Aunties

Here’s Your End-of-May Care Package

LISA SIBBETT

LISA SIBBETT

— 10 min read
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Photograph framed with a small white "A" logo watermark in the lower right corner. A large bird with vivid pink-and-red wings fully extended flies low over a lush wetland.

Time to offset the fools on the news and soak up wholesome content instead.

Photograph framed with a thin green border and a small white "A" logo watermark in the lower right corner. A large bird with vivid pink-and-red wings fully extended flies low over a lush wetland, with dense green vegetation and a calm waterway in the background under a partly cloudy blue sky.
One of my besties was recently in Florida and took this photo on an airboat alligator tour. I was like, “Wow! I thought they only had flamingos in the Keys, were you in the Keys?” and she was like, “It’s not a flamingo! I can’t remember what it is!” So now we are left with a May mystery. What bird is giant and pink and lives in Florida and is not a flamingo? I refuse to Google it. N.B. She has now remembered and told me, but for fun I won’t tell you. WE FIND OUT IN THE COMMENTS OR WE DON’T FIND OUT AT ALL. Enlighten us, ornithologists and Floridians!

​Hey Aunties, welcome to your end-of-May care package! This is the part where always I acknowledge what rough and ugly times we are living through (because it keeps on being true). I talk about how we need to rest in order to keep resisting – to protect our capacity to keep recognizing the beauty in the world and to build on it. I remind us (including myself) to limit the time we spend with the fools on the news. I argue that we need to care for ourselves, reconnect with our bodies and the earth beneath our feet, and remember that life is pretty funny — especially when there are kids around.

I say some version of the above every month because it bears repeating every month. Indeed, it bears repeating every day.

It’s time now for your monthly care package: a collection of writers and others communicating wise, compassionate, funny, insightful, surprising, and/or useful stuff around the internet. I aim for a blend of organizing and activism (e.g., today, how to advocate for universal accessibility on airplanes), community care (e.g., why daycare is awesome, actually), useful stuff (e.g., what makes self-compassion fierce), catharsis (e.g, an unusually satisfying anti-AI rant), and good old fashioned escapism (e.g., sixteen types of fun).

Make it to the end of the roundup to watch the cute kid video of the month: a child delivers a stirring impromptu address to all the kids trying to learn to ride a bike.

A row of seven stylized figures from The Auntie Bulletin's branding, illustrating how two abstract brushstroke figures combine to form the letter "A." The leftmost figures are individual tall, narrow dark navy blue shapes resembling standing people. Moving right, a dark blue figure and a lighter teal figure are shown leaning into each other, their forms together creating the shape of the letter "A"—one figure as each leg of the letter. The rightmost figures show the teal figure alone. White background.

May Around The Auntie Bulletin

I was on NPR! Connecticut Public Radio has a show called Where We Live, and they did a full hour-long episode on aunties, including me and three other guests who have insightful things to say about auntiehood. Life achievement unlocked!

I also went on the global feminist podcast The Conversation to talk about auntiehood alongside co-guest Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, who has a cool book called Tias and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us.

On Substack Notes, I asked parents to weigh in on where they feel comfortable with aunties bending family rules and where they draw the line. I didn’t anticipate how grateful parents would be to be asked – and their answers were instructive. A good resource for aunties!

I interviewed Laura the Foster Parent Partner about her excellent new book, First Time Fostering. She had so many excellent, actionable ideas for how all of us can plug in and support foster families and youth in foster care in our own communities.

My post on How to Rest got lots of positive feedback, as well as the most upgrades to paid of any post this year. People really want to know how to rest! If, once you manage to clear the decks, you still have a hard time getting truly restful rest, this one’s for you.

I wrote about my experience Rebranding The Auntie Bulletin, which the design nerds (complimentary) loved.

The Auntie Bulletin wordmark logo. "The" and "Bulletin" are in light blue rounded sans-serif type; "Auntie" is in red. The capital "A" in "Auntie" is stylized with a brushstroke shape resembling a tall figure with a small figure tucked beside it, echoing the newsletter's alloparenting theme.
The red and blue color story is the winning logo combination!

Also, I love the little balloon duo on the left, below, and proposed it as our new end mark (to take the place of the cornbread heart, RIP). But some readers thought it looked like the big person was taking the balloon away from the small person, so I asked Sriparna, our lovely graphic designer, to tweak it, and now we have the version on the right. What do you think?

Simple, colorful illustration showing two pairs of abstract stick figures, each consisting of a taller figure and a smaller figure holding hands, with a yellow circle (head) on a stick above them. In the left pair, the tall figure is blue and the small figure is red; in the right pair the colors are reversed. Each small figure has a speech bubble with ellipsis dots, suggesting conversation. White background.

