Tales from Rural Maine: The Auntie Brigade

There are some things in life that bring me joy. (Lots and lots of things!) Teaching yoga. Practicing yoga with a kind and illuminated teacher. Serving as a fire fighter. Training as a fire fighter. These things top the list. But among the other, most extraordinarily powerful things that bring me joy, is the opportunity to give unconditional love to children.

I am lucky enough to have people in my life who are willing to share their children with me. To allow me, sometimes professionally and sometimes simply as a friend, to love the socks off their children. They let me play and listen and comfort; they allow me to share in meal times and bed times and holidays. We play at the fire department. We play at home. We enjoy one another and take good care. We are enthusiastic in our warmth and appreciation.

It has often seemed such a cruel twist of this particular life's fate that someone with such a virtually limitless capacity for love and loving kindness and nurturing and patience and joy has no surviving children of her own.

But, there is also this beautiful side to that. I am part of what Liz Gilbert calls "The Auntie Brigade."

"Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade," she writes. "My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world – an ambassador auntie –who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody’s family whatsoever. There are people I’ve been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-time rearing of a child."

Last night, when my friend Kathleen handed her fussy toddler to me near bedtime, he felt upset. There was also a nearly five-year-old bouncing around, avoiding sleep. As his mother left the room to go make up my bed for me, nearly five-year-old daughter tagging along behind, Graeme and I were left alone. I held his warm little self, fresh from the bath, wearing only a diaper, and he reached out his arms after his mother, disappearing down the hallway. "Ma-ma!," he said. Distress building in his face, in his voice, in his body. "Ma-ma!"

I softened into his upset, holding him gently, and I murmured, "Graeme...let's go find the moon..." As soon as I said the words, his body relaxed into mine. He got quiet and rested his sweet little head on my chest. I walked to the window and looked out into the night. I rocked gently, tenderly, and his breathing slowed and softened. His eyelids got heavy. Softly, steadily, he fell asleep.

I stood there for a long time--an Auntie, tired, back aching, but available completely--happily rocking, holding that beloved little boy...and looking for the moon.