First, thank you to all the people who have reached out with condolences for the loss of my friend Chris, who I wrote about briefly earlier this week. I can really feel your love and care, Aunties, and it means a lot.
Now, as I’ve been mentioning at the top of my posts for the last couple of weeks, I was going to do a live video on Substack with Rosie Spinks. Well, now I have! And it went great, even though my long COVID brain was messing with me and I lost my train of thought a few times. Rosie’s dad had RSVP’ed, so we made funny jokes to each other about how there would be at least one person there — but then the whole time, more and more people kept joining! And then they didn’t leave! They wrote comments and tapped the heart button and everything!
But enough about my neuroses. What you need to know about Rosie is that she’s brilliant and she’s a lovely person and she’s a mom, and she writes one of my very favorite newsletters about care and community building — which is saying something because the field is strong!
We talked about our culture’s false divide between parents and non-parents, how to ask for and receive help; how to start loving “other people’s people, and cultivating an attitude of defiance towards the billionaires who want to wreck, and then leave, planet earth. I came out of this conversation feeling so hopeful and invigorated, and I hope it will make you feel those ways, too.
You can watch the video above or read the transcript below. Either way, settle in. This one’s a banger.
Now Let’s Get To It
Rosie: I'm super happy to be here today with Lisa Sibbett of the Auntie Bulletin.1 We should tell our audience that we've spoken a couple times before and I personally enjoyed it so much and just enjoy your writing so much that I thought it might be fun to do this, which I know is a first for both of us.
Lisa: Likewise! Thank you so much for having me. I'm always excited to talk to you, and it's fun to try out Substack Live.
Rosie: We thought it might be just you and me and my dad, so I think we're doing well.
So there's this interesting overlap of our work: we're approaching the same topic from slightly different angles. You wrote this post some months ago that I think teed this up well. The title of the post is A Tale of Two Surgeon General's Warnings. Many of our readers will know that the former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued two warnings one year apart. And one was that there's an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. And two was that parents are at their breaking point in every way possible, especially parents of young children. So you very rightly and obviously and poignantly pointed out that these two groups need each other. Parents need more help and more support and community. And then people who maybe don't have kids or typical nuclear families need more people in their lives. You wrote, “they need more community to love and be loved by.” So in that sense, we're very much saying the same thing – you, of course, from the perspective of Aunties.
So maybe you can just define that in case some people joining don't know what that is.
Lisa: Yeah, totally. So we've got the word “aunt” in English that directly signals the sister of your parent or else your parent's sibling's wife, which can be a very impoverished term. You could have an aunt whom you've never met in your life. But I like “Auntie” because I think of it as a very capacious term. I capitalize it to try to confer some authority on it, because Aunties are often marginalized in our society, an afterthought.
The way I think about Aunties is as alloparents, which is a technical term from evolutionary biology. It often is used to talk about species of animals where individuals who help care for offspring may not be the actual parents. That same thing happens in human societies. It's not just aunts or Aunties and uncles. It's also grandparents, step-parents, godparents, friends of the family –
Rosie: Neighbors.
Lisa: Neighbors, all of the people who make up that village and are, we hope, able to help raise children. My personal opinion, and Rosie, I would imagine you agree with me, is that you've got to have alloparents. You've got to have Aunties in order for the raising of children to be a sane proposition in the society we live in.
Rosie: Yeah, a sane proposition is a good way to put it. That actually tees up what I wanted to say next, which was that the reason this whole topic happened for me is because when my son was born, I spent a lot of time on parenting Reddit. So, late nights not sleeping, feeding my son, scrolling on my phone. The refrain you hear over and over is, “I have no village.” It's this sad shorthand. Everyone on these subreddits knows what people mean when they say they have no village. And what they usually mean by that is that they don't have grandparents or immediate family living nearby, who are obligated to help in most cases.
So I think we both would push back on that. What are those people missing when they think of the village in that narrow way?
