Why Mother's Day is Complicated, with Lisa Sibbett of The Auntie Bulletin
If you're grieving, raging or feeling unseen... you can come sit next to us
“When you’re out and about in the world with other people’s children – especially if they’re not technically family – you are illegible to others…A beautiful side-effect of writing is that my role has become so much more legible to myself.”
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Lisa Sibbett and I have a lot in common. Both of us come from generations of career caregivers, and have spent long hours tending to elderly relatives and carrying other people’s little kids around in our arms. Both of us now write about the importance of care in our newsletters. And we’re both pretty into mindfulness, too.
Yet one of the things I most admire about Lisa and her newsletter,
, is the way that she speaks for an important constituency here on Substack in a way that no one else can: people who offer meaningful care to children who are not their biological kids, also known as alloparents. Or, if you prefer: Aunties.Lisa’s readership includes extended biological family members, child-free chosen family members, step-parents, and educators, who spend significant amounts of time helping out with other people’s kids. It also includes people who have decided, after long and difficult family-building journeys, to embrace a different kind of caregiving path.
I was thrilled when Lisa suggested we get together to talk about the results of her recent readers’ survey, in which Aunties told story after story about why Mother’s Day feels especially fraught for them. And because one conversation didn’t feel like enough for this topic, we’ll also be hosting a Substack Live conversation next week in advance of Mother’s Day, on Tuesday May 6 at 11amPST/2pm EST. (Click here to add it to your calendar!)
During that time, we’ll dig more deeply into Lisa’s survey results, and talk in greater detail about ways in which we might ease our suffering and that of others, on this complicated day. As someone who feels fiercely protective of the alloparents, loss parents, and infertility warriors in my life (and has done time as all three myself), I want to see all of the Aunties get their flowers this year.
Ryan: Where did you grow up? What else grows there? What was it like for you to grow there?
Lisa: I grew up in a small beach town on the Salish Sea (otherwise known as Puget Sound), in the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States. At low tide, the vast tide flats are patched with colonies of sand dollars and flattened forests of eel grass. The landscape of the Salish Sea tideflats is the landscape of my soul. I am totally at home there.
Despite the idyllic landscape, I struggled socially as a kid. I always felt at home with my parents and my five siblings and our extended family, but at school I was bullied and excluded. While I still have to work through that trauma with my therapist from time to time, I’m also weirdly grateful for my social struggles as a kid, because I learned early and the hard way to make wise choices about who you befriend. By high school, I started to figure things out, and I’m still close to many of my high school friends 30 years later.
What is your earliest memory of tending another being?
I was only two when I became a big sister, but I remember being so excited. I adored my little brother, and lovingly called him “Boo Boo.” I have a memory of pushing him in the stroller on the day our dad brought him home, but I think that’s probably a manufactured memory based on a photograph. I remember comforting him whenever we’d have a babysitter – singing and hugging him and assuring him that our parents would be back soon.
What or whom have you most loved tending since?
When I was a kid, I babysat my three younger siblings, their friends, and lots of kids around town. I wriggled out of attending Sunday School by volunteering in the church nursery as often as possible. In high school, I logged many hours nannying for the family across the street, and my older brother had his first of four children. I became a godmother in my mid-20s, and have always taken that role very seriously. In my late 20s, I was a live-in caretaker for my wonderful Grandma Jean, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve also cared for other elders in my family, as well as many beloved kids. Professionally, I’ve been a teacher in one form or another for over twenty years, and in the public sphere, I’ve been involved in community organizing for almost that long. I couldn’t say which of these care roles I have loved most – all have been essential in their season.
You and I now both write newsletters that focus on the importance of care and caregivers. As noted above,
focuses on “aunties” or alloparents – people who play an essential role in the care of people to whom they’re not biologically related.Can you tell us more about how you came to be fascinated by this topic?
I’ve often had care roles in my life, but it wasn’t until I started living in co-housing and spending several hours a week with the kids in our community that I started wrestling with what my role meant. I had recently lost multiple pregnancies. When we finally let go of having kids, there was a lot of loss and grief, but it also eventually freed up space to recognize and lean into the abundant networks of care we already had. Once I knew I wasn’t going to be a mom, I was able to start thinking more deeply about what it means to be an Auntie.
The idea for The Auntie Bulletin started as a little whisper in the mind – “What if I write a newsletter about loving other people’s children?” – and almost immediately became something I had to do. When you’re out and about in the world with other people’s children – especially if they’re not technically family – you are illegible to others. People think you must be the kids’ parent, or their aunt, or their nanny; other options don’t occur to them. In the case of male Aunties – whom I suppose we can call uncles if we must 😉 – the illegibility they experience is compounded by others’ deep suspicions about what they’re even up to.
A beautiful side-effect of writing The Auntie Bulletin is that my role has become so much more legible to myself. I had not recognized how isolated I was, and then I started this newsletter, and then suddenly I was meeting all these other Aunties who had experiences like mine! And different from mine! Amazing!
This project has led to repeated perspective shifts. I realized that Aunties like me actually have a ton in common with other alloparents, including grandparents and other extended family, step-parents, foster parents, godparents, educators, and childcare providers. Then I realized that alloparents being able to talk amongst ourselves is really important, but also that we need spaces for parents and alloparents to connect and position ourselves as members of the same team. And then I realized that the conversation about care and kinship shouldn’t just be about children but also about building loving relationships with our elders and people of all generations.
The thing keeps unfolding and expanding, and there keep being more vistas to explore.
How do you tend to your physical body, and your interior life, so that you can sustain your various care commitments?
