Dear Yael,
You’re going to become an auntie soon. I know you thought, as the eldest child, that you would be the first to have children. Watching two of your younger siblings get married and seeing your sister through her first pregnancy is definitely going to be a little rough, especially when well-intentioned friends and family members start elbowing you and whispering, “You’re next…”
On the plus side, you’re also going to be really happy. You will cry when you meet Ben for the first time. He’ll arrive early in the morning on your 30th birthday and will be sleeping when you arrive at the hospital.
You’ll pick him up and immediately become attached, while believing somewhere deep in your heart that one day very soon, you are going to deliver him a cousin to play with.
While you are waiting to meet your partner, waiting for the one you want to start your family with, you will pour all your motherly love onto the niblings. That’s right…plural. There will be many more that you will meet while you are waiting.
Enjoy it. Let them fill your heart. It will feel so good to pop over for a visit and have them crowd around you, grabbing for your hand, screaming, “Auntie, I want to show you something,” “Auntie, we missed you,” “Auntie, look at my Band-Aid!”
But listen, my dear… There’s something you don’t know. Something you won’t see coming.
You’re going to take this auntie role very, very seriously. Every year that goes by that you don’t have your own children, you are going to attach to the nieces and nephews all the harder.
You will spend a lot of money on them. You will spend a lot of time with them. You will literally bend your life and your career around them. (Just wait until you give up teaching high school English so you can be an assistant at Ben’s school in order to watch over him after his autism diagnosis.)
And here’s what worries me, your future self: You will start to associate your worth with your devotion as an aunt.
The hope of having children of your own will slowly fade as the years go by…especially after a certain event that will turn your whole world upside-down. The feelings that come with the passage of time are going to overwhelm you. You’ll be okay one minute and down the next. You’ll feel like a failure. You’ll be frustrated when you have to constantly answer people’s questions about why you don’t have kids yet. You’ll get tired of being expected to change your schedule or do extra work just because you don’t have kids.
And you’ll feel like a failure. Oh, sorry. Did I already mention that?
Being an overly-devoted aunt will assuage some of that. The feeling of failure won’t be quite so suffocating when anyone close to you can see that your niblings are basically your children. You’re not really an aunt — more like an aunt-mom. (The kids will call you “Mama” and then laugh and correct themselves more times than you will be able to count.)
One day, though, things are going to start to shift. Family members will go where you cannot follow. Some of the kids will get older and won’t need you as much. And as you come to accept your circumstances, you’re going to start wanting things that you won’t have room for — because you’ve given so much space to these children you love so much.
Now rest assured, I’m not here to try to stop you. Dive on in. Love them. Because, my dear, despite what everyone whispered to you at your sister’s wedding, you are not next. You will never be next. The future father of your children is not coming. There will be no wedding. There will be no children.
So please…take this opportunity to do all the things you always wanted to do as a young mother. Pick them up from school. Have sleepovers. Help them with their makeup on Halloween. Knit them elf boots. Play video games with them. Cook their favorite lemon bars. And encourage minor food fights at the dinner table when their mother isn’t looking. (You are the aunt, after all, which means you get to be a little naughty.)
But be ready because this time will end, just like it ends for actual mothers. Children don’t remain children forever. Life doesn’t stay in one place. And you won’t be the same person seventeen years from now.
When the time comes, know that it will hurt. You’ll be hit with two griefs at once: the emptying nest of aunthood and the changes in your body that will signal to you that your ability to have babies is over. Yes…over.
You are going to cry so goddamn much. You’re going to wonder if you gave too much. After all, when the hell would you have had time to meet someone and start your own family when you were always with your sister’s babies?
Ask all the questions. Follow all the curiosities and regrets. Trust me, there will be no shortage of them.
But what I really want you to do is to start taking care of yourself. I don’t mean get more sleep or take more baths (though that’s probably a good idea, too) — I mean take advantage of the space that has been opened.
Who are you, my dear? What do you want now? You were raised in a culture that had you believing that the only truly worthwhile thing you could do was to serve others through motherhood (or, at the very least, aunthood).
But what if you had been born a man? What if the only thing our culture had expected of you was for you to do what you wanted? What if no one would have cared whether or not you got married or had children?
What would you have done?
You are still an aunt and will always be. Your love made a brighter world for eight little beings who will likely take that light and shine it on others.
But what about the light you need for yourself? Like most women, you never got the chance to ask that. You were too busy taking care of everyone else and trying to prove your worth to the world through overly-devoted aunthood.
Take this space now. Take this time. Feel all the feelings, but don’t let them make you lose sight of what’s most important at this point in your life. Not the children you never had. Not the children you love who belong to other people.
You.
Who do you want to be now, my darling?
Yael Wolfe
Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash