I resonate with this essay SO deeply. I think I would love being a parent but as you put it, I don’t think I would thrive. My heart is still open to the idea but my uterus, less and less. And I ADORE being an auntie!
An ongoing conversation I have with my mom is how to relate to my nephew. She seems perplexed by how easily I’ve become friends with him. Finally I told her: “You’re more interested in adult conversation than I am. You love talking to adults, and I get bored and want to go play with Lego instead.” I am relieved and delighted that it’s now socially acceptable for me to take a break from adult society to do a craft or play a game. I used to have to rely on friendly dogs or cats to be my buffer; now I can go hang with the kid(s). At one such occasion, my nephew said to me, “you know, I sort of think of you more like a kid than a grown-up.” I was honored.
Oh geez, that is an honor! And I totally hear you about hanging with pets -- I feel like this is what the sensitive, neurodivergent introverts do at parties until we get old enough that our friends start having kids. :)
That's really interesting. I think, reflecting on your comment, I've realised I'm the opposite. I've always been better with adult conversation, even when I was a child. I often felt left out amongst other children so hung with the adults instead. Now I find it very challenging to connect with children. I have to really get to know them before I feel comfortable, and get a sense that they feel comfortable with me.
I bet certain kids in your life really appreciate the way you show up, Rosie -- especially those who are a lot like you when you were a kid.
As you've no doubt noticed, just like adults, some kids take a lot longer to warm up than others. Being a high school teacher and working in a school where students had many different teachers throughout the day was a good education for me: different kids need different kinds of adults. It's actually a huge benefit when there are adults around with different energies, including folks who take awhile to warm up. This normalizes difference for children, which is good for their individual development and also good for building a society where everyone can be accepted for who we are.
I love yielding the stage, so to speak, to the kids I serve as an auntie or occasional source of outside-the-home entertainment to. I theorize, but don't know, that the adults in their homes don't have the bandwidth/time/whatever to just listen to them talk. And their constant chatter means all I have to do is listen and provide brief reactions, like "wow!" and "oh!" SO MUCH EASIER than leading the conversation.
I love this point, Sadye, and it's one I've been thinking about a lot recently -- especially since Dana Miranda talked about it in her Auntie Bulletin Q&A in late November.
Some of the most emphatic feedback I got about that Q&A, IRL from my loved ones, was that Auties provide a valuable service that parents often just don't have the juice for. We can come in and take over with a full tank of attention and enthusiasm when parents are worn down from just trying to get kids out the door or get meals on the table. In this way, everyone has their role to play, and Auntie is a really important one!
And yeah, it's such a relief sometimes to just let kids natter on. I like it when they tell me to pretend I'm sleeping. I'm like "YOU GOT IT KID." That's one game of pretend I can get behind.
This is beautiful. And I think that your thesis here can be extended to other areas of life. It made me think of how I did very well academically in college, but have never gone to grad school (despite working at a university where I could get a degree for free). I've often had to tell people that I was a good student, but I was not good at BEING a student. I could be very successful under duress because I cared deeply about learning, but I took way more time than necessary on every assignment, cried while writing every paper, and hated every second of academic reading. Academia needs me to be a person I am not (organized and focused). It's not a good fit. I'm still interested in learning things and discussing complex topics occasionally- I just can't do it full time.
What I'm saying is, it sounds like many sensitive, neurodivergent introverts would be amazing parents, but it's also valid to say, "full-time parenting isn't a good fit for me." And I like that you're introducing an alternative to the binary of "parent or not-a-parent." You can be a person who does lots of "parenting" without doing it full time.
Thank you, Jeannie. Academia is such a great parallel example -- many people can do university well (take it from me, I've spent a lot of time in grad school) -- but that's not the same thing as actually LIKING it. The better we know ourselves, the better we can make choices that will be an actually good fit. And I for one find it so liberating that we don't have to capitulate to the "parent/non-parent" binary -- because Auntiehood is available!
