What kind of relationship do you have with your great Aunt?
What’s your special relationship with your aunt like?
Do you have a positive relationship with an aunt? How long have you had that relationship? How close are you guys to your aunts? How do you think your aunt or aunts are different than your mother? Let me tell you about my great Aunt Belle. She was my maternal grandfather’s sister - a diminutive, fast-talking tough woman, Jewish, super-smart, and someone who never suffered fools. Of all my relatives - on either side of my fractious family - she was (after her brother, my grandfather, Milton) the relative to whom I was closest - and the one who, from adolescence onwards, really seemed to understand me, Just as she also had a very clear, lucid comprehension of my parents and their immense problems; the foremost being that they were wildly unsuited as a couple.
Indeed, my earliest memory of my parents were their voices raised in anger at each other, my mother running into my room and crying whenever my father exploded at her; my father constantly ruing out loud (from when I was about nine years old and onwards - and began to have the beginning of a comprehension of such things) that he should never have married my mother... though three years later, when I learned (to my then horror) about the mechanics of sex, and my father continued to tell me - in moments of despair - that he should have thought twice before jumping into his marriage, the thought struck me: “but had you not married your mother, there would be no me”.
I’ll get back to my parents - and how their unhappiness, intriguingly, helped turn me into the writer I am today - a little later on. Suffice to say my great aunt was more than cognizant that her niece - my mother - was a profoundly neurotic woman, and one who - in the words of Belle, around the time that my mother turned sixty-five (some twenty-nine years ago) - was still ‘very much a little girl’.
Belle was the original blunt talker. If she liked you she would do everything possible to keep you emotionally buoyed and very much feeling as if you were special. Certainly she was the one family member from whom I had the closest thing to unconditional love - which is probably the one thing we all crave early on in life, and only after all we have begun to understand just how complex and flawed we adults are all are - and how our very parents (who were, at one time, our entire world) harbored their own shortcomings, disappointments, rages. When I was twenty-two I privately revealed to her that, in ten days’ time, I was planning to take a flight to Europe and put some distance between myself and my parents (especially as my father had begun to pressure me to stop working for no money in the theatre, to abandon my dream to become a writer, and go to law school). She took my two hands in hers - and, in a low voice, she said:“You never heard this from me... but put as much distance between yourself and your parents as possible. You can’t win with them. You never will. And you only have this one little life. Don’t try to please other... especially your parents. Please yourself - as hard as that is”. I have 3 aunts, but only one is super close, but she’s basically part of my nuclear family (other than the fact she’s never lived in my house) She’s now in her 60’s and retired, but she never married and has vacationed with my family and even with my parents before they had kids. Both of my parents worked when I was a kid so I’d spend my weekend with her when she’d come home from her job in a large city (about a 3 hour drive, in a different state) Even after she moved to our city and lived closer all the time I still spent Saturday’s with her and when I’m home from college I typically still do (she has MS but gets around pretty well in her motorized wheelchair)
I don't have any aunts, but I do have an uncle that I really connected with due to a shared love of history, science, and science fiction. I feel like it's a relationship neither of us really expected. He's a gruff lifelong bachelor who lives in the woods, and I was a painfully shy bookworm who couldn't wait to leave the small town life. But over the years, we discovered we had a lot of the same tastes, and I actually admire him a lot. I wish we could have been closer when I was younger, because I'm sure he could have taught me a lot. We live too far away to hang out now, but I always love seeing him at the holidays and talking nerd shit, lol. He's great guy.