I am a full-on introvert, easily overstimulated by light, sound, people, and anything unexpected. If I don’t come home to myself and reset often, I quickly lose my ability to show up and care for others. I’m an avid lifelong fiction reader, and function best when I can curl up and read for at least a few hours every day. As my symptoms of chronic illness have gotten worse over the past few years, I’ve also found a wonderful community of chronically ill, disabled, fat, and elderly acquaintances at the pool, and regular but time-limited interactions with my water aerobics buddies are great for my mental health.
Finally, practicing meditation for many years has made the act of coming home to my body and breath a genuine refuge. Many people struggle to make meditation into a daily practice, but for me – at long last – the key was to let go of trying to do it right. Once I had super low standards for my meditation practice, it became easy-peasy. As dharma teacher Jack Kornfield has said, “You put your ass on the cushion and you take what you get.” But I don’t even put my ass on the cushion, usually – I meditate in bed.
Yes! Normalize lying-down meditation. I wish more people would.
Speaking of hanging around with like-minded people — whose work do you read when you need community-tending inspiration?
There are so many amazing people writing about care today. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Atul Gawande, and adrienne maree brown are major inspirations. I loved, loved, loved Angela Garbes’s books Like a Mother and Essential Labor. And there’s a very deep bench of wise folks writing about care work here on Substack. My must-reads include
, , , , , , , , and , , , , Victoria of (which is a truly amazing and comprehensive resource for caretakers of adults), and of course your friend and mine, the excellent !Aww, shucks! That is a deep bench indeed. I’m honored to be on it.
This feels like a good time to transition to talking about Mother’s Day. I’m wondering if you had caregivers in your own childhood who influence the way you think about care now. How do you honor, or choose not to honor, that inheritance on Mother’s Day?
I was fortunate to be raised by multiple wise, compassionate, loving, wonderful women. My mom, both of my grandmothers, and some aunts were educators, and they modeled for me from the beginning how to really turn toward children, love them, and pay attention to their ideas and questions about the world.
The family I was raised in is not very oriented toward rituals and celebrations. Over the past several years, my mom and I have agreed not to give gifts to each other at all, for any holiday, and it’s an enormous relief to both of us. We prefer a call or meal together – the gift of quality time and attention.
You and I have both had experiences with loss and/or infertility, as have many members of our respective newsletter communities. It feels good to be in a healing space around that, and I think those experiences make you forever aware of how shitty Mother’s Day can feel when you’d like to be a biological parent and yet you are not. What has your mileage been like here?
Losing multiple pregnancies in rapid succession was one of the hardest seasons of my life. Right on the heels of that, my partner and I had to decide whether to pursue IVF, whether to try to adopt, or neither. So I had some hard Mothers Days there for a few years, although really it was the everyday celebrations of motherhood that were hardest for me. I remember being at a women’s gathering while I was pregnant for the second or third time in a row, not ready to tell anyone, and terrified of losing the baby (which I subsequently did). There was another pregnant woman there, several months further along than me, and everyone was talking and laughing excitedly about her coming baby. I longed to be able to say, “I’m having a baby too!” and join that sisterhood of mothers. Instead I had to sit there vibrating with anxiety and pretending to be glad.
Stuff like this happens all the time to people who are involuntarily childless – Mothers Day is just extra brutal. Something like a quarter of Auntie Bulletin readers report being unable to have children despite longing to do so, and I have heard from many who struggle with a deep ongoing sense of grief and loss.
I’m very, very fortunate that I was able to come to a place of true steadiness as a non-parent. My partner realized before I did that parenthood was not the path for us, and I was grateful one of us had finally found clarity. Over the past few years, as I’ve experienced significant worsening of symptoms of chronic illness, I’ve found that, for me, Auntiehood is a wonderful middle path between parenting and childlessness.
Mother’s Day can also bring up a lot for people who are child-free even if it is by choice. Are there any particular pain points for folks in your community around this day that their parent friends need to be more aware of and thoughtful about?
Oof, there are so many pain points around Mothers Day in the Auntie and alloparent community. In my recent survey, readers had such important answers, which were pretty wrenching to read. For example:
Several people reported not being able to have kids of their own and how hard Mothers Day is for them.
Some wrote about feelings of non-belonging, and there was a big range of reactions to what one called the “honorary mention” – that is, appreciations for non-mothers on Mothers Day that may or may not feel genuine and heartfelt.
Many wrote about the ways Aunties are so often made invisible or marginalized, never getting our own day.
My heart really goes out to the stepmoms who shared about never being “mom enough” to fully count on Mothers Day.
Mothers Day isn’t only complicated for people without children, though; it’s also complicated for many parents. A lot of this has to do with people’s grief over their relationships with their own mothers. Several people who responded to The Auntie Bulletin survey talked about:
Having difficult relationships with their own mothers, and wanting to spend the day with chosen mothers who are more affirming to them instead, and feeling torn about that.
Having to choose between different mothers and mother figures in other ways (i.e. one person with two moms who divorced when they were little, and who has spent their whole life since being pulled between competing mothers on Mothers Day).
Being queer and wanting to be affirmed in their identities by their mothers
Being transgender navigating Mothers Day during and after a gender transition.
Grieving over having lost their mom. (One person, adopted as a baby, also talked about the grief of never having met their biological mother in the first place.)
I’m looking forward to talking with you about this more on Substack Live next week, Ryan. And to all the Aunties and all the people who love us, I’m grateful we are not alone.
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I felt this in my heart on so many levels. I'm so grateful to know and learn from both of you. <3