Feeling so seen by this essay! I love being an aunt more than anything and appreciate having the patience and time to just enjoy my nephews and get into their worlds. My AuDHD makes it hard to imagine being a parent. When I’m dysregulated I’m a cranky, anxious mess and I don’t want a kid to ever absorb that or feel like it’s their fault. I’m only recently realizing and taking pride in the fact that the spoons I’m saving not having kids are resources I can dedicate to my nephews and their parents (especially the moms, who shoulder much of the mental loads despite having devoted and enlightened spouses). I’ve even been able to help explain a kid’s sensory issues to their parent so it was clear the kid was uncomfortable and not misbehaving. I love having the energy and compassion to be the kind of adult I wish I’d had more of when I was young: the kind who accepts me for who I am and delighted in the unmasked me. Thank you for writing this!
One of the unexpected things I have found out that I love so much about writing The Auntie Bulletin, Natalie, is finding people with whom I have so much in common! I so appreciate your point about being able to explain a kid's sensory issues to their parent -- it occurs to me now that I've done the same. My sister still talks about how, when her oldest child (now 8) was little, I explained how hard transitions can be for neurodivergent people like me and said child, and how transformative that was for her parenting. It's a really good point that I'm now definitely going to include in an upcoming post about Auntie-ing with disability.
Highly sensitive parent of two boys here who did not find your post offensive AT ALL. (Those caps are emphasis, not sarcasm!)
Indeed, before I had kids I found myself drawn to careers where I worked with kids -- children's magazine editing and teen services in a library -- and now that my kids are out of the intense baby/toddler years I find myself drawn to that work once again as a sexuality educator for 4-6 graders. I always knew the work I did with kids was valuable, but now that I'm a mother, I understand exactly HOW valuable it is to have another adult as a guide and ally for your kids.
I love the idea here that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, that if parenthood isn't a good fit doesn't mean you don't have a ton of value to offer to kids (and by extension, parents). I am so grateful for my friends and family who have decided not to have children -- they can bring a kind of energy and nonjudgmental attention to both kids and parents that other parents, so wrapped up in their own parenting insecurities and busyness, can't always provide.
Your point here is emerging as a theme for me lately, Lacey: that Aunties bring certain things parents often can’t. I truly hadn’t recognized this until I started this newsletter, but a whole bunch of people have brought it up and I think it’s such a valuable insight.
Exactly this: “I can have these deep, loving, intergenerational friendships – and I can show up for my parent friends when needed – because Auntiehood is a part-time gig. My sensitive, neurodivergent, introvert superpowers make me a great Auntie, but I also suspect they might make me a pretty distressed parent.”
Also me: reading bedtime stories to a friend’s toddler five minutes into my party this week.
I thought for a long time that loving kids = desire to be a mother. When my marriage ended and that option slipped away, I grieved it like a death. But my life branched in unexpected ways, and I ended up with a partner with two delightful, independent children and lots of little ones in my extended circles. And small doses of fab kids turned out to be just the right amount for me.
I feel like winding up with a partner who has kids can be a totally sweet setup. Like, I have joked with friends that we should each have kids with someone we don't want to be in a relationship with, then we each couple up with someone else and we're all part-time parents.
And "small doses of fab kids" is, I suspect, the right amount for a lot of people, but that option is rarely made visible to us!
Thanks for this great post Lisa. I too love parties basically only if I can leave when I want without consequence.... Sounds pretty entitled when I read that in print!
I'm sure you don't need to be pointed to this article in the New Yorker but sharing anyway.
Laurie Paul's work on 'Transformative Experience' uses the example of contemplating whether or not to have children.
Love this great piece even though I get some FOMO having been labeled a Highly sensitive neurodivergent 'Extrovert' rather than introvert but could relate to so many of your wisdom points! Happiest holidays to best bulletin around!
