Auntie Dote
On a recent swampy Saturday afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida (I suspect there are no other varieties), I stood in front of a congregation proclaiming my love for a blazing redhead, who stood just across the pulpit. She and I had met some 37 years earlier, via telephone, when her parents introduced us. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about. It was mostly just a lot of gurgling — she was, after all, only hours old — but I knew from the get-go I wanted to be in that girl’s life. For keeps. And here I was, a speaker at her wedding ceremony, where she referred to me as her first friend.
Farther up the Eastern Seaboard, another millennial was embarking on her new married life in a sweet house near Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. I was visiting the night of their first date; I was invited to join her and her mother when she went bridal-gown shopping; and I was asked to write a wedding poem, which was printed in the program. She calls me Aunt Liz.
Meanwhile, back in Maine, a third beloved millennial was launching a different adventure: packing up to move to Pennsylvania, where she and her husband could raise their two boys closer to family. I was delighted for them, but what about my nutty-auntie strategy I’d been working on for the hockey and soccer stands? Hey, ref, you need me to come down there and talk to you?
There’s also my biological New York niece and grandniece. Too far away! And my other actual niece, who still refers to me as Uncle Liz. (This was to distinguish me as more fun than aunts of the girlier variety.)
And let’s not forget my three (count ’em, three) twenty-something Mollys, two of whom I held in my arms as newborns. I didn’t meet the third until her senior year of high school when she was doing a documentary on her late father, a dear friend and colleague, and people said she had to interview me. Three years later, the two of us drove to her college in the Pacific Northwest. Sadly, I couldn’t interest her in stopping at any weirdo roadside attractions, not even the World’s Biggest Udder! Even so, we remain fast friends.
Then there are my three nephews, who tower over me, and my two scholars, both of whom came to me as students in their teens. The first young scholar published a humorous book on quantum mechanics when he was 12, and I was asked to help him with his presentation skills (obviously not with his spaghettification theory). We powered through the pandemic together, meeting in lawn chairs under electric blankets on opposite sides of his driveway. He made me laugh so hard sometimes that I was at risk of inhaling my mask. No one was surprised when he was accepted early admission to MIT. He is already a force in his field on the world stage — in whatever galaxy that stage might or might not exist. (That’s a Schrödinger’s Cat joke; yes, I’m flaunting.) But I was surprised when I received a letter from that institution saying I had been singled out by this young man as his most impactful teacher. I think my socks are still circling a black hole.
I met my other charge during his senior year of high school in Fort Fairfield. There was a question as to whether he would graduate, but he liked to write, so I was brought in to mentor him via Zoom. Now a senior at U-Maine Farmington majoring in creative writing, he’s crushing it (dean’s list last semester), and he continues to slay me with his talent, his vocabulary and his ability to knock me off my chair with laughter. He tells me he wouldn’t be where he is without me — that is, when he’s not referring to me as a fossil.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two very badly behaved Standard Poodles who know me as Auntie Liz, which is poodle code for Crotch Target.
I mention all this not to hold myself up as a shining example of anything, but to say that at this stage in life, as I watch my friends buzz around their children and grandchildren, it gives me pause. Don’t get me wrong. I have no regrets. I never wanted kids. By the time I finally got married, it was abundantly clear one Elizabeth Peavey was enough for this world. Still, you can’t help but wonder.
But then, all I have to do is look around to see how big my brood is. Despite what one certain elected official and his ilk opine, a woman does not have to be a walking womb to foster family. All us crazy cat ladies, crones, tantes and trollops can hold up those tentpoles just as well as our sisters in the stirrups. As they say, it takes a village — or in this case, its idiot — to sometimes help us see that.
Elizabeth Peavey’s latest spawn, her one-woman show, Quartet, makes its Portland premiere at The Hill Arts on October 10 & 11.
