The Auntie Era Has Arrived

An increasing amount of women are opting out of motherhood…but are still raising the children of the world

I have just spent the past two months working late nights, traveling back and forth across my state, soothing nonstop tantrums, and cooking, cooking, cooking for six constantly hungry children.

I don’t remember what it feels like to be able to go to bed when my body tells me I’m tired. I don’t remember what it feels like to pee when I have to pee, or eat when I have to eat. I don’t remember what it’s like to go to bed without guzzling two glasses of water when I finally realize I haven’t had a beverage of any kind for the past several hours.

This might not sound noteworthy to some. With the exception of the endless road trips, this pretty much sounds like #momlife, right?

Except I don’t have any living children. This is, believe it or not, #auntlife.

My youngest nephew, Alex, who is four, just had his first open heart surgery to correct some of the many heart defects he was born with. I traveled across the state in early May to be with him for the week before surgery and helped my sister with her other five kids during that very tumultuous time. Then I brought the older five kids home with me, on another trip across the state, where my mother and brother and I cared for them during the time Alex was in the hospital.

And after Alex was released from the hospital earlier than expected, we made a fast change of plans and I loaded the kids up and took another trip across the state to bring them home and stay for another week so I could be with Alex during the early days of his recovery.

This process was so much harder than I ever thought it would be. What is worse than knowing the child in your life that you love so much is suffering? And not being able to be there with him? It was horrific to witness this from afar. (And I have no doubt it was even more horrific for his parents who had front row seats to the whole affair.)

It also brought up a lot of other issues for me that I’ve struggled with for years. This all happened around Mother’s Day. Childless women who are reading this will understand exactly what that means without further explanation.

But if you don’t understand the reason why the timing of this made everything worse…Mother’s Day is my absolute least favorite holiday. In short, I didn’t get to have children, which is something I will always grieve, but something I have come to accept. But not being a mother in this culture is hard. It comes with constant judgment and even sometimes cruelty.

Because of that, I often struggle with feelings of shame and invisibility. And when a woman like me finds herself at the intersection of Mother’s Day and a family emergency in a group where you are the only childless woman…it brings up all the painful feelings.

In fact, I was so overwhelmed by these feelings that I even wrote a story about it in the midst of all this family chaos and published it on Mother’s Day. And I was so convinced it would attract dozens of angry, judgmental comments that I couldn’t even look at them until two weeks later.

And when I finally did…they were incredibly kind and compassionate. I cried, and for the exact opposite reason I thought I would.

At the end of this journey of my nephew’s heart surgery, I’m coming out of this with an inner exploration that I didn’t expect. I am tired of the shame. I’m tired of being shamed. And sidelined. And left out.

From where I’m sitting, childless and childfree aunties are one of the most unsung heroes of our world. And I’m so tired of witnessing our society judge and ignore them.

My friend Maria is a lot like me. She never married, had a miscarriage at 19, didn’t get to have children, and ended up with far more niblings than she ever expected. She’s also incredibly involved in her niblings’ lives.

Nearly twenty years ago, Maria slept over at her brother’s house during his second child’s infancy because Baby #2 suffered from seizures and often needed to go to the ER in the middle of the night. With Maria sleeping over, her brother and his wife could make it to the ER without worry, since Maria would take care of Baby #1 until they returned home.

Maria has spent time at both her brothers’ houses when their kids were sick. She has given her brothers thousands of dollars to help them pay for private school for their kids. She attends every school function, every sports event, and even takes the older girls out for manicures every two weeks — which as all women know, is a very expensive treat.

And throughout it all, Maria also lives with and takes care of her aging father — because as the only single, childless female of the family, that responsibility, without discussion or negotiation, fell into her lap.

She does all this without complaining. Even when she is taken for granted or taken advantage of, like when her brother asked her to pick up Daughter #3 one Wednesday, which Maria rearranged her schedule to do, only to get a call the next Wednesday asking where on earth she was and why she hadn’t picked up her niece again. Apparently, that one request wasn’t a one-off, but an expectation that she would take care of Wednesday pickups for the rest of the school year. Oh.

No one celebrates Maria on Mother’s Day. No one celebrates her on Auntie’s Day, either. In fact, no one at all celebrates Auntie’s Day. Maybe you’ve noticed that…?

Sometimes, Maria’s brothers complain or speak to her in a way that implies she isn’t doing enough. Enough? What’s enough for someone else’s kids?

Why does anyone expect her help, at all?

Not all my childless/childfree auntie friends are as actively involved in their niblings’ lives as Maria and I are. But all of them are involved in some way. A few childfree aunties don’t love children (hence why they’re childfree) but like Maria, they financially contribute to their niblings’ lives in a multitude of ways.

Interestingly, we all have or have had careers in which we worked in underpaid caregiving roles, and we have all contributed to our communities through years of volunteer work.

And also interestingly, we are constantly judged by others. We are called selfish. Our lives are called empty and meaningless. People ask what it’s like to be able to sit around and watch Netflix all day. They say it must be nice to have such “easy” lives. They remind us that nothing worthwhile doesn’t require effort and that we’d be so much more fulfilled if we had chosen a more difficult road.

Isn’t that the oddest thing? Isn’t taking care of other people’s children meaningful? And isn’t that even more unselfish than the time, money, love, and effort parents give to their own children?