Lisa: I think we've been socialized to think of “family” as the nuclear family. We have very narrow definitions of who even counts as “us.” My argument would be that we need to massively broaden the amount of people that we think of as our “we.”
In fact, I was just looking back at your post on How to Build a Village, Rosie, where you were quoting Kurt Vonnegut talking about how we need people. He said that two people – he was talking about marriage – isn't enough. He said we need 50 people in our lives. And I think that's about right.
I went through a period where I was lurking around on the parent Reddit also, and I found this sub called absent grandparents. There were so many parents who were just so sorrowful and frustrated that their own parents weren't available to be involved with their children.
What I would hope is that regardless of whether your parents are nearby, that as a parent you can resource from a broader community than your actual biological or legal relatives. And so thinking about, well, who are the people who love me? Who are the people who want to have my back? Who are the people who have offered to help?
Rosie: We might think of that as a New-Agey chosen family thing, but if you look at the anthropological research on modern hunter-gatherer tribes – these are people who live something close to how humans have lived for most of human history – the alloparenting that's happening in those contexts, at least for some of the tribes that have been studied, are not the grandparents. The grandparents actually often aren't that involved for all sorts of reasons, including sometimes because they have other little kids of their own that they're taking care of. Instead it's other moms, it's neighbors, it's adults who don't yet or don't have children. So it's actually not weird or super modern. Actually this is how we're supposed to do it.
We've talked about the geographic proximity principle – that should be the starting point.
Lisa: Right, whoever's close is where you're going to be able to source – literally next door, or on your street, or within a few blocks. People who can be at your house in five minutes.
Rosie: Another thing that comes up in the village discourse is this snarky argument that people make, like, oh, the village is code for people who have kids and suddenly want other people who don't have kids to help them. All of a sudden they're like, “I need help,” and the accusation is, “Before they had kids they weren't showing up for me.” I'm not saying any one person says this, but there's just this vibe that “parents go on and on about the village because they just want free help.” This whole discourse points at this parents versus non-parent divide that we've talked about before, which I think is the biggest stumbling block in solving this problem.
Lisa: Ruby Warrington – I happen to have her book, Women Without Kids, sitting right here, so let me give her a well-deserved plug – talks about this as the “mommy binary.” She writes about it as a false dichotomy where either we are choosing to have kids and there's all kinds of narratives tied up with that about being a good and natural woman. Or else we are opting to not have kids, which totally leaves out all of the people – including a huge percentage of readers at The Auntie Bulletin – who are involuntarily childless or for whom it's just complicated for them in some way.
As a side note, I have a survey for new readers at the Auntie Bulletin and one of the questions is, “Are you involuntarily childless?” The answers are “yes,” “no,” or “it's complicated,” and a huge number of people select “it’s complicated.”
So I think that that binary is problematic. And also, it's not one-sided.
A lot of parents read and comment on The Auntie Bulletin, and I'm thrilled to have them there because it feels like a place that’s not just for alloparents, it's for conversation between alloparents and parents – where we're all on the same team trying to figure out how to do this well. So parents will say, “Where's my village? I feel abandoned. I had a baby and now my friends who don't have kids are off gallivanting to Paris without me.”
But then the non-parents are equally as heartbroken and confused and feeling abandoned. They say, “All my friends are having kids and they don't invite me to anything and they're hanging out talking about their kids and I don't fit in anymore.”
So it’s parents feeling their friends without kids don't want to spend time with them anymore, and people without kids feeling the parents don't want to spend time with them anymore. And I say this with love, but all of that thinking is actually delusional. Everybody does want to keep spending time together, but it's just hard to figure out how to navigate through the transition of one or more children coming into the picture and upending the lives of the parents or primary caregivers.
Rosie: We've also calcified these identities of parent versus non-parent. I feel weirdly qualified to talk about this, because people who know me, when I announced I was having a child, were probably like, “Really? You?” I was not a likely candidate, let's put it that way. COVID changed a lot of things about my life.
When I was in my 20s, when I was very ambitious and very career-driven, I did see it as an either-or. I didn't know there was anything in between being selfish, career-driven, travel, sleep, do whatever I want, versus completely disappear into motherhood. Those seemed like the only two options.
I sometimes feel sad that if I had never had a child, which was a very viable possibility for me, I hope I would have figured out a way to have not just kids, but the act of caregiving in my life. It’s not being a mother that's changed my life, it's learning what care is. And care just didn't have any place in my old life.
You've written that you want to help people realize that there's a huge range of options for how to have kids in your life. I just think that's so beautiful. It's something I hope I would have figured out had I not had a kid, and you write about it so nicely.
Lisa: Thank you! It's a real hope that I have for all people who don't have children, especially childless women but every gender, that even if we don't have children, we still get to have what I've started calling a “childful” life. Because the discourse is either you have children or you’re childfree. The narrative about “childfree” people is that you've decided to just travel and have dogs that you refer to as your children [Note: No shade to people who love their dogs!]. Or else you're “childless,” which usually denotes involuntary childlessness. But for me, I felt like none of those labels describes me. I don’t have kids of my own but I've got so many kids who are part of my life. And as you say, that work of care is transformational.
Actually, I have a hard time – I totally understand where people are coming from and I empathize – but there’s this huge discourse in our society right now about lack of meaning and lack of connection, and I don't identify with that at all. I feel like my life is just full of meaning and connection, if anything to the point where it's hard for me to hold it all, you know?
I think that’s available for people, but we have to be brave to try to make offerings to the people that we love and be willing to have them say no and then try again. And we have to be lucky, as in lucky to have people in our lives who are willing to accept us as kin. And we have to be persistent, you know?
But I wouldn't have my life be any other way. I don't think I would thrive as a parent, but I also definitely would not thrive if I didn't have kids in my life.
Rosie: Also just to see it as a shared project. When you're a writer and you become a mother, there's this moment where you're like, “Okay, am I going to write about motherhood now? Am I going to make that jump?” Some people take a hard line and don't write about it at all, and then some people go fully into it. The way I've tried to make writing about motherhood interesting to people who may not want to or may not be able to have children, is to focus on the transformation of being a caregiver.
The reason I needed that – I’m not saying everyone does – is that the values our culture has are very individualistic, consumerist, with a linear or even exponential mindset. There is just no place for care in that. Because care is not productive, it's not good for the economy. We literally hide carework, and the people who do it we either underpay or don't pay at all.
Something I think about a lot is how much the level of support – or lack thereof – for new mothers shapes the world that we live in. The amount of support a new mother or parent has is in direct relationship with their ability to care for their child in the earliest weeks, months, and years that are so crucial to their development, and that dynamic literally shapes who we become. Not only that, we were all once that little baby! So caring for children is the most universal topic. Once I saw that I was like, “I don't need to even have this debate with myself about how I'm going to write about this. Because this is everyone. It's not even a ‘topic.’ It's who we are.”
Lisa: I think that's right. Going back to Kurt Vonnegut for a second, in this commencement speech many years ago, he said something about how a man needs more than one person in his life and a woman needs more than one person in her life. He wasn't thinking across the gender spectrum, but he was making that argument. However, he wasn't coming from a woman's perspective, where women tend to understand more that a lot of what we need is specifically about care work. [Note: Although people of all genders can and do understand this!] One of the things that we really need all those people for is raising children. It's more work than two people can do. You wrote about this recently. Throughout human history, we haven't had just two people doing the care work – let alone one person, as in a single-parent household.
Rosie: And it's not just that, it's finding food, shelter, and the equivalent. It's all of the work that modern parents have to do. It’s actually insane cooking dinner every night, cleaning it up every night. It's way too much work for two people to do. It's so normalized that we think that way, but then everyone wonders why they're struggling so much.
In our household, we get to the end of lots of conversations – which are sometimes maybe arguments – by just saying “this is a not-enough-people problem.” The problem here isn't you, it isn't me. We are having this difficult moment because we're doing something with not enough people. It always helps when we identify that. It’s like, “okay, that's actually what we were fighting about.” And that's what Kurt Vonnegut was speaking to, what people fight about specifically in a marriage. They’re saying, “You're not enough people.”
So let's talk about something super practical for a second. We both hear this from our readers, questions about the how, the nitty-gritty. “How do I offer help? How do I ask for it? How do I accept it?”
You wrote this beautiful primer that you crowdsourced on how to support new parents. I was touched by that post, because it's one of those things that you get obsessive about when you're about to have a baby, like, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do?” You get all this advice from other mothers. But to hear someone who hasn't gone through that put as much care into figuring out how to show up for parents, that's the energy we need in this world and this conversation.
So maybe we can both say from our writing and conversations with readers what we've come upon as the best way to ask for and offer help.
The big one for me, and I've learned this in my own life, is that first you’ve got to accept the help. Sometimes help comes in the form of an invitation: “Do you want to come over for dinner?” It might not be a literal offer of babysitting.
Actually, I have a friend who offered to do a playdate for my son tomorrow because of something I have going on this week. I was in this headspace of, like, “Can I say yes?” Because next week I actually can't take her daughter, and we often do a one week/one week trade. So I was tempted to say no because I couldn't reciprocate. But she offered out of nowhere when I told her something that was going on. I had this chat with myself, like, “I'm going to say yes because it actually would be helpful. I have done this for her, I will do this for her in the future, and I want her to say yes when I offer.” So I think it starts with modeling. By accepting help yourself, you make it okay for other people to do the same thing.
Like when you're sick and someone offers to go to the store but you could use Instacart, don’t. Take them up on the offer! You could use Amazon, you could use any number of things, but don't do that. Say yes. You will probably make their day better and you will feel taken care of, too, which is a nice feeling.
Lisa: Totally. It makes such a huge difference. I'm going to use an example that's not about kids, but it makes such a huge difference in our well-being and our sense of connection to actually offer and ask for help, you know?
My neighbors across the street had to go out of town for a month, and they love their car. They're not wealthy people but they have a nice car and they asked me to watch it while they were out of town. Here in Seattle we recently had a big warning that we might have a once in a lifetime hail storm where we were going to get hail the size of baseballs. I called up my neighbors – I have never helped them out very much before but they asked me to watch their house and their car – so I was like, “There might be this huge hailstorm, it might wreck all our cars.” They were like, “Ack! Anything you can do!” My partner and I ended up going through this whole process to protect their car, and they were so grateful. Even though we've lived across the street from each other for five or six years, it feels like we're much tighter now. There’s this fellow feeling among us that wasn't there before. We got to connect through that act of offering some help that was a little bit inconvenient. I feel once you start doing that you get addicted to it. It just feels so much better. I was honestly really grateful for the opportunity to help them out.
Rosie: In my brain, it went from having these moments of, “Oh, this means I'm going to have to call someone.” I know this sounds terrible, but COVID did this to my brain. I think it did it to a lot of people where I felt that I couldn't ask for help. I would just instinctively shy away from those moments where there was – in the Friendship Problem piece I called it “friction.”
In the years since, every time I felt a point of friction and I would feel the impulse to say “Ugh, no,” I would be like, “Wait, go towards it, go towards the friction. Have the conversation with your next door neighbor when you don't feel like it.” Where I live in Yorkshire, neighborhood small talk is a thriving industry. So you have to talk to everyone on your street.
I actually saw a quote this week. I'm struggling to remember who it was from, but the gist was that community isn't something you build after you have all your needs met. It’s not that you’ve done all your stuff and then you go build community. Community comes from the act of needing other people and offering things to them. It comes from the friction and interaction and the reciprocity – it’s from there that you get community.
Lisa: And that's where we get the loneliness epidemic. We're outsourcing the community care that we would otherwise get. We're outsourcing it through apps and removing the friction from our lives.
Rosie: And the friction's where a lot of the good stuff is. Like, I'm in full gardening mode now, and it's just all friction, but it's so gratifying. It's such a myth that we've been fed that removing all sources of friction from our lives will make things better.