I also had some feelings about this! Not necessarily about how you wrote about it, Lisa, but I think about the larger idea of introversion and extroversion, and how labels can make communities that mean to feel open and permeable actually feel a little closed off, for those who don’t use the label. I read Susan Cain’s QUIET, which is largely about the power of introverts, with some friends last year, and we came to the conclusion that like most binaries that are really spectrums, the introvert/extrovert binary is only helpful as far as it allows you to understand yourself and your needs better, and find communities that support you. I have never really felt like an introvert or an extrovert, fully, because I would articulate my relationship to other people as this: because I am deeply sensitive to other people’s presence and their needs (hi, it’s me, the eldest daughter, you guessed it), I deeply love other people and have a strong appreciation for them. This same trait makes it draining to be around people for too long. I guess my worry about the introvert/extrovert false binary is that culturally, it seems like the understanding is that introverts are people who are “too tired by others” or “don’t like interacting with others” when really it has become an umbrella term for people who interact with others in non-normative ways (“normal” being a slippery slope here, I know… but I guess for me that includes open canceling of plans because I “don’t have bandwidth”, hangouts where we sit in silence doing our own things, and conversations without some of the expected pleasantries). Rather than being a personality label, introvert/extrovert feels like a label that describes a mode of interacting with the world — which might change depending on the people, one’s energy levels, the environment, so many things — and therefore is perhaps more fluid than we, as individuals scooping up our chosen labels, might allow our self-perception to be. Wow, this got really long, but hopefully is interesting. :)
Ohhhh, this is such a great point, Jenna. Labels can be so suffocating sometimes, and I didn't address that at all in this post, did I? In fact, my "-version" level has really changed over my lifetime.
While I always had strong introvert tendencies, I was much more energized by social interaction when I was young. Then we had a series of sudden, back-to-back tragedies in my family and my personality truly shifted. I became much more of a homebody, much more tired by social situations.
Today, my level of intro/extroversion still has so much to do with my energy levels. If I'm really well rested I love talking to people. When I'm tired, I want to hide in my cave.
For me, the label "introvert" is helpful just because it allows me to communicate my needs in shorthand. I learned from a dear friend the habit of just straight-up saying "I need to go introvert now," and it is surprisingly effective! It helps me feel more legible and understood by others. But there's a total flipside where labels like this could be restricting rather than liberating.
I definitely agree! In my more introverted times, when I had not yet developed the set of boundaries, vocabulary, and coping mechanisms that allow me to structure my people time in a way that works for me (and therefore have more of that time), “introvert” was an incredibly helpful label. It helped me describe myself in a concise way to others and connected me to a community of people with some similar experiences and boundaries, which were sometimes misunderstood and critiqued by the well-meaning “but you need to learn to be social!” people in my life.
I love the idea of “introvert” and “extrovert” as verbs and will probably steal this like a little word gremlin to use in my own life! I think that really helps to capture the expansiveness and fluidity of how my, and many others’, interactions with other people change from day to day, as well as over time as we grow into our own boundaries.
Now that you put it in terms of expansiveness, fluidity, and growing into our boundaries, Jenna, I'm recognizing that it may not be a coincidence that the friend who taught me to use "introvert" as a verb is transgender. Trans and non-binary people leading the way on making sense of our identities once again!
One thing emphasized in training at Disney World was to "get on the same level" as kids and not talk down to them or at them. It's truly a gamechanger but can be so easy to forget that they are tiny people with their own full lives and thoughts and get overlooked. Reading this I was getting anxious during your description of the party until the point you get to conversing with the kids, that was eye opening for me that I feel the same. Thank you for sharing
Isn’t that interesting! The same thing happened to me when I was writing: actual physical anxiety in the party scene, actual physical relaxation in the hanging with kids scene. I made that explicit in the post because I truly had not expected it and it surprised me too!
I am always looking for an introvert break at parties. It never occurred to me before reading this, but I think that as a man if I were to go off and hang out with the kids that would be seen as very weird and conspicuous. Just as weird and conspicuous as going and sitting in the car alone.
I resonate with this essay SO deeply. I think I would love being a parent but as you put it, I don’t think I would thrive. My heart is still open to the idea but my uterus, less and less. And I ADORE being an auntie!
