We spent the long weekend with my brother’s family. He and his wife have added to my mother’s collection of grandsons with an absolutely adorable 8 month old named Noah.<\/p>\n
On Saturday afternoon while Simon was napping, Tristan and I made our way over to my mother’s house for a visit, and I finally had a chance to play with Noah for a while. (Before that, if Simon caught sight of me with Noah in my arms, he’d break into instant and heart-rendering sobs. Cast another vote in the ‘con’ column of the great third-baby debate.)<\/p>\n
My mom was holding Noah when we got there, and as she handed him to me she said, “Go see your Auntie Danielle.” It rang in my ears for a minute, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.<\/p>\n
For one thing, although I’m “Auntie Dani” to a posse of kids, nobody has ever called me “Auntie Danielle” before. People have been calling me Dani since I was in grade school, and it’s the only name most of my friends and family use. The only hold outs are my mother, and up until recently, people I work with. <\/p>\n
These days even my work friends are starting to call me Dani and while I enjoy the affection with which it is used, there’s a part of me that’s beginning to miss my formal name. I’m grateful that my mother still calls me Danielle. Sometimes I wonder if there will be a time in my life when Dani becomes too young a name for a woman of a certain age and I’ll have to pack it away with my mini-skirts and neon t-shirts. Not today, at least.<\/p>\n
But as if that weren’t introspection enough from two simple words, “Auntie Danielle”, there’s more.<\/p>\n
I come from a very small family. I have one brother. My father was an only child, and my mother had one sister. My one aunt and uncle had a son, so I have one cousin, but they lived on the west coast for a lot of my childhood. So I wonder if it’s being from a small family that makes me weird about who my kids call aunt and uncle. To me, it’s a title imbued with significance, and only actual blood relatives are called Aunt and Uncle.<\/p>\n
Friends of mine had their son quite a few years before Beloved and I were ready to procreate, and although they were more like family than friends, I was still surprised when they handed the baby to me and introduced me as “Auntie Dani”. I was genuinely touched – but also uncomfortable. I was proud that they loved me enough to include me as part of their family, but knew in my heart that I would feel uncomfortable extending the same courtesy on a future day when I had kids. <\/p>\n
With the grace of a herd of startled cattle, I tried to explain my feelings to them at the time, and succeeded only in sullying a lovely gesture of friendship. We haven’t really spoken about it since, and to their credit, their kids still call Beloved and I aunt and uncle to this day. But my kids don’t reciprocate. I pretty much try to avoid using names at all when talking about them to my kids, referring instead to “so and so’s daddy” or “so and so’s mommy”. When I can’t get around it, I use their first names – and each time, I flinch a little bit at the absence of the “aunt” or “uncle”.<\/p>\n
Recently, another close set of friends brought a beautiful baby girl into our lives, and they have honoured Beloved and I by bestowing us with the title of Aunt and Uncle as well, and once again, I just can’t bring myself to return the courtesy.<\/p>\n
Now that I think of it, I was never able to call any of my in-laws “mom” or “dad” either, nor would I expect Beloved to call my parents that, even though we’re as close as family can be.<\/p>\n
Insignificant though it may seem (when will I be able to think a thought without an echo in my head that asks, “Given everything that’s going on in the world right now, you’re worried about that<\/em>?), it’s been weighing heavily on me lately. I am honoured and touched that our friends think enough of Beloved and I to include us as family, and I’m not quite sure how to demonstrate that we feel the same way – but we just don’t want to commit to it with labels.<\/p>\n What’s it like in your family? Do your kids call your friends Mr and Mrs Friend, or Auntie and Uncle Friend, or something else?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We spent the long weekend with my brother’s family. He and his wife have added to my mother’s collection of grandsons with an absolutely adorable 8 month old named Noah. On Saturday afternoon while Simon was napping, Tristan and I made our way over to my mother’s house for a visit, and I finally had … Continue reading “Auntie matters”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}