So I want to zoom out a bit and maybe go back to your amazing comment earlier, where you were like, “I don't have a lack of meaning in my life.”
Lisa: That was so smug! I’m sorry, everyone!
Rosie: No, I thought it was great. Something I think about a lot is, is this all enough? I've put forth this argument that care work is the most meaningful work we can be doing right now. It's certainly the most attainable, and just obvious. It’s also selfish, because your life gets better when you know more people who live nearby and you get last minute invites and all this stuff. But then it also helps us navigate having something to do, whether it's protecting your neighbor's car or whatever else. Caring for others does take the edge off this chronic feeling of oppressive uncertainty – shout out to this week. And at the same time it's preparation for what might come. But I still second guess myself sometimes and think, Is this enough? Am I doing enough? I wonder how you think through that.
Lisa: Just to add to the framing of the question, we advertised this Substack Live as thinking about building kinship in the context of collapse, and I don’t know about others, but here in the United States, it feels like collapse is well underway. It’s a scary and infuriating time to be living in the U.S. In your Friendship Problem post, you wrote that we have to “constantly consume and metabolize horrific world events,” and that “our brains were not designed to operate this way.” I feel like that is so true.
So then how do we do enough when it's hard to not be living with our bodies just flooded with cortisol all the time? When is it ever enough? Because we're completely flooded with every crisis that is happening around the world.
There's this terrific philosopher, Hailey Huget, who's recently started writing on Substack. I love her newsletter. Everybody should definitely check it out. She’s a union organizer, and she recently wrote about how, no matter how much people are contributing to their union, they always feel they're not doing enough. She's done a lot of organizing faculty members at universities, and she wrote about how tenure-track faculty often want to be advocating for the custodians and the adjunct instructors and those with less power in the institution, but they start to burn out. She asks them, “Can you imagine yourself working at this pace for the next 20 years?” They say no. And then she suggests that you need to work on the thing that is for yourself so that you can be motivated to keep going, and also think about, what's the thing that's going to benefit me and also benefit the people with less power than me? So in the context of higher ed, maybe it's advocating for childcare for all university staff. As opposed to trying to fight other people's battles. So then what are the battles that we can fight in solidarity? And what are the things that we can advance from our own hyperlocal little place?
It was helpful for me to read her talking about how it will never be enough. I do get very caught up in thinking I'm not doing enough. Especially as a person with a chronic illness, I often feel very limited in my physical and energetic capacity. But I actually suspect most people feel that way, whether they're sick or not.
Rosie: I feel like the whole question of news consumption, for me, is informed by the years I spent as a journalist. I was so informed when I was doing that work. This was the heyday of Twitter, and I knew about everything, but I wasn't doing anything. I'm not shitting on journalists here, that work is important, that's not my point. I am saying that the act of being so informed took away my ability to do much of anything, whether it was taking care of my neighbors or even picking one issue I cared about.
There’s an author called Douglass Rushkoff. He's interviewed a lot of tech billionaires – broligarchs, basically, that's his beat – and he explains that their plan – legitimately, it's not a pie in the sky – the thing they talk about over beers, their literal plan, is to leave this planet. So it's, get rich, juice all the money and resources and everything we can out of this world, and then get the hell out of here. Rushkoff is spending time in these circles, and he's saying they're very genuine about it.
So my response when I hear that, it just makes me want to be as human as humanly possible. I don't want to live till I'm a hundred. I don't want to be more efficient. I don't want to be more productive. I just want to revel in humanness and what that means and the friction of it and the delight of it. I'm increasingly feeling like even doing that and modeling it for others and supporting other people through that, that's important work. Just fighting to have a baseline, honest, varied human existence with joy, pleasure, pain, all of it. I find that, weirdly, there's a defiance to this that I am enjoying right now – or not “enjoying,” that's the wrong word, but this just feels like the right space for me to be in.
