Aunts Will Die On This Hill

I say we should put the brakes on this trend about parents knowing best. They know some, aunts know the rest.

An Authentic Note From The Authors

This week we are excited to feature an endearing auntie post by our friend, the incisive and witty writer Sara Kaye Larson. She is author of the newsletter Hot Hot Boredom where she writes about everything from crafting to “semi-public journaling about being in a small town during the transformation of America” in Rural Hours and Hours,

Along with Joanna Vantaram she co-hosts the podcast Biting All The Apples, “an unhinged bookclub-ish conversation that channels the sassy wisdom of long dead victorian feminists to analyze the puritanical influences still messing with our world today.” Her work is funny, heartbreaking, and wildly insightful. Here’s her piece:

Untethered Rants, Unmeetable Demands, and Unmitigated Rage

Photo by Alexandra Lowenthal on Unsplash

Aunts Will Die On This Hill

By

Sara Kaye

Larson, Auntie-hero

I was showing my six-year-old niece how to hug a tree the other day and her skepticism made me realize she’s under too much parental influence. I know we are kind of in a parental rights era, but look around y’all, anyone can see it isn’t working out so well.

You’re exhausted and overburdened and some of you are at school board meetings yelling about things you didn’t even know just five years ago. Young children are developing anxiety disorders previously reserved for middle-aged women. Elementary teachers now do grounding exercises with their students to restore proprioception after being on devices so much. There's just too much pressure on everyone in a nuclear family, but there’s a release valve just over there: and she’s an aunt.

Of course, not all aunts are the same, but we serve the same purpose - to ensure your child receives non-parental adult guidance on important life skills like poker, spray paint, and tree hugging. The kind of knowledge that counterbalances tablet time and creates a protective brain buffer for whatever life will throw at ‘em.

The other component to the purpose-driven aunt mission is to make sure your child is appreciated for the qualities they possess, the ones that are probably too similar to yours before they were squashed by our practical boomer parents. If that sounds heavy it's because the work of an aunt is heavy. But she does it lightly. Like a cat. Or a dragonfly. We don’t have a mascot yet but we will if enough people read this.

Aunts are the natural leaders of a kid’s squad of non-parental adults. No brag, just fact; aunts are kind of the Yoda of that whole scene. Minus the patience for adults and with better skincare.

Aunts, particularly ones that are childfree, tend to have an unmatched comprehension of the natural curiosity and creativity children possess. We won’t say it to your faces, but it really seems like you can’t see just how genius your kid is because you’re always telling them to eat peas or get shoes on or whatever.

As an aunt of 9, I’m primarily focused on protecting and developing their creativity and expression. I don’t think having to wash mud out of hair or waiting a few days for the permanent marker to wear off their face is too big of a price to pay for a creatively free child. Even if I’m not the one paying it.

Too much parental influence leads to parents and kids not knowing where they start and the other ends. Maybe it’s hard to accept that your kid is an individual with hopes and dreams of their own. We, the aunts, see them for who they are and just want our nieces and nephews to be free to be themselves with enough influence from us that they’ll mention their aunt when they win a Grammy.

We’re worried you won’t see their true potential because, uh, we’re your sister. We remember how you got cut from the baseball team and suspect you’re eyeing kid #2 to enact a generational revenge scheme on Coach Jennings. We’re pretty sure you made fun of our latch-hook rugs because you secretly wanted to be a fiber artist. And we also remember that you melted Strawberry Shortcake’s head on an open burner, so excuse us if we hover when it’s time to open presents or laugh along with your kids when you try to impart parental wisdom.

Rest assured that kind of stuff isn’t always front of mind for us aunts. It’s more about how growing up together as siblings informs a very special kind of knowing in regard to your offspring. We have a molecular connection to your children that gives us a cosmic intuition and a drive to help care for them, to encourage them, and understand their humor. It’s so hard to explain, but we like them so much more than you in a way we didn’t think would be possible with anything having to do with the same person that used to threaten us with loogies.

It’s because of the loogies that I say we should put the brakes on this trend about parents knowing best. They know some, aunts know the rest. We are more than just a cheeks-pinching crazy aunt trope. We are crazy when and where it counts. And we are essential. Trust me, you don’t really want your kid to be a carbon copy of you. You cover the discipline and the diapers. I’ve got the percussion instruments and five dollar scratchers.