Eleven years ago this month, my sister went into labor on the same day that one of my best friends from childhood was getting married. Meanwhile, I had just been dumped by a guy who said I was too old for him even though we were the same age. It was a time.
I really hated to miss this wedding, because the bride and I not only saw each other through grade school and high school, but also college. She went into the world and figured out what was good, and then I followed. I would never have considered moving to Santa Barbara after high school if she hadn’t made it seem so fashionable. And it really, really was. I moved there the same week that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up. There were paparazzi photos of them walking solemnly down Butterfly Beach, where only six months later I’d sit reading The Devil Wears Prada when it was still just a book, while wearing my first ever Brazilian bikini. Not a drop of sunscreen on my face. It was peak 2005.
When she left to study abroad in Spain, I joined her for what would be my first taste of Europe. We found each other in the Madrid airport without cellphones. We took a very hungover bus ride to Segovia, a perfect little town where the castle lives that inspired the one from Sleeping Beauty. It was cold and rainy and I was in flip flops, the kind that are like a wedge? Everyone seemed mad at me and I knew that was why. But it was 2006 and we didn't have the ability to see what other cooler, cuter people were wearing on their trip to Spain, so I just thought everybody in the free world dressed like they were off to house party hop in a lawless beach town filled exclusively with hot baby adults.
I was used to Rachel doing big life things first, and then tagging along and seeing what the fuss was all about. And then eventually along would come my little sister to reap all the benefits of our discoveries. But not this time. Now, Rachel was getting married, and Shelley was having a baby, and I was using the money I made renting out my apartment on Airbnb to live.
A full eight hours had passed since my sister went into the hospital. Since she knew absolutely nothing about how birthing works, she assured me there was no way she’d be having any kind of baby within the next 24 hours, so I should just go to the wedding. And since I knew even less than she did, I got in the car and made the three hour drive from Fresno to Monterey.
I parked just off Cannery Row, a street that was once the place to be if you were a sardine or Steinbeck, and is now the place to be if you are a kid with a fairly common name in want of a keychain even though you don’t actually have any keys. I changed into my second-hand Dolce and Gabbana dress in my car (who could afford a hotel room and a designer dress?) and waltzed into the hotel where the wedding was being held.
I didn’t enjoy myself. I felt completely lost among a sea of blonde former Gauchos with shiny new husbands and degrees in business or marketing. Some of the girls whom I’d once designed outfits for out of household materials- tin foil, wrapping paper, lamp shades- for an ‘anything but clothes’ party were fucking doctors now. I was fresh out of my cool job in the music industry and still leaning on it for some semblance of importance, which had the opposite effect. In fact it made me feel so so small. I didn’t want to care, but at 28, what you were becoming in the world seemed infinitely more important than who you were becoming. And I wasn’t sure of anything.
So I did what absolutely anyone would do: I got very drunk and wound up in someone’s hotel room with three other people, only one of whom I was interested in hooking up with. Unfortunately she was more into one of the two guys present. For the record, I am very straight, which speaks to how criminally uninteresting the men in that room were. I took bottled water from the mini bar and a pillow off the bed and slipped out before anyone could make a daring suggestion.
I woke up in my car to several missed calls from my mother. My sister had been induced, but it wasn’t working, so they were going to schedule her for a C-section. I filled myself with enough caffeine to kill a small horse, and made it to the hospital just in time to receive the news that the baby had been born, but my sister was taken to the ICU because they couldn’t stop the bleeding. A more sobering moment I had never lived. All this happened while I was tucked in my little car like a sardine?? Someone told us that the baby was going to be ok, expecting that to be a salve for our imminent panic. They made it sound as though only one of them would live, so at least it would be him.
Thanks to the miracle of modern science, prayer, bargaining with God, threatening the doctor, or all of the above, within a few hours I was holding my new nephew while my sleepy sister asked me about the wedding. I told her it was nice. The bride looked stunning. The groom is great but his friends are boring (No offense G but… do better.) She listened with the part of her brain that would always be reserved for tea, but mostly she was focused on the tiniest movements of the alien in the room. I clocked this, knowing that it was the beginning of a new life. Mine. His. Hers.
My world was still just as big of a mess as it had been the day before, but now all I could think about is how close I came to losing my sister, and how much she had endured to bring this angry little being into the world. At a time in my life when I needed to learn how to re-parent myself, I was witnessing what it looked like when someone made the transition from person to parent in the blink of an eye.
Since then, I’ve become an aunt to two more people, and formed bonds with the children my friends have brought to life. I recently got to meet one of my best friend’s babies on his one week birthday. I sat in bed with her, listening to her harrowing tale of how it all went down when her husband quietly entered the room and handed off the baby. He said he would really like to hang out and catch up with me but that he was going to take advantage of my presence and go run some errands, and off he went.
I’ve heard that gay penguins will occasionally step in to watch over their straight friends’ eggs and help raise their chicks. They’re also probably really fun to hang out with and have the energy for feigning astonishment that the parents can’t possibly sustain. This is so Auntie culture. We pop in, we hang out, we stand guard while you return the Amazon packages. We don’t complain when you’re late or tired or can only focus on one thing at a time. It’s cool. We’re cool.
A few days ago I got a call from my nephew, now a fully formed 11 year old, to tell me he’d just won his first football game. He’d begged his parents to join a league that will have them driving all around central California for the next few months. My sister tried to reason with him, pointing out that she would have to bend the laws of time and space to get him to and from the far away games. He responded flatly, “Auntie will take me.” It’s like he knows I rose from the dead to be there for his emergence into the world and so what’s a 90 mile roundtrip drive on a Saturday morning?
He’s right though, because one of the perks of living by my own rules is that I am free to give myself over to this role that I fell backwards into. As the eldest daughter, my maternal instinct has always been active and had a place to land, which is probably why I’ve not had a persistent desire to produce children of my own. When I was younger, I worried that this might separate me not only from potential partners, but friends who, seemingly overnight, became someone’s primary caregiver. Now I know that the opposite is true.
My life has been anything but conventional, and at times it’s been willfully chaotic. There are some nights spent alone where I wonder if I have taken too many wrong turns and as a result, wound up somewhere I wasn’t meant to be. But then a text comes in from my sister informing me that my 9 year old niece wants to come stay at my house on Friday night. Just her. No siblings. No friends. No pets. Of her own volition and for her own volition. She wanders around my house, examining the walls and the furniture, eyes wide.
HER: Living alone is cool…
ME: Yeah, it is.
HER: You can do whatever you want!!!Yes. You can do whatever you want. My job here is done.