Lisa: I actually feel like “joy” is an apt word. I've been feeling it too, particularly in the U.S. since our current presidential administration began. I've been feeling so defiant; I think that's a good word. I'm fed up with elected officials, actually in both parties, for the most part. I just don't trust them to advance our interests and be brave.
There's something liberating about being like, “You know what? We're going to build what we need right here in place. We're going to create the conditions for some of the politicians to maybe be brave sometime in the future.” We've got a few politicians being brave in the United States right now, but most of them I think are being pretty craven. I want to just disconnect from the hope that the track that we're on is going to work out.
When you were talking about how the billionaires want to actually leave this planet, that was making me think about your brilliant post about becoming “collapse aware”. I wonder if you could just talk about that, because I feel that post had some counterintuitive joy as part of becoming collapse aware.
Rosie: The collapse aware piece came from a feeling that I had exhausted every other option. I was a good socially-conscious millennial all throughout my 20s. I was very online, I was very plugged in, I was super feminist. If you wanted to know about something that was going on, I was your girl. I did all the things you're supposed to do – signed the petitions, voted, posted the things on Instagram. And what happened from 2010 to 2020, which was when I turned 30, was that it didn’t get better. So then COVID hit, and it was like, “Okay, that's not the path. I'm not going to do that anymore.” That's when I quit journalism.
And I no longer think, “Oh, if we just get the right Democrat in power, this will all turn around. It feels vanishingly unlikely that that is going to happen. And as I say in the piece, that's because the fundamentals that our entire society is built on – not just America, but the entire modern Western industrialized world – they aren't good fundamentals. They're not going to work. So once I allowed myself to believe that and stopped thinking that the tweaks around the edges could turn it around, it was like, “Okay, well then holy shit, what comes next?”
And as I say in the piece, all in the midst of this, I had a kid. And I learned about this capacity within me, which is caregiving, that's within all of us. So then I was like, “This is the piece that I didn't get before.” This wasn't in my life before, but now raising a child has changed my understanding of what we are here to do.
Sometimes I feel like talking about the idea of collapse, you come out of the closet as kind of like a crazy person. When I published that piece I was uncommonly nervous. But I found out a lot of people are feeling this way and I'm not the only person writing about it. And you're not alone if you feel like this is fundamentally not working. I felt a lot of hope just in that – that I wasn't alone in feeling that.
There's this idea in the piece, which comes from Tyson Yankaporta [Lisa furiously starts making heart-shaped hand signs], who's an Aboriginal scholar who I interviewed a couple of years ago. He has this great book called Sand Talk, which I know you love, Lisa. In my interview with him, he talked about what he calls the “thousand year cleanup.” He argues we have to adjust our timescales. We're not trying to turn things around by the next election cycle or by the next decade. In Aboriginal tradition and storytelling, the timescales are much longer than we are accustomed to thinking on.
So it can be helpful to really zoom out and say, what am I doing here? What am I participating in? And I think that thousand year cleanup is where that defiance comes from. I might not see what I want to see in my lifetime, but I still feel motivated to live in that deeply human way I was talking about before – as a big “eff you” to the tech billionaires who want to leave.
Lisa: Totally! And I feel like it's so liberating to me to think on that thousand year timescale. Like, okay, the billionaires have left. Bye bye! Take your generation ships, see you later! And then we can clean up. But we can also start cleaning up now, and start building the world that we want to live in now, in our hyperlocal micro little neighborhoods.
Something really important to point out about becoming collapse aware – I've really been taking up that way of thinking as well since you wrote about it, Rosie – is that I think there are people on the left who have a very nihilistic attitude about collapse. Like, “let's just let it burn.” There were far-left people who were not voting in the US presidential election because they were like, “Just let Trump get elected. Let it get as bad as possible. We're just going to have to go through the dark land to get to liberation on the other side.” I think that has a very destructive energy.
I don't think that's what you're talking about, not at all. What you’re talking about, and what Tyson Yunkaporta is talking about, is very generative. Like, “Let's start building the world we want to live in right this minute, building things that are beautiful, and hopefully future generations a thousand years from now will get to live in a different world.” And it will be getting better as we go along. Some people talk about the idea of progress as sort of a delusion, but I think it depends on what you mean by progress.
