Orphanage

I recently became something I desperately wanted to be when I was a child: an orphan. My mom died, leaving me parentless—a condition I longed for daily from the time I realized I had parents to when I left home at 18 and could pretend I didn’t. My dream as a boy was to live at an orphanage. I’d have lots of friends around me and all the sympathy I could use should things go badly. And if I were lucky, I might even meet up with a larcenous old scofflaw who would teach me the secrets of begging and pickpocketing.

But being an orphan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. First, there’s the issue of being all alone in the world. Second, there’s the problem of having no one to bail you out of jail anymore. And third, there’s the shock of suddenly realizing that you no longer have the option of moving back in with Mom and Dad—since now Mom and Dad live six feet under, or everywhere in the ether, depending on your metaphysical point of view.

Of course, it’s a relief to not have to worry about making travel plans for the holidays, but then again, the holidays aren’t likely to be much like holidays without the folks. Who, for instance, is going to ask those pointed questions about my career plans that have so long enlivened Thanksgiving dinners? Who’s going to look surprised again by my vegetarian diet when I turn down the drumstick for the 15th year running? And who’s going to make veiled comments about my unwillingness to stay more than three days with someone who uncomplainingly carried me in her womb for nine months?

In spite of all this, one advantage to being an orphan that I hadn’t foreseen. Now that I have no parents second-guessing my own parenting, I’ve got free reign to work on my own child’s growing desire to be an orphan herself.