The Past and Future Story of The Auntie Bulletin
A brief history, and some incantations for a world that doesn’t suck.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Aunties. Have I told you lately that I love you? I am crazy about you. I get so many good messages from so many awesome people these days. I am truly grateful that we are all in this together.
A mere six months ago, I was an Auntie On Her Own. Apart from my partner, there was no-one else in my life who chose to be highly involved in the lives of someone else’s kids despite not having kids of their own. And I honestly didn’t know how to make sense of my lived experience of Auntiehood. I also felt like my role was confusing to others – even illegible. I loved having kids in my daily life; I had no doubt about the path I’d chosen; I even felt like my partner and I were doing something potentially important politically, however small. But I didn’t have community around any of it. I suspect many readers know what I’m talking about.
I launched The Auntie Bulletin in September 2024, the result of a series of whims. I had been out of the workforce for a year due to chronic illness, and throughout the summer was trying to figure out what came next. One day I thought, “maybe I’ll start a newsletter.” In retrospect, it was a done deal as soon as I thought it. Then I thought, “maybe it could be about helping to raise other people’s kids.” Again, my heart dropped the “maybe” almost instantly, although my mind took a few weeks to catch up. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop brainstorming. I couldn’t get to sleep at night because I was too excited.1
Now in mid February 2025, my enthusiasm hasn’t diminished. It turns out I love, love, love writing this newsletter. But I’m not an Auntie On Her Own anymore because now, every week, I get to connect with thousands of other Aunties and the people who love us. The comments sections are often amazing. Many hundreds of people have responded to the various Auntie Bulletin surveys. I get emails from wise, thoughtful Aunties all the time. I feel so much more equipped to make sense of my own life and explain it to others than I did six months ago. I feel so much clearer on why what Aunties do is important – and even revolutionary.
I gather some Auntie Bulletin readers have found increasing clarity through this newsletter as well, and I want that to continue for all of us. Next week, I’ll be sharing my plans for helping Aunties and those who love us to connect with each other in 2025 – so it doesn’t all need to revolve quite so much around me. I’m hoping to offer lots of opportunities to weigh in, share your experiences, explore challenges, and celebrate joys together this year.
The Auntie Bulletin isn’t about me, it’s about us – the Auntie Collective. To the extent that this newsletter has gotten traction, it’s because so many of us are out here trying for a better way of doing kinship and family and community. We long to connect with one another, and we long to bequeath a much, much better world to future generations. So I think we need not only an Auntie Collective, but indeed an Auntie Movement. Aunties have something valuable – something precious and rare – to contribute.
A Vision for an Auntie Movement
Daniel Hunter from Choose Democracy has a great way of thinking about the different roles we can play in creating a better future. He says we can 1) help protect vulnerable people and groups; 2) defend civic institutions like schools or departments of public health; 3) disrupt unjust policies and disobey unjust laws; and/or 4) envision and help to build sustainable alternatives. All of these roles are necessary and important, and they often overlap.
Here at The Auntie Bulletin, we’re going all in on envisioning and building alternatives. Rather than responding to each new catastrophe as it arises (which I frankly can’t sustain), I see this newsletter as a place to keep steadily banging the drum for the world we want to live in. I aim to help slowly, purposefully, and lovingly change the cultural narrative about what’s possible – so that two or twenty or even two hundred generations from now, all people might be able to live well supported by their communities, free from exploitation, in a clean and safe and healthy world.
Despite what people like J.D. Vance believe, Aunties and many childless people care deeply about the future. Many of us have chosen not to have children specifically in order to reduce our climate impacts, or even to focus our energies on climate justice and other justice-oriented movements. I also recently learned that childless people make the biggest bequests to charity – which makes sense since we’re less likely to have family members who believe they’re entitled to an inheritance. In fact, I know three different people, all childless, who have committed to return their land to their local Tribe when they die. And their commitment isn’t just about reparations for past wrongs; it’s also about enabling Tribes to help heal local ecosystems for the good of future generations.
Aunties don’t just invest in the future through our public activities, however; we also cultivate a personal practice of caring for other people’s children that may reverberate down through the generations. By virtue of our daily experience, Aunties have a deep, embodied understanding that we’re accountable to all families, all children – not just our own – and we understand that this accountability extends to the families and children of the future as well. J.D. Vance may not be able to imagine a world where people give a damn about children they don’t know, but Aunties sure can. And we model this understanding for younger generations every single day.
Incantation for a Future Where We Don’t Have to Be Afraid
I’ve realized I’m trying to write my own better future into existence — because Aunties, I’m afraid. Here in the U.S. at this moment in history, I’m afraid for my undocumented and transgender friends and neighbors, for my friends who work for the federal government or rely on federal dollars to fund their jobs – and really, for all of us. It is a terrifying, horrifying time to live in the United States. But even if Kamala Harris had won the Presidential election in November, I would still be afraid for myself and many others.