I also want to put in another plug for the Aunties here. Those of us who don't have kids of our own – which is not to say that all Aunties don't, a lot of Aunties are also like grandparents or whatever, step parents, foster parents – but whether you have children of your own or not, you can love and care for future generations.
In fact, I know a lot of people who have chosen not to become parents because of their love for future generations – because they want to dedicate their time to building a better world, or because they're fearful about bringing kids into the world that we live in now.
I also think Aunties are really good at loving other people's children. That gives us the muscle of also loving children who may be many generations down the road.
Rosie: So part of the task of being a parent or an Auntie is to help kids see the difference between – in the piece I call it “here” and “there.” There are the values that they're going to experience on TikTok or maybe in school or just out in the world, and that's unavoidable. But there's another set of values that you can show them. You can really help them feel that human, varied, complex, joyful existence. Don’t impress upon them the importance of being a perfect citizen under capitalism so that they can fight tooth and nail to survive under this shitty system. The work is to straddle those two worlds and also start imagining how things might look different in 30 or 40 years, in small ways and big. That work starts to come full circle.
As we said in prepping for this Live today, when you're writing about care you're writing about collapse and vice versa.
Lisa: I think that in a lot of ways, the work starts with remembering our ability to do kinship and have distributed relationships with people who are not just our immediate three or four people who live in our house,
Rosie: And not just kids, but older people, single people, intergenerational groups.
Lisa: For a long time, I've been writing about “other people's children.” That's actually a phrase from the education researcher Lisa Delpit that I think is really powerful, and it’s very important for Aunties, being oriented toward other people's children. But I’ve been broadening that lately, thinking about other people's elders and just other people's people. That phrase, “other people's people,” has been feeling so necessary and powerful to me. If we are loving other people’s people, then we are building the world we need to live in.
Rosie: Well, I have to say, I'm shocked that 87 people joined this call. I was totally not expecting that. Before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts?
Lisa: Oh man. I don't know if I'm capable of gathering my thoughts. I'll just say that I just really appreciate this conversation with you and I really appreciate your wisdom. I'm looking forward to sharing this conversation on The Auntie Bulletin. I think that there are going to be a lot of people who weren't able to be here today who are going to want to join in this conversation, so I hope that those people will weigh in in the comments!
What about you? Do you have any summative statements?
Rosie: Nothing particularly profound, but I will say just a further plug for your writing. I, as a parent of a child, get good parenting tips from your newsletter. You've got so much good stuff there for people to check out. I loved the one about how you handle gifts because that's a big point of anxiety in my parenting life. It's like, “I don't want so many gifts! How do we cut down on this?”
Lisa: Yeah, the TL;DR on that one is to just opt out completely. Just do it, everybody will still love you.
Rosie: So go subscribe and check out Lisa's writing because it is truly a gift.
And thank you, Lisa. And thank you everyone for joining. I'm very flattered that you all spent some time with us today.
Lisa: Me too! Thank you so much, Rosie, and thank you, everybody.
Collecting the Wisdom of the Aunties: Complicated Mother’s Day
Here in the United States, next month is Mother’s Day – a holiday that can be really hard for a lot of people, including those who have hard or nonexistent relationships with their own mothers, those who would like to be mothers but are not, those who are parenting under impossible conditions, and those who have lost a child. My friend Ryan Rose Weaver, who runs a support group for survivors of perinatal loss, refers to this holiday as Complicated Mother’s Day, which seems just right to me.
If Mother’s Day is complicated or rough for you, how so? This month’s survey consists of just this one open-ended question. Feel free to think outside the box.
I’ll be collecting your ideas for the month of April. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.
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Thanks for reading all the way to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to financial hardship, you can reply to this email, shoot me a message in the Substack app, or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a 12-month paid tier subscription, no questions asked.
Technically Rosie was the host and I was the guest, which is why she was the one introducing me up top.
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