I have 6 aunts, on my mother's side and all them live like ten minutes from our house. Growing up, one of them (the oldest) sort of scared me because she was almost always in a bad mood and kinda ready for a fight, so I stayed clear and we didn't really have relationship like I had with the others. When I got older, 12 maybe, my mother told her story and why she used to be so... angry, and I realized that she was actually incredibly strong and independent. I just remembered her "dark phase" as she calls it. I reached out to her and now she is a second mother in my life, that I didn't even know I needed... Sorry for the long post and I hope it makes as I a on mobile. I’ve heard it said that as an adult you get to pick your family and here I am 23 and doing some of that. One of my favorite aunts growing up was fun loving and sort of a free spirit but I never got to spent a lot of time with her outside our family gatherings 3 times a year. I decided several months ago there was nothing stopping me from visiting her and she took me in with open arms and now we regularly drink wine together and talk about life and she’s teaching me how to knit lol. It’s the relationship I never knew I needed but always wanted. Aunts are special because they have lots of advice and wisdom but less of the judgement than your own parents. I don’t have any sisters and my mom and I don’t have the close relationship that many have. Just wondering if there are others out there who have a close relationship with an aunt? I feel like aunt relationships aren’t talked about a lot but mine makes me feel empowered and warm and fuzzy inside so I would love to hear other stories The youngest one is like an older sister. My parents pretty much raised her, she was always my babysitter, and she’s bougie as hell so now that I’m older I’m always borrowing her stuff because she has the best/cutest clothes. The middle one I wasn’t very close to at all growing up. She was always under some guy and didn’t have a great relationship with my Mom & Aunts because of it. Now that she’s been single for a while though, her and my Mom have gotten close and she’s actually REALLY fun. She took me out for my birthday last year and I was surprised at how good of a time I had hanging out with her, and she comes around frequently. I’m glad I’m getting to know and see this side of her. & the Oldest one I’m probably the closest to. I lived with her for two years while getting my current job, and we’d spend hours and many late nights up talking, laughing, and crying. Learned a lot of family history from her and can tell her any and everything.
As someone's aunt this makes me very happy. I always worry when my nephew is a bit older if he's still going to think I'm the coolest person. It's fine if he doesn't, but I want to still be the top three of the coolest people he knows. When he was five I told him I was moving to Mexico and wanted to take him as a companion, help me steal pocket money while playing an accordion, that kind of deal. Dude packed his backpack with clothes, snacks, and bandaids just in case someone tried to hurt us. Broke his heart when I told him I was kidding. He's 15 now. My heart hurts. Call your aunt!
My mother's sister is a person whom I just don't respect. She always treated me fine, but it would take ages to tell you about all the instances of her insecurity, envy and greed making her act like a bitch towards my mother. My mom has somewhat of a Stockholm syndrome about her, so she's not willing to drop her completely, but I have no reason to invest a nanosecond of my time into that relationship, I find her weakness and all the malice it results in to be simply unpalatable.
One of my aunts (my mum's little sister) travels to see us once or twice a year, I'm very close to her children (my cousins), they're about the closest thing I've got to siblings. By extension I'm quite close to her. The other is a generally sweet, happy person who has always loved my sister and me. She's also incredibly religious, though, so there's a fairly good chance she'll stop associating with me if/when my boyfriend and I get married.
Do you have a positive relationship with an aunt? How long have you had that relationship? How close are you guys to your aunts? How do you think your aunt or aunts are different than your mother? Let me tell you about my great Aunt Belle. She was my maternal grandfather’s sister - a diminutive, fast-talking tough woman, Jewish, super-smart, and someone who never suffered fools. Of all my relatives - on either side of my fractious family - she was (after her brother, my grandfather, Milton) the relative to whom I was closest - and the one who, from adolescence onwards, really seemed to understand me, Just as she also had a very clear, lucid comprehension of my parents and their immense problems; the foremost being that they were wildly unsuited as a couple.
Indeed, my earliest memory of my parents were their voices raised in anger at each other, my mother running into my room and crying whenever my father exploded at her; my father constantly ruing out loud (from when I was about nine years old and onwards - and began to have the beginning of a comprehension of such things) that he should never have married my mother... though three years later, when I learned (to my then horror) about the mechanics of sex, and my father continued to tell me - in moments of despair - that he should have thought twice before jumping into his marriage, the thought struck me: “but had you not married your mother, there would be no me”.
I’ll get back to my parents - and how their unhappiness, intriguingly, helped turn me into the writer I am today - a little later on. Suffice to say my great aunt was more than cognizant that her niece - my mother - was a profoundly neurotic woman, and one who - in the words of Belle, around the time that my mother turned sixty-five (some twenty-nine years ago) - was still ‘very much a little girl’.
