On Being Avuncular

By Angel Lemke

“[I]f having grandparents means perceiving your parents as somebody’s children, then having aunts and uncles, even the most conventional of aunts and uncles, means perceiving your parents as somebody’s sibs–not, that is, as alternately abject and omnipotent links in a chain of compulsion and replication that leads inevitably to you; but rather as elements in a varied, contingent, recalcitrant but re-forming seriality, as people who demonstrably could have turned out differently–indeed as people who, in the differing, refractive relations among their own generation, can be seen already to have done so.”

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest“

For a host of reasons outside the scope of this post, I spent very little time with my biological aunts and uncles during my childhood. Still, there were other important adults in my life besides the biggest influences of my mother, grandmother, and teachers. This group was pretty much exclusively composed of my mother’s friends.

I guess it shouldn’t come as such a surprise that when my relationship with my mother turned sour, they all disappeared. They were, after all, “hers.” But as I was growing up, they were occasional babysitters and frequent dinner companions; many of them attended my high school graduation; some of them sent me little care packages when I was away at college. I had conversations with all of them that did not involve my mother. I thought they were at least a little bit “mine,” too. But other than our now-routine Facebook birthday wishes, I haven’t heard a word—not one word—from the adults who peopled my childhood. Were it not for my grandmother and maternal aunt, I would now have absolutely no connection to the adults around whom I grew up. In freeing myself from one toxic influence, I lost a whole generation of elders.

I’ve become avuncular myself over the past couple years, as I’ve reached the age when many of my peers are parenting young children, and as I’ve consciously sought out more connections with kids, given that the odds of my parenting my own children are steadily declining with each passing day. No matter how dear their parents may be to me, I can’t imagine that if I learned, thirty years from now, that one of them was no longer on speaking terms with her mother, or that one of them was in financial distress after an emergency spinal surgery and two years of unemployment, I wouldn’t at least drop a note to say, “Geez, kid. How ya holdin’ up?”

One friend of my mother’s has checked in with me over the past six months; she first met me as an adult, just a couple years ago. I have to wonder if this doesn’t have something to do with it, that in her recollection, I was always an adult (read: person). For everyone else, I am “Jean Ann’s kid.”

I don’t know why, but that seems to make me somehow none of their business.

The other day, I recalled sitting on my grandmother’s front porch as a young adult, arguing with my mother about her controlling ways; one of her friends was there, too, a friend who had long been my favorite and who I thought—and still think—to be one of the most reasonable adults I’d ever known. I appealed to her to support my claim that my mother was being manipulative, offering example after example of ways she’d constrained or attempted to constrain my passage into adulthood. She listened and nodded and even tried to recast what I said in terms that my mother could hear, but she never, ever said, “No, Jean Ann. You’re just wrong. I disagree with how you’re treating this kid.” Later, when I tr
ied to recall the support sh
e had offered, my mother said, “I asked her about it later, if she thought you were right, and she said she didn’t understand what you were so upset about.”

There’s a very good chance that my mother’s representation of that latter conversation is distorted, that the friend in question chose to exercise careful equivocation rather than selling me out wholesale, but I felt then, and feel that much more now, the absence of another adult saying, “No, this is wrong.”

An old friend of my generation, remarking on the breakdown of my relationship with my mother, said, “Well, it seemed like you and your mom were always fighting, but this is different.” The truth is, it wasn’t; the only real difference was my willingness to stop thinking that she could be convinced by me, by her friends, by the passing of time, to treat me differently, to treat me as a person rather than as a possession. It had been going on my entire life. And in greater and lesser ways, all of the adults in our world knew it. I wish one of them had done more, and done it before I was grown.

bell hooks writes, “Childrearing is a responsibility that can be shared with other childrearers, with people who do not live with children. This form of parenting is revolutionary in this society because it takes place in opposition to the idea that parents, especially mothers, should be the only childrearers.” Claudia Card builds on hooks to argue that such “revolutionary parenting” is “an alternative to mothering as a social institution.”

Many feminists approach the institution of motherhood in terms of injustice toward women, their “second shift” duties and such; what hooks and Card foreground is the injustice done to children when the responsibility for their well-being is vested in one other human being—or at best, two. As the title character of About a Boy says, “two people isn’t enough.” With more than two, as in that film, the effects of my mother’s mental illness on me would have been drastically mitigated. If only because I might have felt less alone.

I usually think of my own role as an other-adult in the lives of the children I love as something like Sedgwick’s formulation above, as one of the many people they can choose to use or not use as a model, as offering them the lesson that there are options other than replicating your parents, and that you don’t have to choose one or the other, but can sample from all. Most of the kids I see regularly have pretty good parents, all things considered, so I don’t imagine they need me as their protector against parental injustice. Most of the kids I see regularly have parents that seek out other opinions about the best way to raise their kids, who actively provide their kids with a range of adult role models.

Still, one of the lessons of this last year is undoubtedly about being a better elder than many of the ones I’ve known. And for me, that has to mean that my avuncular responsibilities must begin and end in a recognition of my nieces and nephews as people rather than as someone else’s kids. People for whom I will stand up, even, if need be, against their parents. If only so that they learn it’s an option, that there are people who will stand up. If only so that that, whatever other options they take from this other-adult, they know that this is the kind of people I hope they all become.

About the author: Angel Lemke has always relied on the kindness of strangers, which seems to work out a lot better than you’d expect.