

I am a Mum of one, not just one. But one. I am no less of a Mum because of the number of children I don't have.