Belle was the original blunt talker. If she liked you she would do everything possible to keep you emotionally buoyed and very much feeling as if you were special. Certainly she was the one family member from whom I had the closest thing to unconditional love - which is probably the one thing we all crave early on in life, and only after all we have begun to understand just how complex and flawed we adults are all are - and how our very parents (who were, at one time, our entire world) harbored their own shortcomings, disappointments, rages. When I was twenty-two I privately revealed to her that, in ten days’ time, I was planning to take a flight to Europe and put some distance between myself and my parents (especially as my father had begun to pressure me to stop working for no money in the theatre, to abandon my dream to become a writer, and go to law school). She took my two hands in hers - and, in a low voice, she said:“You never heard this from me... but put as much distance between yourself and your parents as possible. You can’t win with them. You never will. And you only have this one little life. Don’t try to please other... especially your parents. Please yourself - as hard as that is”. I have 3 aunts, but only one is super close, but she’s basically part of my nuclear family (other than the fact she’s never lived in my house) She’s now in her 60’s and retired, but she never married and has vacationed with my family and even with my parents before they had kids. Both of my parents worked when I was a kid so I’d spend my weekend with her when she’d come home from her job in a large city (about a 3 hour drive, in a different state) Even after she moved to our city and lived closer all the time I still spent Saturday’s with her and when I’m home from college I typically still do (she has MS but gets around pretty well in her motorized wheelchair)
I don't have any aunts, but I do have an uncle that I really connected with due to a shared love of history, science, and science fiction. I feel like it's a relationship neither of us really expected. He's a gruff lifelong bachelor who lives in the woods, and I was a painfully shy bookworm who couldn't wait to leave the small town life. But over the years, we discovered we had a lot of the same tastes, and I actually admire him a lot. I wish we could have been closer when I was younger, because I'm sure he could have taught me a lot. We live too far away to hang out now, but I always love seeing him at the holidays and talking nerd shit, lol. He's great guy.
I have 6 aunts, on my mother's side and all them live like ten minutes from our house. Growing up, one of them (the oldest) sort of scared me because she was almost always in a bad mood and kinda ready for a fight, so I stayed clear and we didn't really have relationship like I had with the others. When I got older, 12 maybe, my mother told her story and why she used to be so... angry, and I realized that she was actually incredibly strong and independent. I just remembered her "dark phase" as she calls it. I reached out to her and now she is a second mother in my life, that I didn't even know I needed... Sorry for the long post and I hope it makes as I a on mobile. I’ve heard it said that as an adult you get to pick your family and here I am 23 and doing some of that. One of my favorite aunts growing up was fun loving and sort of a free spirit but I never got to spent a lot of time with her outside our family gatherings 3 times a year. I decided several months ago there was nothing stopping me from visiting her and she took me in with open arms and now we regularly drink wine together and talk about life and she’s teaching me how to knit lol. It’s the relationship I never knew I needed but always wanted. Aunts are special because they have lots of advice and wisdom but less of the judgement than your own parents. I don’t have any sisters and my mom and I don’t have the close relationship that many have. Just wondering if there are others out there who have a close relationship with an aunt? I feel like aunt relationships aren’t talked about a lot but mine makes me feel empowered and warm and fuzzy inside so I would love to hear other stories The youngest one is like an older sister. My parents pretty much raised her, she was always my babysitter, and she’s bougie as hell so now that I’m older I’m always borrowing her stuff because she has the best/cutest clothes. The middle one I wasn’t very close to at all growing up. She was always under some guy and didn’t have a great relationship with my Mom & Aunts because of it. Now that she’s been single for a while though, her and my Mom have gotten close and she’s actually REALLY fun. She took me out for my birthday last year and I was surprised at how good of a time I had hanging out with her, and she comes around frequently. I’m glad I’m getting to know and see this side of her. & the Oldest one I’m probably the closest to. I lived with her for two years while getting my current job, and we’d spend hours and many late nights up talking, laughing, and crying. Learned a lot of family history from her and can tell her any and everything.
As someone's aunt this makes me very happy. I always worry when my nephew is a bit older if he's still going to think I'm the coolest person. It's fine if he doesn't, but I want to still be the top three of the coolest people he knows. When he was five I told him I was moving to Mexico and wanted to take him as a companion, help me steal pocket money while playing an accordion, that kind of deal. Dude packed his backpack with clothes, snacks, and bandaids just in case someone tried to hurt us. Broke his heart when I told him I was kidding. He's 15 now. My heart hurts. Call your aunt!
My mother's sister is a person whom I just don't respect. She always treated me fine, but it would take ages to tell you about all the instances of her insecurity, envy and greed making her act like a bitch towards my mother. My mom has somewhat of a Stockholm syndrome about her, so she's not willing to drop her completely, but I have no reason to invest a nanosecond of my time into that relationship, I find her weakness and all the malice it results in to be simply unpalatable.
One of my aunts (my mum's little sister) travels to see us once or twice a year, I'm very close to her children (my cousins), they're about the closest thing I've got to siblings. By extension I'm quite close to her. The other is a generally sweet, happy person who has always loved my sister and me. She's also incredibly religious, though, so there's a fairly good chance she'll stop associating with me if/when my boyfriend and I get married.
