Navigating Friendship Through Life’s Biggest Transitions

Ann Friedman on Auntiehood, parenthood, and how the one might prepare us for the other.

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 – and the people who love us. You can read my archive here.

Subscribers receive two emails per week. This one, the Friday entree, is a full length essay, and Friday entrees will always be free.

Then on Mondays, look for your Kinship Snacks, which include a weekly how-to, insights and wisdom from the mail bag, recommended reads, and the cute kid video. Kinship Snacks are now for paid subscribers. I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month or $50 for the year.

If you can’t afford to subscribe, you can also support my work by sharing it with friends and family, and by “liking” this post. Liking only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other people find my newsletter. It also helps me out if you share this newsletter with others!

Support Wildfire Relief Efforts

My interview today is with Ann Friedman, whose excellent work I’ll say more about momentarily. This week, though, something I keep thinking about is that she lives in Los Angeles, where wildfires are currently raging through residential neighborhoods, destroying businesses and homes alike. I asked Ann if there are any particular fire relief efforts she’d like to foreground this week, and she directed us to two GoFundMe campaigns for people in her broader circle – both organized by loved ones on behalf of their Uncles and Aunties.

Tommy and Sandra lost their Altadena home of 48 years, and are now staying with a daughter in Palmdale. “They reached their daughter only with the clothes on their backs as everything else was lost to the fire.” Support them here.

Sandra, Tommy, and their daughter Kaylani outside their home of 48 years

Lydia, aka Auntie Mouse Mouse, “is likely the one who has also brought you beautiful home-cooked meals for like no reason at all, sent you care packages, contributed to your art and showed up at all times day and night knowing just what to say or do.” You can support her here.

Lydia and Shiner

I’d also like to call your attention to Priyanka Mattoo’s excellent article, “How to (Actually) Help in a Crisis.” Mattoo lives in Los Angeles and offers clear-eyed, practical guidance for those of us who may be a bit flailing as we try to figure out how to support people affected by the wildfires – and people affected by crises everywhere. The piece begins:

In my extensive experience observing Americans, many who have led relatively uncomplicated lives have very sweet, generous hearts. They also have giant feelings about things, and zero ability to convert these feelings into action items.

Then Mattoo offers some really good action items. I know that long lists of actions to take and people and causes to support can be overwhelming. It’s okay to just pick one thing.

Now Let’s Get To It

Ann Friedman knows a lot about friendship – the wonderful parts and the hard parts alike. If you’ve been listening to podcasts for awhile, there’s a good chance know her podcast with Aminatou Sow, Call Your Girlfriend – “for long-distance besties everywhere.” Beginning in 2014, Ann and Aminatou recorded weekly phone conversations whatever was on their minds – personal topics, pop culture, current events, you name it. The podcast got big. They interviewed Hillary Clinton. They interviewed Gloria Steinem. They interviewed Stacy Abrams. And all along, they kept talking about bestie stuff, to a bigger and bigger audience. Fans would come up to them and share how much they’d learned about friendship from listening in.

As Aminatou and Ann explain in their 2020 book Big Friendship, however, behind the scenes they were struggling as friends. Their lives had diverged in various ways: a health crisis on one side, a new relationship on the other, misunderstandings they didn’t know how to address. Finally, they went to relationship counseling and were able to talk through what had so long gone unsaid — and they managed to reconnect and deepen their friendship in the process. It’s a lovely story.

The kinds of difficulties Ann and Aminatou navigated can arise in friendships for lots of different reasons – including, commonly, when one person becomes a parent. Since I started The Auntie Bulletin, I’ve heard over and over again from parents who feel like their childless friends don’t understand their lives anymore, and I’ve heard just as often from people who don’t have kids who feel like their parent friends left them behind when they had children.

I’m excited to share this interview with Ann Friedman with you today, because she has all kinds of perspective on the challenges that arise when friends start having kids. She’s got the perspective of having navigated – quite publicly, in some ways – through a friendship that hit the rocks but made it through. Not only that, but she was an Auntie for years before she became a parent. She’s seen the Auntie/parent relationship from both sides, and has some real wisdom about what those of us on either side of the divide need to understand in order to keep our friendships strong.

Dig in and enjoy.

Photo by Ryan Schude

When you were growing up, what messages did you receive about who counts as part of your family?

Family was primarily a term used for biological kin. Both my mother's family and my father's family were pretty close to where I grew up in Iowa. One half lived in my hometown, and one half lived like 3 hours away, which, given what I now know about families, is very close, although it seemed like half of them were far away.

