The joy of auntiehood

It's something I never anticipated

With A and J and my mum in the summer

Yesterday morning, my mum and I looked after my five year old nephew while my sister took his older brother (seven) to play football.

“What would you like to do?” I asked A. “Play the suitcase game!” he said, racing upstairs to my mum’s bedroom to fish around under her bed. “Pull up the handle,” he instructed. I laid the suitcase on the floor and he climbed inside.

“We’re going to the airport!” came a muffled cry. Then the suitcase lid flew open: “Hang on, I need toys!” he said, and we rushed downstairs to collect a pile of Mr Men books, a water bottle, two packets of ‘snap’ cards and a cushion for A to lie on. Then my mum became the plane’s pilot, sitting on the end of the bed for the seven-hour flight to America.

The morning continued like this, with A going into familiar rooms at my mum’s house to play with things he’s grown to love there - trying out her sewing machine, using her yellow shoehorn to put his trainers on to blow bubbles outside.

“Can I go on the gardening rocks?” he asked, meaning the flat stones in mum’s front garden. He jumped between them, using an imaginary watering can to water the plants in between. Then it was back to the suitcase game.

When A’s brother J arrived, we were ready to play hide and seek. “Who’s counting?” J asked. I counted to 15 as four little feet scampered upstairs. Then it was J’s turn to count and I hid under the dining room table.

I write a lot about my childless/childfree experience, ranging from always thinking I’d have children to how I found myself celebrating being a ‘fab maiden aunt’ – with all the hoping, grieving and accepting stages in between. But I’ve rarely written about what it’s actually like to be Auntie Lucy, or ‘Ucey’ as I’m sometimes called (I’ve also been ‘Sisi’ or ‘Sisu’ when my nephews were learning to say my name).

I love that I get to see my nephews at their cutest, whether that be two-year-old A rushing towards me for a hug when I arrived with my mum on holiday one year, his tiny yellow Crocs a blur, or J getting into bed with me to read stories one rainy morning, or asking me to mark his goal kicks out of 10.

I love that I get to sit on the sofa while they explain what’s happening on their favourite TV shows, or watch A as he shows me a new toy or trick, and listen to J when he tells me how many times he went to football camp at half term.

I also get the tiniest window into the hard work of parenting – worrying when they go out of sight for a moment in the playground, asking ‘please don’t use that stick to lift algae out of the pond’ on repeat or responding to the same request to roll a tape measure up so it can be unrolled down the stairs again and again.

This helps me understand a slither of what life is like for the mothers and fathers I know with young children - which includes several good friends.

Did I anticipate how much I’d love being an auntie when I was in the depths of worrying about whether I’d ever become a mother? I did not. But it is a joy.