Auntiehood is the Real “Having It All”

Here’s the beautiful thing about Auntiehood: it lets up.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a newsletter for people who are significantly involved in helping to raise other people’s children. You can read my archive here. If you appreciate reading 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 below. It only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other people find my Substack.

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In October 2019, my partner and I bought a house next door to some friends of ours who have kids. 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, our friends’ jobs had just gone fully remote, and they suddenly had no child care. I became the primary person on call to care for the kids when their parents weren’t available, with my partner also doing a lot of filling in. It was very “all hands on deck.”

In those first several months of the pandemic, I was asked to take care of the kids several days a week, 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. When I picture that time, I see myself standing in our shared backyard, a diapered baby on my hip, his big sister 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). The baby, always a guy after my own heart, loved 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.

Yoda mask, 2024. By S., aged 8. Construction paper, marker, painter’s tape, human hair. Hair sourced from the artist’s head without his parents’ permission. Artist’s statement: “Wait, I thought we gave that to Teo on Chris-o-ween, with the big Star Wars gun.” Artist’s sister’s statement: “Chris-o-ween is my favorite holiday that I ever made up.”

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. People would remark that my partner 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 overextended sometimes. Over that first year of the pandemic, our community got a crash course in intentional co-housing and clear communication. But I never doubted that, when asked to take care of kids, I would always say yes if I could. Of course our friends 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 suggested I was doing more than my fair share, I finally put my finger on what felt already more than fair about the fact that I was spending so 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 I’m being rewarded a thousandfold. I get to have kids in my life in a meaningful way even though I don’t have kids of my own.” I was and remain grateful that I don’t deal with sleepless nights or early wake-ups, that I don’t have to pay for childcare or scramble to find childcare in the summer. Alongside the never-ending work actual parents do, the hours I put in at the height of the pandemic weren’t much. They always ended, and I always got to go home to my 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 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 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 go about our lives without kids in tow. We may even find time to do nothing at all.

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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. I’m grateful for the change in pace and I’m thrilled for 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 the kids in our community 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 my partner and I will be there for them. I love loving these kids and being loved by them.

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.