Auntiehood is the Real “Having It All”
Here’s the beautiful thing about Auntiehood: it lets up.
In October 2019, my partner B and I bought a house next door to our dear friends J and V, whose kids at that time were 3 years old (Y) and 10 months old (O).1 We called ourselves a co-housing community, shared meals often, and had regular game nights after the kids went to bed. And then COVID-19 hit, and we figured the six of us would isolate together.
I was nearing the end of my PhD, and had recently left my job at the university in order to finish my dissertation. It was a huge task but I was well-equipped and my schedule was my own. Meanwhile, J and V’s jobs had just gone fully remote, and they suddenly had no child care. I became the primary person on call to care for Y and O when their parents weren’t available, with my partner B also doing a lot of filling in.2 It was very “all hands on deck.”
In those first several months of the pandemic, I was asked to take care of the kids all the time, often more than once a day, usually for an hour or two at a stretch. I almost always said yes. It was a gift to spend so much time with the kiddos, but as anyone who’s put in a lot of hours with small children knows, it was also exhausting and often a slog. When I picture that time, I see myself standing in our shared backyard, a diapered one-year-old O on my hip, Y in her favorite sequined red and black dress with the long black fringe, commanding our participation in her ever evolving games of pretend family, pretend Moana, pretend hospital. (After several months of this, I realized I could just tell her honestly that I don’t enjoy playing pretend, and from then on we did more art projects, which suited me much better). O, always a guy after my own heart, loved from babyhood to snuggle up on the couch and read together, invariably requesting a “truck one.” After a couple hours taking care of kids, I’d get back to my dissertation – and later, to my new (still flexible) job. Rinse, repeat, day after day, week after week, month after month. Joy, beauty, boredom, despair, back to joy again – the carework churn.
When I talked to friends and family outside our bubble, I often reported how tired I was. The media was full of reports of the loneliness of social distancing, but I felt like I could never get enough time and space for myself. Many would remark that B and I sure were putting a lot into our relationship with our neighbors. We were doing so much for them, but what were they doing for us?
Okay, so here’s the crux. I won’t deny that I felt taken for granted sometimes. Over that first year of the pandemic, J and V and B and I got a crash course in intentional co-housing and clear communication, and we definitely had to work through some stuff. But somehow I never doubted that, when asked to take care of kids, I would always say yes if I could. Of course J and V did not reciprocate the support we offered them – how could they? They were trying to work full time and parent full time, which is impossible. Their responsibilities were relentless. They had the need and we had the capacity. There could be no equal exchange.
But there didn’t need to be. After several conversations with loved ones who gently suggested maybe I was doing more than my fair share, I finally put my finger on what felt already fair about the fact that I was spending many, many hours taking care of my friends’ kids. “It’s true that I’m putting in a lot of work,” I remember telling someone. “But the trade-off is that I get to have kids in my life in a meaningful way, without actually having to have kids myself. I get the benefits of being a parent with almost none of the costs.” No sleepless nights, no early wake-ups, no paying for childcare or scrambling to find childcare in the summer. Alongside the neverending work actual parents do, the hours I put in at the heigh of the pandemic weren’t much. They always ended, and I always got to go home to my nice quiet house.
There is a myth in the United States that being a working mother amounts to “having it all.” Countless articles written by working moms have debunked this myth, pointing to the systemic inequalities they experience both in the home and in the workforce. For parents of any gender, working a full shift then coming home to the demands of kids and household is far from the high life. It’s hard. Working parents – especially working moms – frequently feel they’re falling short both at work and at home. As sociologist Jessica Calarco has put it:
Mothers are blaming themselves… for “failing” to be the kind of perfect worker who doesn’t let her kids distract her from work, for “failing” to be the kind of perfect mother who sacrifices work to meet her kids’ needs, for “failing” to be the kind of perfect wife who never gets angry and always defers to her spouse.
And the difficulty for working mothers in the United States is massively exacerbated by the lack of social safety nets like universal health care and childcare.
Here’s who I think might actually come closer to having it all: Aunties. The (childless) author Glynis MacNichol was on a book tour this summer, then wrote in The New York Times about visiting the kids in her life:
Since June, I’ve spent time variously spooning avocado into a toddler’s mouth and answering questions about what it’s like to get your period. I’ve been taught new card games. I balanced myself in the surf as a 6-year-old clung to me screaming with joy, trusting me not to let go. I attended a children’s performance of “The Little Mermaid” starring one 9-year-old who, as a 9-week-old, I held in my arms while I did an interview for my first book. Summer concluded with my driving a bunch of teens and preteens to one of their many sporting events while I cajoled them to look up from their phones once in a while and talk to me.
I love reading about MacNichols’s sweet times with these important kids in her life. And I also love imagining that, when she got tired during her tour, she went back to her hotel room by herself and had a long shower and watched TV. Odds are, on some occasion during her summer, a toddler’s after-dinner meltdown was her cue to leave. Perhaps she felt a little thrill of freedom as she headed out into the night.
Here’s the beautiful thing about Auntiehood: it lets up. In between the snuggles and books and bike rides and trips to the beach, we get to go about our lives without kids in tow. We may even find time to do nothing at all.
Since 2020, I have continued to help out with the child care needs in our co-housing community, although these needs are thankfully much less frequent or last-minute. Y is now in third grade (excuse me, “turd grade”) and O has just started kindergarten (“kinderfartin’” – we are very mature). These days, I pitch in more like once or twice a week and the appointment usually goes on my calendar days in advance. I’m grateful for the change in pace and I’m thrilled for J and V and parents everywhere that in-person school has been a thing again for the past few years.
But I’m also grateful for my time of intense care work in 2020 and 2021. My relationship with Y and O was deeply rooted by all the hours we put in together, all the time they spent in my arms and in my lap. They still routinely snuggle up against me or climb onto my lap at the dinner table. They know, in an embodied way, that I will be there for them (and that B will, too). I love loving these kids and being loved by them. And at the end of the day, I love leaving them with their parents.
I believe there are a lot of us Aunties out there — indeed, almost a hundred people who are total strangers to me have signed up for this newsletter this week alone, on the strength of very little advertising. Yet, as MacNichols rightly observes, Auntiehood “is not an experience I see reflected back to me in culture.” My hope with The Auntie Bulletin is that we Aunties can start sharing our stories more widely, with each other as well as with the wider public. I hope our culture will come to understand that we don’t have to be parents to be deeply embedded in networks of care.
In a previous Auntie Bulletin post, I used different initials for these kids. On consulting with their parents, I’ll call them Y and O going forward.
They offered to pay us. We said no thanks.
I've been thinking about this premise of having it all because I personally don't believe that anyone can really have it all (whatever all means to them). I will say as a person who loves being an auntie, I also yearn to have children of my own. It hasn't happened yet, it may never happen for me and I'm coming to terms with that for myself. I remind myself to enjoy the going home part, and I really do - is there anything better than a full night's sleep after being up all night with a crying child?? Too often the going home part however feels like a cruel reminder that I don't have my own kids. It's a catch 22 of course because if I had my own kids, I wouldn't be able to spend time weekly with my nieces and give them that undivided attention. Sharing that perspective! For those who don't want their own children, I'm sure it feels more like having it all.
As a human who lives several hours away from all the kiddos in my life, I am living vicariously through the idea of living next door 😭 how amazing to see them grow up every day