My parents were also really embedded in the Catholic church, and so the next tier would be other families who we were friends with through church, most of which had kids similar age to ours. That also met definitions of family in the sense of “these are people who care for each other and show up for each other and spend time with each other and have rituals together.” But my parents wouldn't have used that term to apply to those friends. The way I understand it now, we had both biological and non-biological family, but the word was very much used for those we had a blood or marriage tie to.

The people I identified as church family made the cut through sheer time spent. They were the people I saw my parents rely on. They were the people we spent mundane times with but also saw for religious holidays, the church festival every summer, and so on.

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

It's really simple. People I love had kids. I was an Auntie to non-biological family for a decade or more before I had my own biological nieces. My sister has three-year-old twins, and when those babies were born I was like, “Oh, yes, add them to the pile!” I wasn't like, “I'm now an Auntie for the first time.” The oldest children whose lives I've been a part of, in an Auntie capacity, are 12-13 now.

It's so fun to watch them grow up, isn't it?

I love it. I always tell them, “I'm like God to you. I've known you since before you were born.”

I came to your work backward, chronologically: I became aware of your newsletter first, and then your book, and then your podcast, Call Your Girlfriend. It was fascinating to get that story in reverse order through Big Friendship. You and Aminatou Sow had done this podcast through the lens of your friendship, which many listeners perceived as a sort of friendship ideal. But as you explain in your book, behind the scenes more difficult and painful things were happening. At the end of the book, you relate how couples therapy helped you rebuild your friendship, which is so cool.

So the trajectory that you and Aminatou experienced, of being close and then going through something difficult and then reconnecting – it seems parallel to what happens to a lot of us, either when we have kids or or when friends have kids. Going through that experience before you yourself had children, did that prepare you for when your friends started having kids or for when you had kids?

Absolutely. I am a big proponent of geriatric pregnancy and having kids later, in part because you get to practice the skills that serve you in continuing to be a happy, fulfilled human as you become a parent.

Big Friendship came out in July of 2020, so it was all Zoom and podcasts. We didn't do any kind of book tour. We would get the occasional question – I think because parents were so particularly taxed during the pandemic – where they were like, “It's so intense and difficult to parent. How can you have these lofty expectations for friendship on top of that?” With a few years’ hindsight, I can see that the parents were drowning with no childcare or school.

What we told them then, and what I would still say now, is that there are lots and lots of different things that can challenge a friendship and really mess with how much time you have to devote to it. A Big Friendship, as we define it, is expansive enough to go through periods where one person is – well, maybe not fully checked out, but less able to give time or attention to the friendship. But that cannot last indefinitely; it cannot last 18 years while you're parenting. Maybe it lasts while your child's an infant, or maybe it lasts while one friend is going through a difficult period at their job or moving to a new place.

There are a lot of big events that can disrupt a life. You have to hold that the friendship will change. Not everyone's time to devote to it is going to remain the same. But it can't remain lopsided forever, either, and still be a good friendship. I have been the one to have grace for friends and also I've needed that grace from friends – not just when having a child, but with lots of different things in life. Weirdly, I feel even more evangelical now about continuing to show up for friendship, even through the periods where one of you, or maybe both of you, feels they can't find the time.

You were an Auntie for many years before you became a parent (a little over a year ago). I think of people like you as bicultural, having been on both sides of the Auntie/parent relationship. Has that given you any insights around what Aunties need from parents, and conversely, what parents need from Aunties?

Thank you for the bicultural label! I love it. I do feel that way. And I think that on both sides of the equation, the expectation has to be honesty. By that I mean, when a parent tells you they don't want to accept your offer of help, or when an Auntie tells you, “No, it's no big deal for me to offer this,” or “I'm happy to do that,” you have to take that offer at face value. And by the same token, if one of you is feeling taxed or overasked, you have to be able to articulate and accept that. Where you get into trouble is one party extending themselves and the other not really taking that offer seriously, or someone feeling overextended and like they can't protect their boundary.

Over at her newsletter, AF Weekly, Ann does a weekly pie chart for paid subscribers. If you get a paid subscription to her newsletter — for only $15 a year — you can receive pie (charts) every week!

