10 Questions about Auntiehood for Dana Miranda of Healthy Rich

“Before she was born, I thought my lack of desire to have kids meant I didn’t like kids, but I fell in love with her instantly.”

Hi there! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship and community for people who choose to help raise other people’s kids. You can read my archive here. If you appreciate this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month (or $50 for the year). You can also support my work by “liking” this post. It only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other Substack users find my newsletter.

As always, read to the end for the Cute Kid Video of the Week.

Now Let’s Get To It

I’ve been a fan of Dana Miranda’s Healthy Rich newsletter ever since she wrote a guest post for Anne Helen Petersen in 2022. Dana writes about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach, and talk about money, and in that Culture Study post, she made an essential point that I still think about all the time.

The way to have enough money isn’t to budget better, it’s to be paid a living wage.

Dana wrote:

I used to tell people I was grateful to work in personal finance, because what I’ve learned has helped me get my own money under control. I have a small IRA, a comfortable $20,000 savings cushion, automatic bill payment, a credit card and a 740 credit score. But I’ve stopped giving financial literacy the credit, because I know the real reason my finances are “healthier” now: I have more money. I took a job with a salary that quadrupled my income, and voila — I became a lot more “responsible” with money.

My own experience matches Dana’s. When I’ve worked low-paying gig jobs, I’ve struggled to make ends meet, racking up credit card debt and having to learn how to ask bank representatives to waive overdraft fees. When I’ve worked stable, well-paying jobs, in contrast, I’ve paid off my debt and my credit score has gone way up. It’s not magic; it’s not budgeting; it’s adequate compensation. And it’s something all humans deserve, regardless of whether we pre-assign every dollar to an expense category.

So imagine my fangirl excitement when Dana messaged me soon after The Auntie Bulletin launched, and I found out that she is an Auntie! We agreed to do a newsletter Q&A swap: her questions about how I think about personal finance as an Auntie ran in Healthy Rich earlier this month. And today, I’m thrilled to share what Dana has to say about her experience of Auntiehood. One highlight is her discussion of her blended and evolving family over time – a beautiful model of what kinship really looks like for so many families.

Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance®, and in addition to writing Healthy Rich, she’s got a book coming out that I’m really excited about, and which you can preorder now: You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). Dana is also the expert behind the nationally syndicated “Dear Penny” financial advice column, a regular contributor to Business Insider, Fortune, CNET Money and Salon, and a founding member of the Kiplinger Advisor Collective.

And – importantly for our purposes – she’s also Auntie Dana!

Auntie Dana

What do the kids in your life call you? How did that name come about?

The kids most entwined in my life are my sister’s kids, and they all call me Auntie Dana (and we’re in central Wisconsin, so that’s “ant-y”). It actually surprised me after my oldest niece was born, because my sister and I didn’t use titles for our aunts and uncles growing up; we just called them by their first names. If you’d have asked me, I would have said I thought the title was silly. But that baby was born, and everyone started calling me Auntie Dana, and then when she started talking and said it? It was over. There are four kids now, and each time one of them gets old enough to say “Auntie,” my heart melts.

When you were growing up, what messages did you receive about who counts as part of your family (and/or who doesn’t)?

We’ve always had a very closed family unit; within that unit, family ties were important, whether you liked someone or not. But family wasn’t necessarily static. My parents divorced when I was five, and my mom remarried a man who had three daughters around my age. So that family unit became more complex; those girls had a whole other family when they were with their mom and stepdad, and my sister and I had a whole other family when we were with my dad and grandparents. Kids tie those disparate units together after a divorce, and it’s interesting to think back now to the people, like my stepsisters’ stepbrothers, who were part of my life through family but not really my family.

A few years ago, my sister and her husband became foster parents and have fostered and adopted multiple kids who have varying levels of connection to their birth parents, so they talk about the nuances of family ties and the messiness of family trees. They were talking about family being made by love, not by blood, and I mentioned that of course we know that because we have stepfamily by marriage, and no one had thought of the connection. It struck me how certain ways of constructing family were presented as normal versus abnormal in our cultural upbringing and how hard it is to break out of those assumptions.

Did you have Auntie figures in your life growing up? If so, how did they come into your life? Tell us about them!

Maybe! I didn’t have that cultural understanding. But my dad was in a long relationship with a woman after my parents’ divorce, and she helped raise my sister and me until we were teenagers. She was very much a stepmom figure, but because they weren’t married, she never got that title. She didn’t stay in our lives immediately after that relationship ended, but we reconnected as adults, and she remains an important family tie that’s really more Auntie-like than anything else now that she’s no longer connected to a parent.

Did you *decide* one way or another about whether to have kids of your own? If so, what made you feel it was time to decide?

I did decide not to have kids. I married young and was divorced six years later. When we first were married, I assumed we’d have kids eventually and that I just wasn’t ready yet. By the time we divorced, I was only 24, and I hadn’t made the decision explicitly with my ex-husband, but I pretty much knew I didn’t want to have kids. Once the marriage ended, I knew clearly that moving forward, kids wouldn’t be in the cards for me.

Nothing prompted the decision specifically; I just came to the realization over time. At first, I figured I was too young and that I’d want kids when I was more stable financially. Then my ex-husband and I talked about adoption, because the idea of giving birth was unappealing to me. Then I realized it was unappealing because the idea of having children of my own was unappealing to me. The divorce was probably a bit of a catalyst to say once and for all that I wasn’t having kids, because it became an important part of knowing what my next steps would be and what I was looking for in my next relationship.

How did you come to have kids who aren’t your own in your life?

My niblings are all my sisters’ kids: one biological niece, three adopted niblings, and six step-niblings. I’m closest with my oldest biological niece, not because of blood but because she’s the only one I’ve known since the day she was born, and I’ve spent the most time bonding with her. Before she was born, I thought my lack of desire to have kids meant I didn’t like kids, but I fell in love with her instantly and learned so much from seeing her grow up.

After six years of having an only child, my sister began foster care and eventually adopted three children. Being a foster auntie has been a challenging and rewarding experience, because kids come into our family at different ages, with different life experiences and with different levels of ties to the rest of their family. And we never know how long they’ll be with us, but they need love and care however long it is. Kids in foster care are experiencing so much trauma and are constantly dealing with getting to know the rules and customs of a new home. As an auntie for those kids, I’m grateful I get to be someone who shows up solely to love them for whatever time I get with them. Unlike foster parents, I have the privilege to spend time with the kids without the challenges of social workers, family visits, discipline at school, etc.

How do you explain your relationship with the kids in your life to outsiders?

It doesn’t come up often. When I’m out with the kids, people probably assume I’m their mother until one of them calls me Auntie. We do have a habit of assuming any woman near a child is the child’s mother, don’t we? It’s an odd feeling, because “mother” is absolutely not part of my identity, so I tend to assume it’s obvious to others that I’m not a mother.

Since you became an Auntie, have you experienced any conflict with the kids’ primary caregivers? What happened?

Yes, several. I’m a queer leftist, and the kids’ parents are conservative white evangelicals, so their approach to parenting often bumps me. I’m not part of raising the kids, so I don’t speak up a lot on specific issues. Instead I just make myself available as a model for an alternative approach and a voice to note what’s “weird” about conservative attitudes, which is something I wish I’d had growing up in a conservative small town.

What drives you to make kids a priority in your life – especially when there are so many other things you could prioritize?

I have been amazed by these kids since the second I met each of them, and it would break my heart to know they didn’t have everything they need to be and do whatever they can in life.

Their parents are incredible supports who provide a rich life for them and tons of love. But I can imagine everything that’s running through your head every second as a parent and how necessary it is to take shortcuts instead of having the deep conversations, exploring the feelings, allowing the experimentation and all the things parenting books talk about that take time and patience life doesn’t always offer. It’s important to me that I can show up and carry none of that burden and just love and support the kids unconditionally.

It’s so easy as an Auntie to be the perfect, patient, loving, understanding adult we expect parents to be, because I have so much time off. Kids deserve that kind of adult in their lives, and it’s unreasonable to expect parents to be that while also providing a home and care and an upbringing and, usually, working full-time outside of the home.

What’s your favorite Auntie memory?

For the first couple of years of her life, my oldest niece couldn’t pronounce all the letters in my name, so she called me “Auntie Nah-nah.” One Halloween when she was two-and-a-half years old, I was living out of state, and my mom sent a video of my niece to show off her costume. In the video, she said, “Twick or tweet, Auntie Day-na!” and it was the first time I heard her actually say my name.

It shattered me. She was this little bundle of cuteness for years, but something about my name coming out of her mouth made this connection, and suddenly she was a person that I got to share my life with. She had an awareness of the world around her and of me, and I was someone she loved, and I was so lucky.

