Auntie in Title, but not in Practice
I thought being called Auntie meant closeness would be automatic. Instead, I spent months waiting to be invited closer.
I was recently preparing for a much anticipated happy hour with one of my closest friends, and as one does, I started to think when was the last time I saw this person. I realized I hadn’t seen her in four months, and only then realized I hadn’t seen her daughter in six months, and that was really sobering and heartbreaking for me.
The sadness stems from the assumption that as my friends became mothers, my proximity and regular connection to them and their children would be automatic, and deepen from what it had been prior to them becoming mothers. Maybe it’s silly of me, but I really assumed that I would see my friends with their child(ren)/nuclear family at least once a month. I assumed a casual integration into their new family life. But in reality, what it has looked like is long stretches of absence and distance, where I am shocked by the growth and change that is happening to their small babies. The very real thing that I had to sit with is that I had an expectation about what my relationship with my friends as mothers would look like, because I assumed that it is what we both wanted.
That assumption doesn’t just come from anywhere. It comes from a culture and a real practice where many of my friends refer to me as Auntie in relation to their children. And as someone who is a biological aunt to my brother’s three children, that is not a title that I take lightly. Additionally, my friends and I have waxed poetic about our hypothetical children having a relationship with one another. We talked about wanting each other to be trusted and relied-upon figures in our children's lives, someone they could come to for guidance, support, and direction as they got older. These conversations never seemed like theoretical fantasies. To me, they were authentic desires about integrating one another into family ecosystems.
But the thing is, this assumed expectation continued to live solely in my mind as something that would automatically take shape, and so it never shifted from the authentic desire towards being articulated to my friends, or even towards a practical conversation about what it would look like.
While I wanted closeness and intimacy, and a bridging of community, what I actually ended up creating was a lot of distance to avoid imposing on their lives or putting additional pressures on them.
I didn't want to impose on the preciousness of their weekends, because I know for a lot of new parents, time can be limited and quality time is needed to establish routines and memories as a nuclear family.
I didn't want to apply pressure or suggest they were being an absent friend - because I didn't want to guilt them into making time for me.
I didn't want to be perceived as not understanding the reality of their new life - because I was afraid of being seen as an easily expendable friend, someone without children who couldn't possibly grasp what they were navigating.
So I stayed distant. Giving them the space to let me know how best to engage. I figure when they have time and want to see me, they’ll let me know, and I will make myself available. If they want me to come spend time with their child(ren), they will let me know, and I will show up. So my strategy was to remain open and flexible and present for if and when they had time for me and wanted to create space in their life for me. But of course, the reality is that I expected them to read my mind and to know that I wanted to be a closer part of their lives. In actuality, what I ended up doing was creating more distance than closeness.
It can be easy to quickly land in a place that sounds like, “my friends haven’t created space for me in their new lives” and that feels like rejection. But when I stepped out of my deeply emotional state and attempted to rationalize the moment and think about how to work through it, the most logical response was to simply communicate with my friends and articulate the kind of relationship that I was hoping to have with them, their children, and their family. But the fears ring louder than the desire:
What if they say no? – like what if I have this fantasy about what our relationship could look like, but my friends let me know that is not what they are interested in with me?
What if they dismiss me as failing to understand the push and pull of their day-to-day and how little capacity they have for planning moments to allow me to be part of their lives?
What if they judge me for choosing not to have children, only to reap the benefits of their families?
The reality is that my relationship with my friends who are mothers has fundamentally shifted. And so in order to remain in connection with them, it means that I have to show up in the new ecosystem of their lives, and that system now involves more family time and less three-hour sushi happy hours and three glasses of wine. That part, I understand well.
The part that I’m still learning is that creating this requires me to be very explicit about the role that I want to play in their lives. Again, not demanding but making it clear so that there is no confusion or ambiguity around how I would hope to show up for them in their new role in a way that respects and honors how their lives have changed and how our relationship, as a result, must change as well. I’m not going to pretend as if I’ve gotten there yet, like I said, I am a work in progress all the time, but it is definitely something that I’m working towards.
But I'm learning that creating family is an act of intention, regardless of the path you choose, but especially when you're not building it the way the world expects. For me, it means I get to be explicit about who I want in my ecosystem and how I want to show up for them. It also means respecting that my friends get to do the same, and that their definitions may not have room for me in the way I hoped.
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