Welcome! 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 below. It only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other people find my Substack.
As always, read to the end for the Cute Kid Video of the Week!
A few months ago, in the midst of a whirlwind, out-of-state, multi-stop family trip, I paid an overnight visit to some friends who moved away a few years back. They now have a baby and a five-year-old, and I wanted to meet the little one, re-meet the older one, and have a nice long catch-up session with their mom – which I did. Within an hour or two, it was as though we had never been apart.
We were sitting at the dining room table, computers and toys and craft supplies strewn about, when the older child asked if I would like to make a bead lizard.
“What’s a bead lizard?” I asked.
“What do you mean, what’s a bead lizard?” the kid and his mom said in chorus. “You don’t know what a bead lizard is? Where do you live, under a rock? Were you raised completely apart from all human society??”
Okay, that’s not exactly what they said, but I can’t remember the precise words and that’s pretty much what it came down to. They were shocked. They were aghast. Eyebrows were extravagantly raised. My friend, who is a few years younger than me but not that much younger was like, “we made bead lizards all the time when I was a kid. I can’t believe you missed out on this foundational millennial childhood craft activity!”
Okay, so now the child trotted out his homemade bead lizard collection. Then he competently and patiently taught me how to make a bead lizard myself, sharing even the sparkly beads without hesitation. He encouraged me to use whatever colors I liked. He talked me through it when I got stuck or confused. When I made a mistake with the placement of the hindmost opaque orange beads, this wonderful child supported me to embrace disorder, which is a life lesson I always need. He was a truly excellent teacher, and if I do say so myself, I made an excellent bead lizard. Meanwhile, I carried on chatting with his mom, and the baby played happily by herself on the floor, and a lovely time was had by all.
Now, the Auntie Bulletin is a newsletter about building kinship, not crafts, so I’m not going to tell you how to make a bead lizard. If you’d like to learn this fun and easy craft, there are lots of great video tutorials online, including this one that I like because it’s quick and straightforward and the guy is so sweetly proud to have, at some point in the past, posted the very first bead lizard tutorial ever to hit YouTube.
What is My Point?
Aunties, I just like this story. It’s a sweet and peaceful memory – a few hours of quiet in the midst of a truly demanding past several months. It feels like we’re in the midst of a whirlwind currently, with so many unpredictable and scary things going on. We have a responsibility to meet this moment, and lots of wise things have been said recently about how we can do so. But geez, I’m tired. I just want to rest, and connect with my loved ones, young and old. I want bead lizard lessons from a lovely little soul.
It was nice for me to visit with my friends in the midst of a whirlwind trip, in the midst of a whirlwind season, year, era, lifetime. I think it was nice for them to have me there, too. I think making these pleasant, mundane memories together are a big part of how we build kinship. I think this is how we have a good and happy life.
That’s all I have to say about bead lizards right now.
Coming Attractions
This week, I’d planned to bring you a follow up to last week’s Gift-Not-Giving Guide – an essay that will largely be a paean to the radical potential of the white elephant gift exchange. But then, as I said, I hit a wall energy-wise. So I’m going to save that one for after Black Friday. Look for it in early December!
Next week, I’m delighted to be rolling out a new series, Q&As with Aunties of Note, starting with Ten Questions about Auntiehood for Dana Miranda of Healthy Rich and the forthcoming, intriguingly-titled, anti-capitalist personal finance book You Don’t Need a Budget. Dana has so many lovely insights about caring for other people’s children, and I can’t wait to share her perspective with you. Here’s a teaser:
Q: Since you became an Auntie, have you experienced any conflict with the kids’ primary caregivers? What happened?
A: 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.
Three Recommended Reads
One. “In This House/Classroom/Dentist’s Office, I Do the WHOOs”
I’m going to try to include a light and fun recommended read every week henceforward. Here’s my first, ringing endorsement – although it may say something about me that I apply the words “light and fun” to an essay about a children’s picture book in which seven children do something reckless and almost die. But trust me on this one! This here recommended read is hilarious and informative and wonderful and excellent not only for Aunties but also for design nerds who want to think deeply about fonts!
Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen are award-winning children’s book authors who argue, and amply demonstrate in their newsletter Looking at Picture Books, that “picture books are real literature.” Their essay on the Donald Crews picture book, Shortcut, influenced me to buy the book, and I am almost never influenced to buy things. I couldn’t resist! In fact I bought a (used) set of seven Donald Crews books because I was so intrigued!
MAC: When I first started reading this book to my son — who was two-and-a-half —he immediately understood that as those letters got bigger, the WHOOs got louder, and he loved being the train whistle. It’s a great interactive element, a “role” for the child in this very theatrical picture book.
(That is, if you, as an adult, are comfortable delegating some of your storytelling power to children. If you want to maintain total control, you can do the WHOO-ing yourself.)
JON: (And if the child tries their own WHOOs, gently but firmly tell them that you are trying to maintain total control.)
MAC: (“In this house/classroom/dentist’s office, I do the WHOOs.”)
Two. Mapping Our Roles.
Deepa Iyer created a terrific and insightful social change ecosystem map – “for how individuals, collectives, and organizations can try to meet this moment and prepare for what is ahead.” She maps out ten different roles people tend to play in changemaking efforts, and it’s a useful visual aid that’s been helping me think about the value of all the different kinds of roles and skills we can bring to the table.
In her recent post, “Grieve, Connect, Act, Reflect, Correct. (Repeat),” Iyer applies her social change ecosystem idea to the current post-election moment, including briefly describing each of the roles in the intriguing graphic below.
Three. Who Are the Real Freeloaders?
Shane Meyer-Holt has a kid with very high needs, which means his family relies on a large support network of friends, family, and paid careworkers to make it through the day. In a super insightful post for his newsletter Untethered, Meyer-Holt challenges the dominant narrative that paid work is the most valuable work we can do. I’ve thought about this idea a lot before, but the idea that people who don’t do carework are, in a sense, freeloaders, is new to me and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Viewing paid work as the most valuable gift any person can add to the world is grim at best. Yet, when we think about an 80-hour week, we can’t help thinking about how much that person is doing — what’s unlikely to cross our mind is how much that person isn’t doing. Not just for themselves but for everyone else too…
If investing energy into care and connection to maintain social bonds is the glue that holds us together as humans when things start to fall apart, then who are the real freeloaders?
To lean on old tropes, could it be possible that the 70-hour-a-week 90’s stockbroker, who has no time or interest in anything beyond the vortex of corporate life, has actually been leeching for too long off the hard “glue-work” of his stay-at-home wife, the local volunteer librarian, and less busy friends who tend to the networks of care that keep everyone afloat and will tend to his grief when the market crashes?
And Now, the Cute Kid Video of the Week
Behold, a child and her grandmother. The kid acts like an absolute goofball and provokes an outsized, seemingly irritated response from Grammy. We don’t find out until the end that the whole thing has been a game, at which point we perceive how both have been delivering their lines perfectly. Oh, Grammy!
Nothing Sold, Bought, or Processed
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my new favorite substack. thanks for always putting thoughtful, accessible words out into the world. I am a child-free auntie and i'm working on emulating a lot of your practices :)
Agreed. I'm going on year two of being an auntie to a refugee family whose eldest is in 6th grade this year, and we've done a wide variety of activities, but some of the fondest memories I have are the nights that we all just hung out and the older kids practiced reading (THEIR IDEA) with/to me, and their mom kept the younger ones quietly entertained.
Also, these kids absolutely LOVE teaching me words in their native language. (I love it too.)