An ongoing conversation I have with my mom is how to relate to my nephew. She seems perplexed by how easily I’ve become friends with him. Finally I told her: “You’re more interested in adult conversation than I am. You love talking to adults, and I get bored and want to go play with Lego instead.” I am relieved and delighted that it’s now socially acceptable for me to take a break from adult society to do a craft or play a game. I used to have to rely on friendly dogs or cats to be my buffer; now I can go hang with the kid(s). At one such occasion, my nephew said to me, “you know, I sort of think of you more like a kid than a grown-up.” I was honored.
Oh geez, that is an honor! And I totally hear you about hanging with pets -- I feel like this is what the sensitive, neurodivergent introverts do at parties until we get old enough that our friends start having kids. :)
That's really interesting. I think, reflecting on your comment, I've realised I'm the opposite. I've always been better with adult conversation, even when I was a child. I often felt left out amongst other children so hung with the adults instead. Now I find it very challenging to connect with children. I have to really get to know them before I feel comfortable, and get a sense that they feel comfortable with me.
I bet certain kids in your life really appreciate the way you show up, Rosie -- especially those who are a lot like you when you were a kid.
As you've no doubt noticed, just like adults, some kids take a lot longer to warm up than others. Being a high school teacher and working in a school where students had many different teachers throughout the day was a good education for me: different kids need different kinds of adults. It's actually a huge benefit when there are adults around with different energies, including folks who take awhile to warm up. This normalizes difference for children, which is good for their individual development and also good for building a society where everyone can be accepted for who we are.
I love yielding the stage, so to speak, to the kids I serve as an auntie or occasional source of outside-the-home entertainment to. I theorize, but don't know, that the adults in their homes don't have the bandwidth/time/whatever to just listen to them talk. And their constant chatter means all I have to do is listen and provide brief reactions, like "wow!" and "oh!" SO MUCH EASIER than leading the conversation.
I love this point, Sadye, and it's one I've been thinking about a lot recently -- especially since Dana Miranda talked about it in her Auntie Bulletin Q&A in late November.
https://theauntie.substack.com/p/10-questions-about-auntiehood-for?r=nbcpy
Some of the most emphatic feedback I got about that Q&A, IRL from my loved ones, was that Auties provide a valuable service that parents often just don't have the juice for. We can come in and take over with a full tank of attention and enthusiasm when parents are worn down from just trying to get kids out the door or get meals on the table. In this way, everyone has their role to play, and Auntie is a really important one!
And yeah, it's such a relief sometimes to just let kids natter on. I like it when they tell me to pretend I'm sleeping. I'm like "YOU GOT IT KID." That's one game of pretend I can get behind.
This is beautiful. And I think that your thesis here can be extended to other areas of life. It made me think of how I did very well academically in college, but have never gone to grad school (despite working at a university where I could get a degree for free). I've often had to tell people that I was a good student, but I was not good at BEING a student. I could be very successful under duress because I cared deeply about learning, but I took way more time than necessary on every assignment, cried while writing every paper, and hated every second of academic reading. Academia needs me to be a person I am not (organized and focused). It's not a good fit. I'm still interested in learning things and discussing complex topics occasionally- I just can't do it full time.
What I'm saying is, it sounds like many sensitive, neurodivergent introverts would be amazing parents, but it's also valid to say, "full-time parenting isn't a good fit for me." And I like that you're introducing an alternative to the binary of "parent or not-a-parent." You can be a person who does lots of "parenting" without doing it full time.
Thank you, Jeannie. Academia is such a great parallel example -- many people can do university well (take it from me, I've spent a lot of time in grad school) -- but that's not the same thing as actually LIKING it. The better we know ourselves, the better we can make choices that will be an actually good fit. And I for one find it so liberating that we don't have to capitulate to the "parent/non-parent" binary -- because Auntiehood is available!