What’s one thing you’ve learned from being an Auntie?

I’m constantly reminded that kids are full humans with full lives that we often don’t recognize as adults. We see kids as amusing creatures that live in our world, and we often treat them accordingly, but they are also people who have a whole world of their own. Thoughts are running through their heads when they’re not speaking. They’re pondering questions and trying to put puzzle pieces together. They’re so smart and so perceptive and so insightful. They see us and they hear us. I work hard to speak to kids the way I speak to adults and not pull punches, because I wish adults had done that for me when I was a kid. I can use big words, because kids will clarify what they don’t understand. I can broach big topics, because kids will fill in holes if we leave too much unsaid.

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Coming Attractions

Next week, tune in for the follow-up to my recent Holiday Gift-Not-Giving Guide. In it, I’ll be exploring a number of kid-friendly alternatives to our typical holiday gift-buying rituals, including unpacking (ha!) the radical potential of the while elephant gift exchange.

Also coming soon:

• What to do when a kid gives you something they made… and you don’t know what it is

• 10 questions about Auntiehood for the great Ann Friedman of Big Friendship and AF Weekly

• The absolutely, positively, unequivocally #1 best way to decide if you want to have kids¹

Three Recommended Reads

As promised last week, the third one will be light and fun!

One. Publish the Equal Rights Amendment.

Aunties, the most powerful thing societies can do to protect kids is protect women. I learned from Katherine Goldstein’s The Double Shift last week that, according to the American Bar Association and many other legal authorities, the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all of the hurdles necessary to be added to the U.S. Constitution. 28th Amendment, baby! Apparently all that’s necessary is for Joe Biden to place a call to the National Archivist directing her to publish it. If you dig around in the links in Goldstein’s article a little bit, you may come across some inside baseball suggesting that the National Archivist stands ready to publish and is just waiting for the call. So there’s a whole big campaign happening right now, including daily vigils in DC and a postcard campaign to President Biden planned for December 10 (but any day is good – or heck, every day!)

The short explainer video included in Goldstein’s post is incredibly convincing and compelling (that’s a screencap below). Please watch it. Then write a postcard to the President while we can still get this (HUGE) win!

Two. How to Watch a Baby.

If you’re currently grieving about not being able to have children, you might want to skip this one.

Kristin Radtke has created a beautiful interactive comic about new parenthood for The Verge. Specifically, it’s about the loving/terrified compulsion to monitor and track every aspect of a baby’s existence.

Whether or not you have kids of your own, I recommend that Aunties read (or view, or listen to) content that dives into the experiences of parenting. Learning about what preoccupies parents equips us to participate meaningfully in conversations about childrearing. And this meaningful participation benefits everyone: the primary caregivers feel better understood, we Aunties are able to feel an increased sense of belonging, and kids get the benefit of being cared for by adults who not only love them but are also somewhat informed.

Three. Take the Shame Out of the Cone.

This story is a delight, but the photos. What we’ve got here, Aunties, are dogs wearing majestic collars made of all sorts of materials, often “based to fit specific dog breeds.” The photographer is Winnie Au, the cone designer is Marie-Yan Morvan, and the fruits of their collaboration demonstrate that dignity and absurdity can and do co-exist. (See also: humans).

Ryder, an Old English sheepdog, sports a cone of fluffy batting.

Sebi, a young Brussels griffon, wears artificial grass affixed to a plastic base.

And Now, the Cute Kid Video Audio of the Week

My partner and I first heard this story on public radio over a decade ago, and it has been regularly quoted in our household ever since. In it, two little girls explain “the worst haircut ever.” Their dad is the interviewer. Crank the volume so you don’t miss a word.

Sadie: “It was almost about down to her tush, and if she grew it any any longer, it would be like, when she wiped her butt, her hair would go into the toilet. And it would be gross.”

Eva: “I didn’t like it because it was all the way down to my butt, and it was really itching my – my hips.”

Sadie: “Hair cutting takes like a lot of concentration. We learned not to do it again. Ever again. That was really really really terrible, but everyone does that kind of stuff sometimes. It happens like once, or twice, or three times, in every life.”

[Here, picture their dad glaring fiercely].

Sadie: “Or twice. Or once. I mean once.”

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1. I keep teasing the “how to decide whether to have kids” post because I’m BUILDING THE ANTICIPATION (and also because I don’t want it to get lost in the holiday season shuffle). Are you on the edge of your seat? Are you?? YOU SHOULD BE!