And childless/childfree people often contribute much more to their communities than parents do. Why? I’d guess one of the primary reasons is that, yes, we do have more time on our hands, and — here’s the part that will shock some of you — we are capable of identifying and pursuing what feels meaningful to us and are no strangers to hard work.

Just take a look at former wrestler and actor Jon Cena. He has set a record for wishes granted through the Make a Wish Foundation. How many, you ask? Six hundred fifty! You can read about it here.

What’s interesting about this is that this article doesn’t even mention that Cena is childfree. Some are aware of this, as he has spoken about it publicly. He has explained that he really enjoys his life as it is and values the connections and relationships he already has. He understands that parenthood would divide his attention and have a major impact on other areas of his life and though he feels he would be good at it, he knows himself well enough to understand that it simply is not the right path for him.

Cena is both generous…and lucky. If that article had been written about a childfree woman, her parental status would have been noted within the first paragraph. And indeed, I question if an article would even have been written about it, at all, because our culture is judgmental and often hateful toward women without children. It’s not something that you see spoken of in a positive light in the media.

Heaven forbid we recognize anything about a woman that isn’t central to the roles she performs for others.

This is, ultimately, what is at the heart of my determination to see aunties more appreciated in our culture. It’s not so much about me or my friend Maria or any other childless/childfree auntie. Yes, that matters, but what matters more to me is the fact that our culture only considers a woman valuable if she has children.

It’s a dangerous narrative and don’t even try to argue with me as we stand here in the midst of abortion ban after abortion ban. Don’t you get it? It’s all connected.

When I see the way childless/childfree aunties are treated, how invisible they are, and how underappreciated they are, I worry. When I hear people proclaim that mothers are more valuable to the world simply because of their parental status, I worry. And hell, when I see how much we fetishize the selflessness of mothers, I worry.

We don’t do this with men. How many times do you suppose Jon Cena was told he is selfish? A failure of a man? A waste of a good life? How many times do you think he’s been asked to justify his existence because he didn’t have kids? How often do you think people have questioned his morality or even existence because of his decision to not have children?

How often have people told him that his siblings (who do have children) work much harder than he does? That his life isn’t as important because nothing he does will ever compare to the lives his siblings chose? That being a good uncle and a good citizen aren’t enough for us to tolerate his presence in society, let alone celebrate or appreciate him?

I’m sorry for my frustration, but I’m really just over this. I’m so tired of this nonsense. I thought it would get better as I aged, but on the contrary: it’s gotten worse.

There’s something so strange about it. Wouldn’t you assume that as a woman ages, she has more to offer the world thanks to her experience and knowledge? Wouldn’t you assume that she is more valuable, particularly around caregiving and child-rearing, because of her wisdom and discernment? Doesn’t that sound logical?

Yet I’ve experienced the exact opposite. I find that people are so much quicker to judge me than they used to be. I find that people found me more competent as a caregiver and aunt when I only had one nibling than they do now, seventeen years and twelve niblings later.

And I’ve found people are far, far more likely to ask me personal questions about my journey and to make wild and often inappropriate assumptions about where I’ve been, what I want, and who I am.

I suspect there are a lot of things at play here. I feel the strains of pronatalism that have been playing a gentle background score to our lives for the past few decades and have suddenly become a Top 40 tune. You can see it clearly in the cultural and political conversations around the declining birth rate, domestic labor, and abortion. The expectation that all women should be mothers and the evidence that we only value those who become one is everywhere. And we are seeing a political landscape that is also proving how committed it is to this narrative by forcing women into motherhood and punishing those who don’t want to opt in and continue opting in.

Further, I see the way this narrative is influenced by our insistence that a good woman, a worthy woman, must be defined by her roles in service to others — even if those roles only exist in potentiality. For instance, I suspect people perceived me to be more competent and invited me into circles that were largely populated by mothers because back then, I was a potential mother. In my childbearing years, both in and out of relationships, everyone — including me — assumed I would become a mother. It wasn’t an “if.” It was a “when.”

Now solidly in the throes of perimenopause, just a few years from fifty, it’s clear to me and the rest of the world that this is a done deal. There will be no children in my future. I will not become a mother.

Somehow, because of that, people see me as even less competent and valuable.

As I mentioned, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of checking my comment sections and finding a message from someone saying I’m selfish, I’m a waste of space, there’s no meaning to my life and one day I’ll finally realize that (when it’s too late, of course). I’m tired of friendships ending because I’m not a mother and I’ll “never be able to understand what it’s like to be a mom.” I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines during the family Mother’s Day celebrations, and watching every Aunt’s Day go by without any acknowledgement whatsoever.

And I’m so goddamn tired of people comparing every single thing I do in my life with mothers, a comparison that was designed to invalidate my life and my experiences.

Women without children shouldn’t be subjected to this constant judgment and shaming. Come at me when you have the same vitriol to spew at Jon Cena and other childless/childfree men.

I’m done being a silent auntie, an invisible auntie, an auntie filled with shame. And so are the rest of the childless and childfree aunties of the world.

This is our time to shine.

© Yael Wolfe 2023

Yael Wolfe is a writer, artist, and photographer. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com.

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