As a parent, I've had to remind myself a lot that, before I had children, every offer I made was sincere. When I said, “Your daycare fell through today and I'm happy to come watch your kid for an hour,” or “No, it's not a problem to bring them to dinner,” I meant that. I didn't offer it when I didn't mean it. Sometimes that was because I knew spending time with the child was the price of spending time with my friend, and sometimes it was like, “No, I genuinely want to see your kid, too.” But no matter what the motivation was, I meant the offer. So sometimes now, when my friends make an offer to me as a person who's really taxed with an infant, I have to remember to take them at their word. It puts the responsibility on individuals to show up how they want to show up, to ask for what they need, and know that the other person will just say no if it's too much. I do think that goes both ways.

I feel acutely that I'm in a period of life where I'm asking a lot of my community – people with kids, people without kids, everyone. I'm really drawing down. But I do feel confident that they would tell me if it was too much. I also feel secure in the fact that these are relationships that I've put in so much time, so much of myself over the years, that it's okay. I really don't think this is going to be a forever situation where I need the amount of help that I need right now. And that is fantastic. It feels great to be like, I have proven with my experience that it's okay to ask and to extend this kind of offer.

There are so many things I love about that answer, and one of them is just the necessity of taking each other at face value. I feel like the tendency to read into what we're saying to each other can have a huge negative impact on our ability to just show up. And your point earlier about the value of a geriatric pregnancy, I think, is really relevant here. The older we are, the better we have learned that level of maturity. So if somebody says, “I want to help,” I'm going to believe them. If somebody says “I don't have capacity,” I'm not going to take that personally.

I think it can be hard, in your own experience, to accept that it is no big deal for someone else to do a thing that you're finding very difficult. We all bring different things to community, and different things tax different members of the community differently. That is a feeling that I find so comforting – just knowing how different everyone is.

Get it from your library or buy it at Bookshop.org.

I watched a friend's kid yesterday. I love hanging out with kids who are older than my one year old, because they're honestly more fun. I'm not a baby person, which I learned from being an Auntie. But I’m like, “I loved reading to your kid about Greek mythology and having him correct my pronunciation.” Yes, I was doing my friend a favor, but it also helps me orient myself in this decision I've made to be a parent. What I'm doing now is not the whole game. My Auntiehood really allows me to feel the long game in a wonderful way. These psychic rewards are so good for me right now.

Oh man, I love that story! Being a mom of a young baby, which is a notoriously difficult time of life, and then taking care of an older kid – to be energized and find joy in taking care of somebody else's child in that phase of life is a story that we don't often get. But I think it’s true for a lot of people.

So, next topic: Your personal life has been a big part of your public and professional life for big chunks of your career. I'm curious if having kids in your life has changed your orientation to what you're willing to share in public?

Well, I do think my friendship with Aminatou as it was foregrounded in our podcast and in the book, is based on a series of consensual decisions that we made as literal co-authors of that story. It does feel personal, but there are certainly things that transpired – for both of us individually and between us – that we opt not to put in the public record. If it's public, we both feel good about that. Or the times I have written about my partner, he's read it before I published it. I can't think of a time where he's asked me to change anything, but I would. I'm very aware that that's his story, too.

My child is not old enough to read and weigh in, so I try to say as little as possible. Maybe when he's old enough, I'll give him the same opportunity and then he can decide. But I feel pretty strongly that talking about my experience of community while in parenthood, or my experience of pregnancy in my early forties, or whatever it may be that centers me – that's not really about his life or his upbringing. And I'm okay with that. I don't foresee becoming a writer who's chronicling the ins and outs of parenting my child as a specific individual. Maybe that will change when he's old enough to be like, “yeah, sure, cool, I don't care if you write that,” but for now anyway, that's where I draw the boundary.

I can imagine if you ever found yourself getting to that point, there would be a difficult discernment around, “How old is old enough for him to comprehendingly consent?”

My writing life and my creative life are also a long game. If I'm compelled to write about him, which I often am, I just put it aside. I write it, but not everything has to be published immediately, and the venue for everything isn't, “all over the Internet, right now.” I get to decide the venue for that story, if and when I ever want to publish it.

You’re now writing a book about modern adulthood. Has that influenced what you want for the kids in your life?

That's so interesting because the book is explicitly not about childhood.

It has made me think about how I define maturity, especially being close to kids of varying ages in various places, and their relationship to becoming mature people. It's made me think about a different set of criteria than I would have before. For Big Friendship, we interviewed a therapist who said that a lot of American ideas about what it means to be a healthy adult are coded as independent. Can you live alone? Can you pay your own bills? Can you stand on your own two feet? It's all about the individual. But when you look at what makes people happy and healthy for the long term, it's interdependence. Do they have people who they rely on, and who rely on them? Are they accountable to themselves and to others?

