The good aunt and sticky friendships, revisited

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Back in July, I wrote about the struggle women without children have in maintaining friendships with their friends who are moms. If you missed the first post or have forgotten it, you might want to read it and then come back to this post.

I’m revisiting the issue, because so much of what I hear in response to the good aunt series has to do with the difficulty of navigating friendships.

I want to say it again: good aunts want to be good friends to the moms in their life, but there’s sometimes a difficulty in knowing the best way to approach those friendships.

Those of us who aren’t moms know that the job of mom is a demanding, all-consuming, draining, not-always-fun-and-games life. Really, I promise you moms out there, we do know that, even if it’s only in an intellectual way instead of the empathic way your other mom friends can truly understand. And so we know to expect changes in friendships when babies are born. What we don’t always know, though, is how to maintain the friendship and develop a relationship with the new little one, or if that’s even something the new mom wants.

A friend of mine and I sat chatting over coffee yesterday, and the topic of friendships with new moms came up. My friend is in her early thirties, is not yet a mom, and is experiencing that so familiar boom of babies being born among her group of friends.

She voiced what I have felt, too, though I’m farther from the baby boom with my friends than she is: each time another friend becomes a mom for the first time, there’s an uncomfortable shift, as the questions begin:

  • What does the friend expect from me now that she has less time for herself and her friends?
  • If I’m the only one making an effort to connect, is it because the new mom doesn’t need/want me in her life any more? Or is it because she’s overwhelmed and needs me to come to her aid whether she asks for it or not?
  • Does she still value me as a friend, even though I don’t have children and can’t adequately talk through the latest nappies or sleepless night solutions and can’t offer her any knowledge about nannies, or juggling work and babies?

The questions that arise out of this natural separation in a friendship are not comfortable or easy. And each friendship will resolve the questions differently.

Some friendships will strengthen with the answering of these questions, even if the questions are never asked or answered out loud. Other friendships will fade because of different needs and expectations on either side of the friendship. And there doesn’t seem to be a recipe or computer program that will help you determine which friendships will survive and which won’t, no matter how much work you put into them.

So where do we go from here?
If a friendship mattered to you before a child was born (your own child or your friend’s child), then decide if the friendship is worth some extra effort now. The answer won’t always be “Yes,” and that’s okay.

But for the friendships that are worth it to you, the ones that you cannot imagine losing, take some time to make them work. And be honest with each other about what both of you want and need from this new way of being friends. Honest conversation may have to happen in snatches between crying fits and first smiles and diaper changes, but those conversations are the best way to keep a friendship going strong.

Have some great advice for how you and a friend have navigated friendship changes after one of you became a parent? Or a question about how to start that honest conversation? I’d love to hear from you.

Would your friends drop you through a roof?

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I’m very blessed. I have friends who would drop me through a roof. Do you?

You may be confused about why I think having friends who would do that for/to me is a blessing. You may be wondering whether I have a radically different definition of friendship than you. Trust me: I don’t.

The pastor where we attended church this past Sunday asked us this very same question, although I think she used the word “lower” instead of “drop.” Her question was spurred by this passage in Mark’s gospel: Continue reading →

A good aunt’s soap box

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Malala Yousafzai has captured our hearts, prayers and worldwide attention in the past few days. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Yousafzai is the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot by Taliban supporters because she wants to go to school and has spent the last three years speaking out about the right girls have to get an education. Earlier today, she and her family made it to the UK, where she will have access to the medical care she needs to have a chance at recovering from being shot in the head.

Did you know her name means grief-stricken? Those of us following her story have been struck with grief, too, along with a sense of moral outrage that there are men in this world who believe it’s right to shoot a girl because she wants to go to school.

Yousafzai is a victim in a war not her own making, but she was persistent and loud enough to draw attention to herself through a blog she’s been writing since she was 11. Her voice has a power that the Taliban has tried to silence, and I only hope that other voices will join hers and sustain her cause while she struggles for life.

I want all of you with daughters and nieces (and sons and nephews whom you hope will grow up to marry fabulous women) to imagine your emotions if Yousafzai had been one of your own. What weapons would you take up in her fight? Would you fight for her against what so many take for granted: the right to go to school?

It’s easy, in the face of our fresh grief and outrage for this girl, to imagine what we would want to do if we were part of her family, part of her community. But there’s a culture war happening here in the Western world, too, and I wonder if it’s easier for us to ignore simply because there aren’t vans being stopped on the way from school and 14-year-old girls getting shot in the head over it.

I’m speaking of the mainstream media’s cultural war on what it means to be a girl and, ultimately, what it means to be a woman. Continue reading →

Trail Tales

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Most of my friends know that I don’t especially love reading non-fiction. When I pick up a book, I usually prefer to escape the real world and go to a fictional place.

But a dear friend from childhood – the friend I totally and completely bonded with in fifth grade because we both loved reading and loathed field day in equally passionate measure – has enthusiastically taken up with camping and hiking. For months, she kept telling me to read Jennifer Pharr Davis’ Becoming Odyssa, a book Davis wrote after hiking the Appalachian Trail. I figured I’d get around to reading it some day.

