ONLY: Growing UP Alone

by Ed Buhrer

Growing up has never been easy, with parents and teachers and bullies and friends who aren't friends two days later. Dark, shadowy monsters that inhabit your bedroom at night can be frightening. Growing up alone, as an only child, with no one to share these fears with, really stinks. ONLY is about a kind of growing up that takes place as much in the inner thoughts of a child as in what he hears from the "others" in his life that are often a great deal fewer than in the lives of those kids who grow up in larger families. ONLY is a story of that only child who had an invisible “brother”--the ideal child that his parents expected when he popped out of the womb and slid, slippery, into the delivering doctor's gloved hands, the child who would, of course, get all A's in school and never lie. For this “only,” life was hard when this ideal son was always there, living in that same house, to constantly remind the parents that their actual "only" wasn't quite what they had hoped for in their only attempt at parenthood. Most of all, ONLY is the story of one such "only," desperately wishing for a brother, while experiencing the sometimes funny, sometimes joyful, often painful, and without doubt, poignant moments of growing up in the middle years prior to the invasion of puberty and the awareness of self in its most pervasively adolescent manifestations.
And finally, a brother appears -- one that only two kids know about -- who gives this lonely only child a real “brother”…for a while, anyway.

208 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 6, 2011

About the author

Hi. I grew up for the first 38 years in New Jersey, minus four while I was away in the Air Force. If you grow up in Jersey, you can survive anywhere and drive anywhere. I now live in rural central Virginia with my wife of almost fifty years and three feline road orphans. When I'm not writing, I garden, read, chop wood, and to let off steam, I participate in full-contact sarcasm and occasionally hunt deer flies with my Red Ryder BB gun. To date (December 2013), I have 17 books for Kindles with Amazon and six published books, two still in print. You can also visit my humble blog at
http://pizzaed.blogspot.com