Aunt - Like Mom Only Cooler

The title of this post is the wording on a coffee mug the kids gave to their Aunt Roxanne for her birthday. She is Ty-man's sister-in-law (a.k.a. the wife of his older brother) and she is, and will be, a cool aunt.

The coffee mug made me think about my own aunts of whom I had four (not counting all the great-aunts I only saw once a year - if that). These four aunts were in my immediate family: three were married to uncles and one was a blood relative - my mother's only sister. The three in-law aunts were OK. I didn't know them very well and wasn't close to them. But my mother's sister - this is who the post is about.

When you stop and really think about it, being a woman is a very special thing. Each woman part of a larger sisterhood - fellow women who know what it's like to have their hearts broken by immature teenage boys, who deal with the monthly annoyances of mood swings, cramps, and tampons, who understand the discomfort and embarrassment of a yearly pap smear, who get the constant nagging of our own mothers, who feel your pain when you realize you're turning into your mother, who see your beauty even when your gray roots are showing, who feel for you when your clothes don't fit post-third baby. Really, it's an amazing thing to be part of this large community, half the world's gender. I know that my girl friends are women who sometimes know me better than I know myself because they've been through it all, too. So, knowing this, a girl's aunt, in particular her mother's sister, should be a very special person in her life. She should be the woman the girl can turn to when her mother won't, or can't listen or understand. You would think...

That coffee mug spoke volumes to me when I bought it for Roxanne. She truly loves my children and will step into the role of mother if something ever happens to me. I see it in her eyes when she comes over to our house to visit or babysit. Her face lights up whenever she sees Miss-Miss, Bubba, and J-man, and she has such fun playing with and talking to them. I know she would take great care of them and raise them wonderfully. I know that on those days when Mama doesn't have the answers, Aunt Roxanne will and if my kids are too embarrassed to talk to Mama about it, Aunt Roxanne will be the ear to listen. And I know that Miss-Miss, in particular, can have someone to talk to if Mama isn't there. Roxanne would never steer her on the wrong path - or ridicule any choices she may make. At the same time, watching Roxanne with my children also makes me sad to think of my mother's sister - my Aunt Joy. She wasn't an aunt, a second mother only cooler, a friend, a confidante. She was... a disappointment.

My Aunt Joy was infertile. By the age of 21, her endometriosis was so widespread that the only option for her, in 1963, was a total hysterectomy. Can you imagine taking hormone pills at the age of 21 because the parts of your body that would normally take care of that for you are gone? Can you fathom being a 21-year-old woman, at the supposed most fertile time in her life, suddenly finding herself as the equivalent of a woman in menopause? I can't. But I know it scarred her because of the way she treated me.

After my aunt's death in 1995, my mother finally told me the story that put all the puzzle pieces together and explained all the horrible treatment I received from Aunt Joy over the years. In the spring of 1971, when Mom told her only sister she was pregnant, you could supposedly hear a pin drop. Large amounts jealousy with a side of snide comments ensued. Outings between the two were canceled by Joy. Phone calls became non-existent. My aunt, the woman who should have been a second mother to me, only cooler, was sick with envy and couldn't bring herself to face my mother or her expanding abdomen. I've gone back again and again, reading the cards Aunt Joy gave my mother with baby shower gifts or cards sent to my parents after my birth, trying to read between the lines the screaming that must have gone on in her head. I know the screaming and the agony were there - I heard it all during my struggle with infertility. I would hear it each time I went to a baby shower, visit a new baby and mother in the hospital, or have another friend tell me she was pregnant.

For all the rotten, nasty things Aunt Joy did to me, an innocent child, all those years ago, I later wanted to talk to her, find out what it was like for her, share my pain with her, a pain I know she understood well. I was more like her than she ever imagined. I have her hands, her handwriting, some of her mannerisms, and her infertility - traits we could have shared, laughed at, cried over. But, she has passed away and is no longer with us. She died ten years before my first pregnancy. But, let's be honest, she was never there for me. She was never my aunt. She was instead a bitter woman who happened to be my mother's sister. And my children would have probably brought out the worst in her.

I am an only child and I have made sure to surround myself with wonderful girl friends, the aunts I want my children to have, the aunts I wish I could have had. But I know that the one blood-related aunt, Aunt Roxanne, will never be the horrible, bitter woman that was my Aunt Joy.

And thank the stars for that.