“The religion nerd in me wants to point out that what Richard Pryor did is also what a prophet does. The prophet isn’t predicting. The prophet is testifying. And comedians seem particularly good at this right now.” This one’s at the top of the care package for a reason. So good.

A children’s librarian explains what children actually want from picture books.

“Academic research has gotten significantly more accessible over the past decade.” An academic librarian shares six free tools that used to require a university login – one of them is JSTOR!

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Important resource: the predator who tried to groom a 3-year-old and the mom who spotted the signs. Share widely.

Wow! Writer, dad, and high school health teacher Christopher Pepper interviewed the director of a successful org with a genius design for supporting adolescent boys’ social and emotional development. “If you’re raising a boy, you already know how much time he spends online, gaming, hanging out on Discord, watching YouTube. The question isn’t whether boys will be online. It’s whether the spaces they’re in are setting them up to thrive. NGM Alliance is a free, safe online community hosted on Discord for boys and nonbinary youth in middle school and high school, built around gaming (think Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite) and run by trained Next Gen Men facilitators.” 😍

Screenshot of a Substack post from Sarah Menkedick's newsletter "Terms of Endearment." The post lists things the author did that her eleven-year-old daughter found embarrassing, including starting a group text with "hello friends," pretending to lasso something, wearing an oversized t-shirt, carrying dog poop for two blocks, explaining her dog's name to a Sephora cashier, pursing her lips while applying lip gloss, and writing in a tiny notebook at swim practice. Ends: "Please share your own struggles in this department. Solidarity." 516 likes, 37 replies.
For the record, pretending to lasso something is one of life’s greatest joys and children are monsters. The comments on this one are a lot of fun.

This one’s for all the step-ish parents, as well as anyone who loves such a person. #stepishparentvisibility!

“How else would you describe the sensation, in the dark of night, of a creature with the splotchy skin and splayed limbs of a spatchcocked chicken, scrabbling up your chest to feed from your body with milky sightless eyes and paperthin, razor-sharp claws? That’s the experience of the very first night with a newborn — only minutes or hours from them being cut off from their previous foodsource: your bloodstream.” Amrita Vijay on her new baby and the point at which their soul enters their body. “It definitely isn’t within the first couple months of life.”

“In fish, when there is a parent who’s involved, it’s much more likely to be the dad. If you look at amphibians, it’s a co-parenting situation. Birds, almost all birds, have co-parents. So it’s very much a human bias to see motherhood as this really, you know, primal thing. Like mothers didn’t even come first on the planet.” I’m excited to read this new book called The Creature’s Guide to Caring. Here’s an interview with the author, Elizabeth Preston.

My sister is the one who first hipped me to the many magical advantages of daycare. Here’s Amanda Litman compellingly outlining the pro-daycare argument, which all aunties should know.

Illustrated comic with a pink background. The top panel shows a creature emerging from a swirling pool of colorful AI-generated goo, captioned "Out of the primordial goo of AI slop, a new species of techbro emerges." Below, a drawing of a man in a green t-shirt with a speech bubble reading "I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT." Caption identifies him as "Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI on The Tonight Show."
Aubrey Hirsch does these great feminist comic essays and here's a very cathartic one about — oof — ChatGPT dads.

Relatedly: “In my Facebook dahlia growers group, there are endless queries from new growers asking if the planting plan built for them by some A.I. chatbot would work (almost always: no). I want to reply in all caps: COMPARE THE TIME IT TOOK YOU TO ASK CLAUDE THIS QUESTION, POSE IT TO THIS GROUP, THEN FIGHT WITH EVERYONE IN THE GROUP ABOUT A.I......TO LOOKING IN ONE (1) DAHLIA-GROWING BOOK, OR PERUSING ONE (1) DAHLIA GROWER’S FAQ.” A satisfying rant from Anne Helen Petersen on how AI keeps wasting our time.

It is important to remember that we are winning. Here’s an essential pep-talk from Garrett Bucks.

Read this sentence and then read it again: “California’s new batteries, installed over the last 36 months or so, are the equivalent of a dozen new nuclear power plants.”

While we’re on the subject of hopeful climate news, I recommend this newsletter. It led me to this delightful story about the beavers recruited to dam an urban creek that kept inundating a London Tube station.

Interior of an open storage cabinet or closet organized with art supplies. Upper shelves hold binder clips, paint brushes, scissors, a small multi-drawer organizer, and metal trays. A white rope basket and a rolled paper carrier sit on the lower shelf alongside fabric pouches and small notebooks. White headphones and a small drawstring bag hang from hooks on the right side.
I love home organization content so much. Here, Erin Boyle explains how she organizes the kids’ crafts and games closet in her family’s small New York apartment, with a dash of reflection on the photos creators stage for public consumption versus the lived reality.