Longstanding economic and social arrangements are precarious for so many of us. I’ve spent much of my adult life engaged in underpaid teaching and care work, and consequently I have minimal retirement savings. I am much more protected than many people – by generational wealth in various branches of my family, by my advanced degrees, by my race and citizenship status and gender and so many other things. And yet I’m afraid of being impoverished in my old age and having no one to care for me – no one who will notice if I need help managing my medications or recognize when I shouldn’t be driving anymore. I’m afraid of winding up in a state-run nursing home like the terrifying hellscape I visited when I was looking for a residential care facility for my grandmother. Unless I can accumulate a lot of wealth, it’s not clear what will become of me when I’m old – and I’m far from the only one.
Thank goodness for a wise story that Robin Wall Kimmerer shared in her new book, The Serviceberry. A linguist was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest.
A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.
Aunties, don’t you long for such security? I do. I want to live in a society where my contributions today will be revisited on me tomorrow, if I’m in need. This arrangement feels so much more stable, more reliable, and more loving than amassing money. I want to be able to store my meat in the belly of my brother and rest assured that I will be fed all the days of my life. I want this for all of us.
I sometimes feel that writing The Auntie Bulletin amounts to writing a desperate incantation for the future. I’m trying to write into existence a society where people know how to love and care for each other so that I will be okay, and my loved ones will be okay, and everyone everywhere will be okay. It’s delusional to imagine it can be done with one weekly newsletter. But what if hundreds, or thousands, or millions of us imagine a better future together, and as we imagine it, we start to figure out how we can build it?
A future where the elderly are loved and cared for, and nobody dies in poverty. May it be so.
And while we’re at it:
A future where parents feel resourced and held, where they can get enough rest, and pursue hobbies, and participate in political organizing and movement-building. May it be so.
A future where all adults can access childful lives, where we are able to love and be loved by members of younger generations our whole lives. May it be so.
A future where all children have multiple loving, trustworthy adults in their lives. May it be so.
A future where kids can spend unstructured time swarming around in multi-aged packs, learning from and teaching each other. May it be so.
A future where all people can skillfully connect across age, ability, social class, language, ethnicity, and belief, where we can build reciprocal kinship-style relations even with people who seem very different from ourselves. May it be so.
A future where we love not only our own children but other people’s children, and other people’s parents, other people’s families, other people’s communities. Where we love other people’s people. May it be so.
All together now. May it be so.
Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin
Coming Attractions
Today’s post was Part 1 of The Auntie Bulletin Strategic Plan – sort of its preface or mission statement. Next Friday in Part 2, we get into specifics. I’ll be sharing a few issues and topics I’m planning to elevate in this newsletter going forward, as well as my plans for building out The Auntie Collective so it’s hopefully less Lisa-centric.
In the meantime, we’ve got Kinship Snacks for paid subscribers coming up this Monday (and every Monday). I am very, very stoked to bring you “How to Burst into Song” in a few days, and other tasty goodies await you this month as well:
How to hold a newborn baby (simple yet profound!)
How to introvert while chronically ill and on vacation with children (ask me how I know!)
How to befriend your elders (we’re branching out! kinship is intergenerational!)
For the Love for Our (Childless) Elders: Auntie Collective Survey
I’m planning a post about loving and caring for our elders as we ought. What would it look and feel like for all of us, regardless of whether we have children, to be supported by intergenerational communities of care from late career to retirement to true old age?
I want to know:
Have you or anyone you know received excellent, loving support during a time of need in adulthood? What happened?
What are your hopes for yourself or your loved ones as you/they age?
Have you or anyone you know received inadequate or no care during a time of need in adulthood? What happened?
What are your fears for yourself or your loved ones as you/they age?
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.
The responses I’ve received so far are gold. I’m so excited to share our Auntie Collective wisdom with 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. It’s affordable at only $5 a month, and it allows everyone to be able to access The Auntie Bulletin, regardless of their income.
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 final 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.
At his excellent newsletter Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni once wrote about what it feels like to write something you truly enjoy: “Suddenly I didn’t need self-flagellation to get work done. I lost track of time, I didn’t want to take breaks, and bedtime became a disappointment because it meant I had to stop. When I’m writing this blog, I feel like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford sticks the Staff of Ra into an underground map at the right time of day and a beam of light shines through the ruby at the head of the staff and it reveals the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Which is to say, I feel like I’m in alignment with the universe, channeling sunlight, illuminating something that used to be unknown.”
MAY IT BE SO!
This feels like the beginning of Spring. I’m so, so grateful for this newsletter. And I look forward to helping it branch out, catch the sunlight and live on and on!