I think about that a lot, being around kids. Okay, did you carry your plate to the sink? Cool. But more importantly, did you empathetically look around you and ask the question that needed to be asked about everyone else at the dinner table? It’s more than just, did you take care of your own plate.

Although I also don't think the point of children is to become mature. Kids can just be kids.

That example of taking your dishes to the dishwasher versus looking around to see what needs to happen reminds me of – I saw in a comment section once, a parent was talking about how, in her family they do a routine called “family noticing.” Her kids, when it's time to clean up, they have to practice just looking around and seeing what needs doing and responding to it. And she's raising boys. I just love that framing, especially for men and boys, to pay attention to what needs to happen, and respond. It’s so different from, “put away your dishes.”

Totally, yes. A kid in my life who is 11, about to turn 12, his parents are doing that with him right now. I just saw his mother, who's a close friend of mine, and she was telling me about the exact same thing. This is probably in the ether right now, which is great.

And it's good for me to know! She was telling me because we were catching up on each other's lives, but also because I'm around her child all the time. So if she's doing this at home, this is a thing I'll reinforce when he's in my home.

In other news, you're running a writing workshop soon!

I have a long-running collaboration with my friend Jade Chang, who is a novelist and a screenwriter and an essay writer. Since 2018, we've been doing writing workshops together. We’re doing a few this year, all of which are over Zoom – which has the downside of being Zoom. I mean, we're on it right now. Woof. But the upside is that people can join from anywhere.

Like I said, I'm always interested in the long game. A lot of what we're focused on this year is helping people get into a group, figure out how they write best, build some community to make their own writing practice more possible. The first workshop we're doing is for people who don't yet consider themselves writers, and maybe always wanted to start a practice. And then the second one we're doing is for writers who have a project that they just can't seem to finish, or they know they want to finish but haven't been able to open that document because of that dread they feel.

Jade and I refer to ourselves as the Midwives of Invention. You, the writer, are the mother: you do the actual work, and we are just here to support you. It's a very Auntie-like approach!

Thank you so much for talking to me, Ann!

There are a few spots left in Ann and Jade’s writing class “for people who don’t yet consider themselves writers.” The course starts January 26. Find out more and sign up here.

Ann Friedman is a journalist, essayist, and co-author, with Aminatou Sow, of the best-selling book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close. Also with Aminatou, Ann co-created and co-hosted the podcast Call Your Girlfriend. You can find Ann’s writing in The Cut, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and ELLE, and she is a contributing editor to The Gentlewoman. Her next book, about modern adulthood, will be published by Viking Books. Read her work and subscribe to her popular weekly newsletter at annfriedman.com.

Coming Attractions

This coming Monday, your Kinship Snacks will include “How to Lose at Uno” – which is really about how to have a fun (not boring) time playing games with kids. Other upcoming how-tos include:

• How to respond to owies (or whatever you call non-life-threatening kid injuries where you live)

• How to apologize to a child

• How to burst into song

Meanwhile, I’ve been gathering Auntie Bulletin reader input for an essay upcoming in February, tentatively titled “New Baby Bill of Rights.” I envision a piece that’s less about the rights of the baby (although those are certainly important) and more about the rights of primary caregivers and families to community care. For example, when a friend of mine had a new baby a while back (the inspiration for this essay, actually) I realized that I believe any family with a new baby is entitled to a clean kitchen and a fridge full of tired-parent-friendly food when they get home.

What about you? If you’ve ever brought home a new baby (or indeed, a new older child) I want to know:

• What kind of care did you want and/or need from your communities?

• Any examples of something particularly wonderful that someone did, to which – now that you think about it – maybe all families with a new baby should be entitled?

• What did you NOT want or need from your communities?

• Any examples of something somebody did that you wish they hadn’t – perhaps something that all new families should have a right to be free from?

Be warned, these are open-ended questions, so they’ll take a little more thought and time. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I actually asked you.

I’ll be collecting your ideas all this month. Click below to share your perspective – and be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin!

Nothing Sold, Bought, or Processed

The Auntie Bulletin is an ad-free, anti-capitalist publication that will never try to sell you anything and receives no money from affiliate links. I can only offer it if readers like you voluntarily make modest donations to keep the lights on. If you appreciate what you read here, please take a few seconds right now to become a paid subscriber.

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 shoot me a message in the Substack app or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions asked.