Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday. My mom passed away in 2015, and I still think about her every day. I always sent her a card and called her on Mother’s Day, of course. But for years I sent another set of cards as well.
Every Mother’s Day I counted up the aunts I had and made a card for each of them too. I started with nine. This year I’m down to only two aunts, and I will send cards again. I want both of them to know how much they have meant to my life.
One of my good memories of growing up was sitting around the kitchen table at one or the other of my grandmothers’ homes while they and my mother and my aunts prepared a meal together. They would all be sad to know that the meal preparation gene didn’t rub off on me, but at least their conversation did.
If you are fortunate enough to have had a similar family situation, you know what I’m talking about. Being with your older female relatives and listening to their talk and interactions with each other teaches you a lot about life and yourself.
This was how I learned about being married. Not the “personal stuff” so much, but the everyday things I’d have to expect. Like the fact that, unlike my dad, not all men would eat almost anything that didn’t bite back, and the fact that some men didn’t help with housework and others did. I learned that some of my uncles cared if their wives spent money and others didn’t. Some could be teased and some couldn’t.
Listening to their gentle jokes about their husbands made me realize that real marriage wasn’t like the movie portrayal of it. Their conversations, which they didn’t know I was listening to so carefully, began to form my ideas of the kind of man I would look for one day.
My aunts’ easy camaraderie taught me how to relate to other women: when there’s work to do, do your part, don’t complain, don’t talk bad about another woman’s children even if you know something to talk bad about, and even though a wife may talk bad about her own husband, you can’t add to the discussion. You just say, “Well, bless his heart.”
From observing these women, I also learned early in life that women are all different and that’s okay — that there are many ways to be attractive. I had aunts with warm, outgoing personalities, aunts who were quiet homemakers, witty aunts, helpful aunts, playful aunts, dutiful aunts. I learned something from them all. Essentially, I learned that as a woman I could be me and it would be okay.
In those informal family meetings, I learned which family characteristics had shown up in me. I learned, for example, that my family were story tellers. I didn’t think I shared this characteristic with them until it dawned on me that I loved to write stories. I guess this column is my attempt at following in my family’s footsteps.
If you sit through many family gatherings, you begin to understand how people view you, your assets and your peculiarities. My aunts would casually refer to my grades and say I was a good student. So I made school success one of my goals because that was part of my identity in my family.
On the negative side, the word most often used to describe me was “independent.” For a long time I thought “independent” was a cuss word because they usually said it when something had gone wrong and I had engineered it without asking anybody.
Part of what they meant was that I didn’t seem to care what people thought of me. I had an older cousin who did care. and though I envied the aunts’ good comments about “how sweet she is,” I couldn’t seem to muster enough concern about public opinion to be sweet myself. But I knew that they accepted me anyway, and that gave me the freedom to continue to be “the independent niece.”
I learned much of my value system from them too, while they worked a round the kitchen, commenting on life as they understood it. I learned that families aren’t perfect, but they stick together. They may fuss about each other, but they love each other. I learned that you take responsibility— if you mess up you clean up. I learned that education was valued in my family, even though no one else had graduated from college until I did it. I learned that God was an indisputable fact of life.
You Simpson County girls are lucky. If you’ve lived here near family most of your life, you get to socialize often with your aunts and grandmothers and cousins. Keep it up.
Listening to them will teach you how you fit into your family and that’s the way you will fit into the world.
There’s already a Mothers Day and a Fathers Day and a Grandparents Day, but there ought to be an Aunts Day on the calendar too. Mine are and were special enough to deserve one.