Feeling so seen by this essay! I love being an aunt more than anything and appreciate having the patience and time to just enjoy my nephews and get into their worlds. My AuDHD makes it hard to imagine being a parent. When I’m dysregulated I’m a cranky, anxious mess and I don’t want a kid to ever absorb that or feel like it’s their fault. I’m only recently realizing and taking pride in the fact that the spoons I’m saving not having kids are resources I can dedicate to my nephews and their parents (especially the moms, who shoulder much of the mental loads despite having devoted and enlightened spouses). I’ve even been able to help explain a kid’s sensory issues to their parent so it was clear the kid was uncomfortable and not misbehaving. I love having the energy and compassion to be the kind of adult I wish I’d had more of when I was young: the kind who accepts me for who I am and delighted in the unmasked me. Thank you for writing this!
One of the unexpected things I have found out that I love so much about writing The Auntie Bulletin, Natalie, is finding people with whom I have so much in common! I so appreciate your point about being able to explain a kid's sensory issues to their parent -- it occurs to me now that I've done the same. My sister still talks about how, when her oldest child (now 8) was little, I explained how hard transitions can be for neurodivergent people like me and said child, and how transformative that was for her parenting. It's a really good point that I'm now definitely going to include in an upcoming post about Auntie-ing with disability.
Highly sensitive parent of two boys here who did not find your post offensive AT ALL. (Those caps are emphasis, not sarcasm!)
Indeed, before I had kids I found myself drawn to careers where I worked with kids -- children's magazine editing and teen services in a library -- and now that my kids are out of the intense baby/toddler years I find myself drawn to that work once again as a sexuality educator for 4-6 graders. I always knew the work I did with kids was valuable, but now that I'm a mother, I understand exactly HOW valuable it is to have another adult as a guide and ally for your kids.
I love the idea here that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, that if parenthood isn't a good fit doesn't mean you don't have a ton of value to offer to kids (and by extension, parents). I am so grateful for my friends and family who have decided not to have children -- they can bring a kind of energy and nonjudgmental attention to both kids and parents that other parents, so wrapped up in their own parenting insecurities and busyness, can't always provide.
Your point here is emerging as a theme for me lately, Lacey: that Aunties bring certain things parents often can’t. I truly hadn’t recognized this until I started this newsletter, but a whole bunch of people have brought it up and I think it’s such a valuable insight.
Exactly this: “I can have these deep, loving, intergenerational friendships – and I can show up for my parent friends when needed – because Auntiehood is a part-time gig. My sensitive, neurodivergent, introvert superpowers make me a great Auntie, but I also suspect they might make me a pretty distressed parent.”
Also me: reading bedtime stories to a friend’s toddler five minutes into my party this week.
I thought for a long time that loving kids = desire to be a mother. When my marriage ended and that option slipped away, I grieved it like a death. But my life branched in unexpected ways, and I ended up with a partner with two delightful, independent children and lots of little ones in my extended circles. And small doses of fab kids turned out to be just the right amount for me.
I feel like winding up with a partner who has kids can be a totally sweet setup. Like, I have joked with friends that we should each have kids with someone we don't want to be in a relationship with, then we each couple up with someone else and we're all part-time parents.
And "small doses of fab kids" is, I suspect, the right amount for a lot of people, but that option is rarely made visible to us!
Thanks for this great post Lisa. I too love parties basically only if I can leave when I want without consequence.... Sounds pretty entitled when I read that in print!
I'm sure you don't need to be pointed to this article in the New Yorker but sharing anyway.
Laurie Paul's work on 'Transformative Experience' uses the example of contemplating whether or not to have children.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/09/the-philosopher-l-a-paul-wants-us-to-think-about-our-selves
Thank you! I had not seen this article so I did indeed need to be pointed to it!
Hadn’t seen this either, thank you!
Love this great piece even though I get some FOMO having been labeled a Highly sensitive neurodivergent 'Extrovert' rather than introvert but could relate to so many of your wisdom points! Happiest holidays to best bulletin around!
The world needs extroverts! We'd all just be hiding in the car without you, Carolina!