How to characterize Blackbird Spyplane? They use slang I don’t understand, although I’ve gotten more of the hang of it over time. They focus on intimidatingly cool style that I mostly can’t afford and probably wouldn’t wear because I mostly want to wear sweatpants. And I love them. Here’s Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah encouraging us to take the grace-based path, and I didn’t see that coming, but it’s actually totally on-brand.

Instagram post from @zendaya showing her doing the hair of a younger child sitting on a bed. Zendaya, wearing glasses and a gray t-shirt, brushes the child's long natural hair. The caption reads: "Auntie Daya duties, washing sheets, forcing them to talk to me about their life (cause I'm supposed to be the cool auntie), do their hair...the usual." Posted April 28, 2016, with 757.8K likes.
Behold Zendaya — “Auntie Daya” — doing her niece’s hair.

Asta / Aastha on why style matters more than people give it credit for: “How you do something is how you do everything. The woman who can put on a blazer and say yes, this is what I’m wearing, I like it, I don’t need to explain it further. She’s building a specific muscle. And that muscle shows up everywhere else.”

From Cy Twombly's Untitled (Roses) (2008). Four monumental panels, each one a rose in full bloom. Wide-format abstract painting featuring four large rose forms rendered in loose, gestural brushstrokes in hot pink, magenta, and golden yellow against a pale pink background. Paint drips vertically down the canvas. Handwritten text near the upper right reads "Rose."
“1.1 billion years ago, pink was the color of Earth’s oceans. 2,000 years ago, the Romans painted Venus pink. Just 80 years ago, postwar marketing flipped it from the color of boys to the color of girls almost overnight.” Rose Florence on the most shape-shifting color in history.

“In a 2024 interview with one of my favorite authors and poets, Ocean Vuong, he was asked why, as such an effeminate gay man, he still chooses to identify as a man. He said, “I choose to stay and complicate.” Why Diana Cherry and her family have decided not to leave the country.

“After landing, we were met on the plane by a Complaint Resolution Officer who told us there had been an ‘incident’ – by which she meant my 450 lb. wheelchair had been dropped while baggage handlers were removing it from the cargo hold of the plane.” My buddy Emily Ladau’s chair was totaled by Delta Airlines, and her story went viral. She talks us through what happened, how it felt, and how we can help advocate for universally accessible air travel.

A cathartic pairing: two experts on the grifts with outsized traction in their respective fields.

I love Rebecca Makkai so much. Her 2019 novel about the AIDS epidemic, The Great Believers, deserved its many awards. Her lesser-known 2012 debut novel, The Borrower, was also wonderful, and is 100% an auntie book. Her newsletter, SubMakk, is mostly about the craft of writing (super insightful), sometimes about demented Zillow listings (laugh-out-loud funny), and occasionally about living with ADHD. Her recent post on the latter topic is what I’m actually here to recommend – in which she explores five questions useful to neurodivergent people of any flavor, including:

  • What would it look like if I gave up?
  • What would it look like if I made peace with how I actually do things?
  • What would it look like if I asked for help?
  • What would it look like if I threw money at it?
  • What would it look like to embrace inconsistency?

Good stuff.

Kristin Neff is thee expert on self-compassion.

Illustrated infographic by Dr. Kristin Neff titled "Fierce Self-Compassion." Two cartoon bears: a gentle bear cradling a cub on the left represents "Tender Self-Compassion: Accepting Ourselves to Alleviate Suffering," and a roaring bear protecting a cub on the right represents "Fierce Self-Compassion: Taking Action to Alleviate Suffering." Fierce self-compassion involves protecting (drawing boundaries and saying no), providing (saying yes to our needs), and motivating (to learn, grow, and change the world). A yin-yang symbol at the bottom shows tender and fierce together creating "a caring force allowing us to thrive." Text notes that our authentic self claims both sides, countering gender role socialization.

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“Type VII Fun: Something that was not pleasurable to you in the moment, but was pleasurable to someone else after the fact, and that a third party took additional pleasure in denouncing the second party for experiencing.” Daniel Lavery on types of fun.

Going to restaurants is often hard on me because they’re so freaking loud. Here’s an explanation (focused on Los Angeles restaurants, but I suspect it transfers).

And finally: your cute kid video of the month. It’s one of my all-time faves. I used to show it to my high school students in the secret hopes that somebody would later bust out with an impromptu inspirational speech.

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The Auntie Bulletin is an ad-free, feminist, anti-capitalist publication that will never try to sell you anything (okay, except a paid subscription). We donate 100% of affiliate revenue from Bookshop.org to organizations supporting vulnerable kids. Now through (at least) June, we’re supporting NICWA, the National Indian Child Welfare Association. Learn more here.

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Simple, colorful illustration showing a pair of abstract stick figures, consisting of a taller figure and a smaller figure holding hands, with a yellow circle (head) on a stick above them. The small figure has a speech bubble with ellipsis dots, suggesting conversation. White background.

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