Tag Archives: good aunt

Proud aunts

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I’ve written before about the pride we aunts take in our nieces and nephews, and the 10 days I spent in Oregon at the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials brought out a number of proud aunts to cheer on their family’s elite athletes. Today, I’ll share three “good aunt” stories with you from the competition.

Proud aunts follow through on a father’s inspiration
Early into the trials, I saw an article in the The Register-Guard talking about Amanda Smock, an expert in the women’s triple jump. She competed in the 2008 trials, but finished 5th and didn’t get to go to the Olympics that year.

After those trials, her father encouraged her to keep pursuing her dream, though he didn’t live to see her succeed. He died from cancer a year later, but four of Smock’s aunts (her father’s sisters) made the long drive from Minnesota to the trials to surprise her and cheer her on.

Smock finished first in the trials, and because of qualifying requirements to compete in the Olympics, she’ll be the only athlete to represent the United States in her event. Of winning and what it meant to have her four aunts watching from the stands, she said: Continue reading →

Aunts (lovely and vile) in literature

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I hope you won’t mind a lighter post today. I’m flying back from my vacation in Eugene, Oregon, where I spent 10 marvelous days watching the US Olympic Track and Field Trials. If you missed the trials and want to know who made the team for London, check out my favorite running site: Flotrack. I’m sure there are some proud aunts (not to mention moms and dads, too) of our US athletes.

For today’s post, I wanted to mention some aunts in literature, some that you’d love to have as your own aunt and some that are vile, ornery or downright evil.

I owe the inspiration for this post to a fellow blogger Jodi Chromey, whose post about Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Beezus (and their aunt Beatrice) got me thinking about other aunts in literature. Check out her post. It’s a lovely tribute to Cleary and the power of literature in a child’s life. And Chromey describes in moving detail why Aunt Beatrice means even more to her now that she’s all grown up and a woman without children of her own but a niece and nephew to adore. Continue reading →

The best and worst thing

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Several of the women I interviewed spoke of relief after becoming an aunt, because it provided their parents (or in-laws) with grandchildren and took some of the pressure off of the women themselves to provide more grandchildren.

As aunts, we have children in our lives we can adore, spoil, teach, play with and watch grow into who they will become as adults. Aunthood also gives us a closer insight into how children change a marriage.

The advice: The best and worst thing
One of the women I interviewed, Bette*, told me about a conversation her husband Caleb had with his boss – who also happened to be a close friend and the father of grown twins – when Bette and Caleb were trying to decide whether to have children.

Caleb asked, “What advice would you give to somebody who’s trying to make this decision?”  His boss told him that having children is both the best and worst thing that could ever happen, simultaneously.

He said it’s the best thing because your capacity to love is multiplied, and you love these children more than you ever thought you could, and it enriches your life. On the other hand, it also completely changes your life. Your marriage changes. You don’t have time for former pursuits. Your priorities are different. When you’re in it, you’re glad your priorities are these children, but everything else suffers because of your shift in priorities. He finished by saying, “I’m not saying it’s not a worthwhile priority. Again, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, but it’s also the worst thing.”

Bette said she and Caleb thought about that statement, “It’s the best and worst thing,” and turned it around and said perhaps not having children is also the best and the worst thing that would ever happen to them.

For them, it is the best because they have time and energy to focus on each other and their marriage. They travel extensively, and do plenty of other things they wouldn’t consider if they had children. Plus, they are able to be more involved in the lives of their extended family than they might otherwise be.

In this case, you really can’t have it all
Bette admits, though, that she just won’t ever fully know. She says she feels like she gets a glimpse of the best part of having children because of how much she loves her nieces and nephews, but she knows she’ll never know exactly what she has missed out on.

She says, “You can’t always have it all, and I have come to the realization in my life that I have the best of both worlds. If I didn’t have nieces and nephews, maybe I would feel differently. Maybe I would feel like there was something else that I was missing. But to hear a parent say that having children is simultaneously the best and worst thing that has ever happened was a turning point for us. I flip that idea around and think, ‘Maybe that’s me, too, just from a different perspective.’ ”

Whether you have children or not, I’d love to know what you think of this perspective: that either way – having children or not having children – it’s simultaneously the best and the worst thing that can happen.

____________
* To protect the privacy of the women I interviewed, I have changed all names.

When being an aunt isn’t all sunshine and roses

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In Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of aunts:

Often able to accrue education and resources precisely because
they were childless, these women had spare income and compassion
to pay for lifesaving operations, or to rescue the family farm, or to take
in a child whose mother had fallen gravely ill. I have a friend who calls
these sorts of child-rescuing aunties “sparents”—”spare parents”—
and the world is filled with them.

Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital
sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to
spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment
to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world—an ambassador
auntie—who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody’s family whatsoever. … In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways
to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.
(192-3)

Gilbert’s discussion of “sparents” and their ways of fostering life reminds me of a story I heard on NPR’s StoryCorps back in March. Abby Libman’s life changed forever when her brother-in-law killed Abby’s twin sister, leaving behind two children (ages 7 and 4), whom Abby took in and raised. I encourage you to listen to the brief interview between Libman and her now 23-year-old nephew. For Libman, her role shifted from aunt to mother, and as she navigated through that difficult time, she was most importantly fostering the lives of those two precious young children who would grow up to think of her as “mom.” She was the ultimate “good aunt” to her sister’s children. Continue reading →

When you need an extra set of hands … or clothes for the frog

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In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Committed, she writes mostly about marriage but devotes some of her words to aunthood and its role in human populations across time and place:

… here’s an astonishing fact that I discovered in the margins of my
research on marriage: If you look across human populations of all
varieties, in every culture and on every continent (even among the
most enthusiastic breeders in history, like the nineteenth-century Irish,
or the contemporary Amish), you will find that there is a consistent 10
percent of women within any population who never have children at all.
The percentage never gets any lower than that, in any population
whatsoever. In fact, the percentage of women who never reproduce in
most societies is usually much higher than 10 percent—and that’s not
just today in the developed Western world, where childless rates
among women tend to hover around 50 percent. …

In any case, the number of women throughout history who never
become mothers is so high (so consistently high) that I now suspect
that a certain degree of female childlessness is an evolutionary
adaptation of the human race. Maybe it’s not only perfectly legitimate
for certain women to never reproduce, but also necessary. It’s as
though, as a species, we need an abundance of responsible,
compassionate, childless women to support the wider community
in various ways. Childbearing and child rearing consume so much
energy that the women who do become mothers can quickly become
swallowed up by that daunting task—if not outright killed by it. Thus,
maybe we need extra females, women on the sidelines with undepleted
energies, who are ready to leap into the mix and keep the tribe supported.
(190-191) Continue reading →