When my niece Carmen and her brother Lucas were children, I often babysat and stayed with them while their parents went on business trips. I am very close to my brother and sister-in-law. We lived in the same neighborhood, and I saw those kids almost every day. At times I felt like a third parent. But I am not a parent; I am something far more delicious. I am an aunt.
One evening while I was in charge, they were cranky, I was cranky, and it was dinnertime. Carmen must have been 8, and Lucas was 5. The cupboard held no palatable options, and the task of creating a meal for the three of us that night was outside my ken. I opened the fridge. Inside was half a cake. The night before had been a family birthday celebration for my brother and what remained was a chocolate-slathered temptation oozing cream between its layers.
I turned to Carmen and Lucas. “Get three forks,” I said. “We are going to eat cake in the bed.” They squealed; the cranky evaporated. We took the forks and the chocolate mound to their parents’ bedroom, sat on the vast plain of their California king and ate cake off the plate until we were stuffed. Then we jumped on the bed in a sugar-induced frenzy.
Was cake for dinner a nutritionally sound, parent-approved dinner choice? Probably not. Was eating cake in bed something the two of them remind me about all these years later? Yep.
I don’t have any children of my own, but I do have three nieces and a nephew. I have godchildren, and I am entwined with the children of my closest friends. To all of these children I am an aunt, an aunt who relishes her role and has come to know the potent and singular love it coaxes forth. My love extends to my brothers and friends for making these children and enfolding me into their families.
As an aunt I have a ringside seat. I am a loving mother-sister-friend combo platter and a third eye. I don’t have the flash or the cash of Auntie Mame, but I do have my revered place on the council of elders. If it takes a village, then I am the Minister of Culture & Fun.
No relationships are as essential to children as the ones they have with their parents. As an aunt I have responsibilities, but the benefits far outweigh them. As an aunt, I don’t have to set the bigger boundaries, do the daily herding or slog through the essential caretaking. Instead, I offer a safe harbor for advice. I live another idea of what a woman is in the world. I pay attention and give attention in ways their parents cannot.
I have two close friends who also don’t have children. Though the three of us have never discussed it as a trio, we have a shared ethos about our auntie-ness. Erica’s Facebook page is photographic testimony to the children and young adults in her orbit. She is exalted as an aunt and softened by her relationships with the children in her life. My friend Caren exercises her generosity on her nieces and nephews by taking them on trips abroad, teaching them how to be in the larger, unfamiliar world and introducing them to adventure that they navigate outside of the conscription of their parents.
When I was a young girl, my favorite person in the world was Aunt Stevi. She is my mother’s youngest sister and nine years older than me. I worshipped Stevi. I felt so grown up when she took me for rides in her VW Beetle. She let me sit on the rim of the bathtub and watch her put on makeup. I tried on her shoes, internalized her sense of style. I told her things I didn’t tell my mom, sought her advice, felt protected and alive in her company.
Stevi is in her 70s now and we see one another infrequently. The last time we visited, we spent the day together driving around Mobile, Alabama, where she lives. We were on a nostalgia tour, visiting the house where she grew up, the school where my mom went to college and the houses my grandfather built. Stevi and I had no solid plans and let spontaneity impel us. As she listened to the stories of my life and gave me her attention, I felt the pulsing of a familiar love inside me, enlarging me, steadying me, applauding me. The love of my aunt.
