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" &amp;quot;Is he your only one?&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve been asked that question frequently over the past eight years. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s from other mothers at the playground\u2014usually those wrangling two kids at the same time\u2014and sometimes from grandmotherly types in line at the grocery store. Something about my demeanor, or that of my son, suggests that he&amp;#039;s an only child. Perhaps it&amp;#039;s the degree of my attention to him, or his comfort around adults, or the way, riding on the subway, he quickly gets lost in a book\u2014the impression he gives of being a person who is accustomed to entertaining himself. Is he my only one? There&amp;#039;s no quick answer to that question. Sometimes I say, &amp;quot;He has three brothers,&amp;quot; and then watch my interlocutor&amp;#039;s mental wheels turning. (Where are they? When did you fit that in? And how come you&amp;#039;re still so tiny?) Sometimes I say, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s the only one I gave birth to,&amp;quot; adding that my husband already had three sons when we married. Sometimes I simply say that I have three stepsons, but whenever I do I think of the elderly woman in my neighborhood who once gently chastised me for using that locution. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no such thing as step,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re all your sons.&amp;quot; Is he my only one? That&amp;#039;s a very personal question, as are the questions that usually follow. Which parent do they live with? (When they were growing up: half the time with us, half with their mom. Now: here, there, and everywhere.) How old were they when you, um, got them? (Eight, 11, and 13. Pause for my questioner to register the notion that I voluntarily took on three proto-adolescent boys.) Do you get on with their mother? (Yes, very well. And she is as slender as I am.) Does your son like having big brothers? (Does the earth revolve around the sun?) But I don&amp;#039;t mind the questions, because I welcome the chance to discuss complex family relations. I don&amp;#039;t much like the term in popular use, the &amp;quot;blended family.&amp;quot; That seems to smooth into blandness what is most knotty and interesting about domestic situations like mine, where the words we use are much less complicated than the relationships they describe. My son&amp;#039;s big brothers, my husband&amp;#039;s older children, my stepsons\u2014none of these ever seems quite adequate to describe my relationship with the three young men who came into my life more than a dozen years ago. Sometimes I&amp;#039;ll refer to one of them as my son, for shorthand&amp;#039;s sake. &amp;quot;My son lost his keys again,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ll sigh to the guy at the hardware store. But when I do, I feel I&amp;#039;m laying claim to something that isn&amp;#039;t really mine. When I arrived in their lives, my stepsons were already too old for me to have a certain kind of maternal intimacy with them. They&amp;#039;ve all been taller than me for much longer than they were shorter. I have never wiped away their tears or put them to bed, and none of them has ever sat on my lap. (At least, at the time I thought they were too old for such physical tenderness from me. Now, as the mother of an occasionally tearful, lap-sitting eight-year-old who insists on being tucked in just so, I wonder whether I was right.) These three handsome, kindly, intelligent men whom I&amp;#039;ve watched grow up\u2014for whom I&amp;#039;ve cooked a million dinners and picked up a million discarded sneakers, over whom I&amp;#039;ve worried when things were going badly and for whom I&amp;#039;ve rejoiced when things were going well\u2014these young men are mine, for sure. But they&amp;#039;re not my sons. They&amp;#039;re my something else. How to characterize it? &amp;quot;Our boys.&amp;quot; That is how George Eliot\u2014who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819 and went on to write perhaps the greatest of English novels, Middlemarch\u2014usually referred to the three sons of George Henry Lewes, the man she lived with for 24 years. Before I started writing my book, My Life in Middlemarch, I was aware of the rough outlines of Eliot&amp;#039;s complicated domestic situation. Lewes was married to but separated from Agnes Lewes, from whom a divorce was legally impossible, though both parties probably would have welcomed it. (Agnes was having an affair, and children, with Lewes&amp;#039;s close friend Thornton Leigh Hunt.) Eliot&amp;#039;s bold choice to live out of wedlock with Lewes scandalized her contemporaries, even if it has endeared her to later-born observers. But I hadn&amp;#039;t thought much about the three sons, who, when Eliot and Lewes met, were about the same age as my husband&amp;#039;s three sons when I met him. Now, of course, I reflect upon what a disorienting experience it must have been for Eliot. She was in her early thirties\u2014established as an editor, critic, and translator, if not yet as a writer of fiction\u2014and most likely expected to remain childless. Suddenly she found herself in the position of a parent, of sorts. &amp;quot;We have three little boys to keep as well as ourselves,&amp;quot; she told one of her sisters, in a letter announcing that she had found &amp;quot;a kind husband&amp;quot; (even if he were the kind of husband she couldn&amp;#039;t actually marry). There was a defiant conventionality to the way she asserted her new responsibilities, which included making enough money to help Lewes support Agnes and all her offspring. I find it particularly poignant that George Eliot staked this claim to motherhood without having met the three Lewes boys\u2014and without their knowing that she existed. They went to boarding school in Switzerland, where they were kept in ignorance of their parents&amp;#039; unsettled household. Lewes and Eliot lived together for five years before Lewes told his sons about her, and even after her existence was revealed, at the outset her relationship with them was conducted by letter rather than in person. When they were finally due to come home to London, Eliot admitted to a quiet trepidation over the prospect. &amp;quot;I hope my heart will be large enough for all the love that is required of me,&amp;quot; she wrote to a friend. These are words that might resonate with any well-meaning stepparent, words that point to the sometimes fraught complexity of belonging to a family that isn&amp;#039;t so much blended as composed, assorted, irregular. Is my son my only one? How long have you got for the answer to that question? He&amp;#039;s an only child with three brothers: &amp;quot;the big boys,&amp;quot; as they are usually referred to in our household. He&amp;#039;s the youngest of four sons. He has a mother and a father, and he has a loving relation\u2014for which there is absolutely no name, believe me\u2014in the mother of his brothers, to whom I also consider myself related. (When we&amp;#039;re old we&amp;#039;ll both be hoping for visits from the same middle-aged men.) When I was pregnant my husband&amp;#039;s oldest son, who was then 16, presented me with flowers for Mother&amp;#039;s Day, something he&amp;#039;d never done before. Whether the gift was in recognition of my impending maternity, or acknowledgment of my role as stepmother, or an expression of some sense that we were being connected in a new way by the arrival of another child, I do not know. I only know that it was a perfect gesture. At the best of times, the big boys\u2014and the unconventional family to which we all belong\u2014give me hope that none of us needs to be anyone&amp;#039;s only one. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a2282/rebecca-mead-family-bonds/>