The same friend loaned me her copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Her prologue begins with her looking out over the trees:

The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep
mountain slope in northern California. Moments before, I’d removed
my hiking boots and the left one had fallen into those trees, first cata-
pulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it, then
skittering across the gravelly trail and flying over the edge. It bounced
off of a rocky outcropping several feet beneath me before disappearing
into the forest canopy below, impossible to retrieve. (3)

She had me hooked. That was the start of my adventures into trail tales. And because I surprised myself by actually enjoying a book about Strayed’s solo hike, I picked up Becoming Odyssa, too.

My recent reads about thru-hiking

Those of you who know me best may be wondering why I’d even read the stories of women hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail (Cheryl Strayed) and the Appalachian Trail (Jennifer Pharr Davis), given my own aversion to lots of outdoorsy activities and critters. Like stream crossings and big spiders and a lack of hot running water. But most especially snakes. Continue reading →

Feeling less than a good aunt

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I just finished reading Jennifer Pharr Davis‘ Becoming Odyssa, a book she wrote to describe her thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. I’ll talk more about the book on Wednesday, but I was searching for more about her online just now and came across her blog on tumblr. The most recent post included a list of who and what she would miss most on her hiking trip through Spain this summer. Number one on the list:

“My 20-month old niece. She is perfect. I am not biased.” (Source)

How many of you aunts – and uncles – have ever felt this way about your own nieces and nephews?

When my older nephew was still the solo kid in the family, I told him constantly that he was my favorite little boy in the whole world. I thought he was perfect, and I was not at all biased, ahem.

And then my second nephew was born, and suddenly I had two favorite boys in the whole world (yes, it’s possible to have two favorites), both of whom were perfect. And I loved them more than I imagined I could ever love two people. And I was not biased.

Both of my nephews love me (even as teenagers they still tell me this, and not just when I send money or presents), but I have never been a perfect aunt. Lots of times, I feel less than perfect. Like that time I yelled at my older nephew for breaking the cup holder in my car. Or the time I yelled at both of them for fighting in the backseat after a trip to Chuck E. Cheese (which, by the way, was the first time I truly understood how miraculous it was that my father never really followed through on his threat to pull the car over).

There’s a lot of distance between where I live and where they live, and so I didn’t get to see them regularly as they grew up, or get to see them in most of their favorite activities. And I quite possibly never ever sent anything on Halloween. (I understand some very good aunts never miss sending goodies on this oh-so-important holiday in the life of a child.)

But I’ve done the best I could to foster relationships with them and make sure they always know that even though I’m not perfect, I still pretty much think they are.

Searching for how to be a good aunt
Recently I was looking through the statistics page on my blog, more specifically, the search terms that bring readers to my blog. I was surprised and saddened to see this search: “I don’t know how to be a good aunt.” That line stopped me cold. Some woman out there was looking for online help, wanting to learn what it meant to be a good aunt.

So she typed, “I don’t know how to be a good aunt” to see what answers might come up. There was something in her search that resonated with me, and I wondered what that woman was going through to make her turn to Google.

That could have been me all those years ago, searching for an answer about how to be a good aunt. Let’s be honest. There are still days I could benefit from a magic Google search that has all those answers.

My older nephew was born when I was a sophomore in college, making me the first of my friends to become an aunt. I had no clue what being a good aunt entailed. I was busy trying to figure out what being a good college student and a good friend and a good adult and a good human being meant. And now this baby was on the way, and I knew with an unshakeable certainty that I wanted to be a good aunt. Even though I had no idea how to go about becoming a good aunt.

Several of the woman I interviewed spoke of a similar feeling of inadequacy, this “less than” feeling that made them doubt I should even group them with other good aunts for the series. In some cases, there are strained family relationships that take nieces and nephews out of reach of aunts who would love to be more involved with them. Sometimes the separation happens because of the demands of an aunt’s career. Sometimes there’s no tangible reason to pinpoint why the aunt/niece/nephew relationship never really takes off. This is true not only with biological relationships but also with the children of a good aunt’s closest friends.

If I’ve learned nothing else from the good aunt series, it’s this: being a good aunt is about intention (actively cultivating the relationship in whatever way works) and attention (spending time letting the children know they’re important to you). Beyond that, there’s no magic recipe. There’s no Google search that can guarantee you’ll be a good aunt.

There are as many different ways to be a good aunt as there are different aunts and different nieces and nephews. And it may take a lot of trial and error to figure out what works best with the children in your life. You may even discover that what works perfectly with one child doesn’t work at all with another. If you’re really struggling, I encourage you to enlist the help of the children’s parents, grandparents and other aunts and uncles to help you figure this out, too.

I think Jennifer Pharr Davis is onto something that may help you, though: start with the belief that your niece/nephew is perfect, and therefore deserving of your love and attention, and together, you’ll figure out a way to forge a strong bond.

Have any advice to share about what makes a good aunt? I’d love to hear it. And apparently, there are others out there who’d love to hear it, too.