I also had some feelings about this! Not necessarily about how you wrote about it, Lisa, but I think about the larger idea of introversion and extroversion, and how labels can make communities that mean to feel open and permeable actually feel a little closed off, for those who don’t use the label. I read Susan Cain’s QUIET, which is largely about the power of introverts, with some friends last year, and we came to the conclusion that like most binaries that are really spectrums, the introvert/extrovert binary is only helpful as far as it allows you to understand yourself and your needs better, and find communities that support you. I have never really felt like an introvert or an extrovert, fully, because I would articulate my relationship to other people as this: because I am deeply sensitive to other people’s presence and their needs (hi, it’s me, the eldest daughter, you guessed it), I deeply love other people and have a strong appreciation for them. This same trait makes it draining to be around people for too long. I guess my worry about the introvert/extrovert false binary is that culturally, it seems like the understanding is that introverts are people who are “too tired by others” or “don’t like interacting with others” when really it has become an umbrella term for people who interact with others in non-normative ways (“normal” being a slippery slope here, I know… but I guess for me that includes open canceling of plans because I “don’t have bandwidth”, hangouts where we sit in silence doing our own things, and conversations without some of the expected pleasantries). Rather than being a personality label, introvert/extrovert feels like a label that describes a mode of interacting with the world — which might change depending on the people, one’s energy levels, the environment, so many things — and therefore is perhaps more fluid than we, as individuals scooping up our chosen labels, might allow our self-perception to be. Wow, this got really long, but hopefully is interesting. :)
Ohhhh, this is such a great point, Jenna. Labels can be so suffocating sometimes, and I didn't address that at all in this post, did I? In fact, my "-version" level has really changed over my lifetime.
While I always had strong introvert tendencies, I was much more energized by social interaction when I was young. Then we had a series of sudden, back-to-back tragedies in my family and my personality truly shifted. I became much more of a homebody, much more tired by social situations.
Today, my level of intro/extroversion still has so much to do with my energy levels. If I'm really well rested I love talking to people. When I'm tired, I want to hide in my cave.
For me, the label "introvert" is helpful just because it allows me to communicate my needs in shorthand. I learned from a dear friend the habit of just straight-up saying "I need to go introvert now," and it is surprisingly effective! It helps me feel more legible and understood by others. But there's a total flipside where labels like this could be restricting rather than liberating.
I definitely agree! In my more introverted times, when I had not yet developed the set of boundaries, vocabulary, and coping mechanisms that allow me to structure my people time in a way that works for me (and therefore have more of that time), “introvert” was an incredibly helpful label. It helped me describe myself in a concise way to others and connected me to a community of people with some similar experiences and boundaries, which were sometimes misunderstood and critiqued by the well-meaning “but you need to learn to be social!” people in my life.
I love the idea of “introvert” and “extrovert” as verbs and will probably steal this like a little word gremlin to use in my own life! I think that really helps to capture the expansiveness and fluidity of how my, and many others’, interactions with other people change from day to day, as well as over time as we grow into our own boundaries.
Now that you put it in terms of expansiveness, fluidity, and growing into our boundaries, Jenna, I'm recognizing that it may not be a coincidence that the friend who taught me to use "introvert" as a verb is transgender. Trans and non-binary people leading the way on making sense of our identities once again!
One thing emphasized in training at Disney World was to "get on the same level" as kids and not talk down to them or at them. It's truly a gamechanger but can be so easy to forget that they are tiny people with their own full lives and thoughts and get overlooked. Reading this I was getting anxious during your description of the party until the point you get to conversing with the kids, that was eye opening for me that I feel the same. Thank you for sharing
Isn’t that interesting! The same thing happened to me when I was writing: actual physical anxiety in the party scene, actual physical relaxation in the hanging with kids scene. I made that explicit in the post because I truly had not expected it and it surprised me too!
My first piece I’ve read top to bottom. Really love this.
Thank you for reading, Leah!
I am always looking for an introvert break at parties. It never occurred to me before reading this, but I think that as a man if I were to go off and hang out with the kids that would be seen as very weird and conspicuous. Just as weird and conspicuous as going and sitting in the car alone.
Reading this made me wish that wasn't the case!