The Fun Aunt

I was very lucky that my mother was the oldest in her family, and that her youngest sister was just 16 when I was born. That’s not so unusual; Scott has an aunt who is four years older than he is, and you even see aunts and uncles who are younger than their nieces and nephews, like in Little House on the Prairie where Laura and Ma were pregnant at the same time.

My grandmother (who will be heretofore referred to as Nana) lived about fifteen minutes from us, also in Lowell, in a brown ranch house in a family neighborhood not too far from downtown. In her fifties, she had not one but two kids still living at home—my aunt Joanne, in her twenties, and my uncle Mike (who was 14 when I was born). Joanne had moved out for a while, married her boyfriend at 18, had two kids, got divorced, and moved, with her two kids, back in with Nana. Mike never left (he really never left—he still lives there, but he owns the house now and lives there with his wife and daughter.)

This might not sound like such great material for comedy, but my brother and I had a fantastic time every time we went to Nana’s house. My cousins were there, and Nana had already raised her own kids. Mostly she was out playing cards or bingo or having her card ladies over; to her credit, she didn’t even care if we sat under the table and giggled while they played. The ladies smoked, laughed loudly, and ate crackers with cheese you squeeze out of a can. Nana wasn’t the one babysitting us anyhow—that was Joanne’s job. And she was the best babysitter I ever had, without question.

Joanne was cool. She had long, straight brown hair and wore t-shirts, jeans and flipflops, not polyester pants and printed blouses. She even had one of those leather visors with studs in them, like a biker. She gave me all of her celebrity and fashion magazines when she was done reading them, and she loved records—one time she had us all dance around in her room to Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” from “Off the Wall" with the blue strobe light flashing. She was also a fan of the Beatles, Heart, and Supertramp, and we liked to look at album covers with Heart, Linda Rondstadt, and Olivia Newton John on them and talk about who was prettier and why (the dark-haired woman from Heart. Because she could play guitar). When she took us for ice cream (which was often) she always asked, afterward, “What do you say?” to which we were supposed to shout in unison “Thanks a heap, creep!.” She often used the word "shithead" in regular conversation, not in anger, but to make us laugh. When the movie 10 was popular she styled our hair like Bo Derek’s (which took a long time) and then we sat out on the front porch and did what she called “waving to cuties” who would drive by.

Life there was very different from life at home. First, we didn't always have to eat at the table, and we were free to turn down what was offered and eat something else. Joanne is the pickiest eater I know or ever will know, as is her daughter and now her granddaughter, but she did cook one thing on a regular basis: a dish known as “yuck-yuck,” which, as far as I remember, was made of ground beef, noodles, and tomato sauce. Her tastes are not without contradiction—she hates tomatoes, but will eat some things with tomato sauce and loves Bloody Marys. She is still a big believer in options. At her fiftieth birthday party a few years ago, there were two lasagnas: not a vegetarian one and a meat one, as you might expect, but one with tomatoes and one without tomatoes (though it still has sauce). Every holiday she makes two banana cream pies: one with bananas and one with no bananas (though it still has banana filling).

My Nana’s house was not the quiet place one might think of when recalling grandma’s house. The music I most associate with being there are the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water,” because my uncle Mike, who lived in the basement at the time, often had his band over and you could feel the music vibrate through the floor—it was that loud. Sometimes the band guys, shaggy-haired, bearded dudes with jean jackets, would come up—to Joanne’s delight—but we were never supposed to go down there when they were around: I think that the was the only rule , and it was Mike’s. Nothing cramps your style like five little kids running around.

Yet when I think about how Joanne was when we were kids, she seemed to genuinely like hanging out with us. She never seemed bored or annoyed, and I don’t remember her ever getting mad or yelling; in fact, she found tantrums funny (which took away any reason to have one) and she didn’t mind it if we swore or engaged in light combat. No one really ever got hurt anyhow. I have a niece and nephew of my own now, and remembering how Joanne was (and still is) with us has made the experience of being an aunt even better; maybe I am now the “fun aunt.”

A Whole World of Problems, Brought to you by Judy Blume and V.C. Andrews

I read an edited collection last year titled Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume. Basically, the thread that ties the essays together is that Judy Blume’s characters are relatable to young girls, and this relatability is timeless because Blume really captures what it is like to be a pubescent or adolescent girl. If that sounds a bit circular, it is. Most of the women in the anthology lovingly describe these books as central to their formative years, maybe in the same way that kids today will look back on the Harry Potter or Twilight series. As one contributor put it, “the books made me see that I was normal.” I respectfully disagree.

Now, yes, I read a bunch of these books, but I can only say I really loved one of them: Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is semi-autobiographical. I’m not even sure it’s a children’s book, and I mean this as a compliment—it’s about a Jewish family in Miami after the end of World War II. The main character, Sally, is funny and interesting (she has an ongoing fantasy that she spots Hitler in a grocery store or park and blows his cover, bringing him to justice, and she’s constantly trying to figure out the meaning of dirty jokes the teenagers around her tell) and the book does not feel like a vehicle for getting an IMPORTANT MESSAGE across. It’s a good story, and I recommend it. A close second is Blubber (she really gets the way kids turn on each other overnight) and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, written from a boy’s perspective. Up until then, I thought boys had it easy, but the unpredictable hard-ons and wet dreams the character endures in that book made me feel most fortunate. I was also glad I did not live in New Jersey, because it was full of what the main charcter called "social climbers."

The book most often cited in this collection is Are you there God, It’s Me Margaret. This is the book that focuses on menstruation, as well as on choosing a religion, though I’m not sure the two subplots merge all that seamlessly. It was published in 1970, but by 1981 (when I read it) it was already dated: sanitary pads weren’t even called that any longer, and they didn’t use any kind of belt contraption (that really confused me at the time). What was ultimately disappointing about the book, though, was that it was so divorced from my own experience that I was angry that I hadn’t been born just ten years earlier. Margaret and her friends talked about getting their periods! They were excited about it! They wanted breasts! I and my own circle of friends in the Boston suburb of Andover, Massachusetts (home to Philips Academy and a whole lot of kids whose parents want them to get accepted to Philips Academy--basically, social climbers) found menstruation disturbing and horrifying--and we rarely discussed it at all. When we did, we came to two conclusions: First, having your period would make you more likely to attract sharks if you were swimming in the ocean (see previous post). It also provided new opportunities for humiliation at school. One girl in my math class was excused to go to the bathroom one day and she clearly had a visible stain on the back of her jeans. It was the main topic of discussion for month ("Andrea has her period" "Gross!")which also made her a mess, out of control. Had Margaret even considered this?

Breasts, too, were not considered a good thing at my school. They got you ridiculed, not admired: I didn’t see where Blume’s characters were getting this “we must, we must, we must increase our bust,” "Gro-Bra" mentality. We wanted to flatten ours out so no one would notice. Also, we didn’t call them “busts.” The most developed girl in our school, Susan, had breasts that were pointy and worse, asymmetrical, so they pointed in different directions. Better to delay all of that as long as possible.

No, more comforting to me was the Flowers in the Attic series. Now, they had problems: locked in an attic by their own mother, starved, forced to bury their own little brother and to turn to incest. And through it all the adolescent girl just got thinner, and thus more ethereal and beautiful. Relatable, no, but it was something better—it was about people who had it far worse than I did, and were almost pure victims; the teenage girl would never walk around the eighth grade hallways with blood on her cordoroys. Plus, their problems were ones that I would never, ever have to deal with. So I could always pretend I would have handled it better, gotten out somehow, given the mother and grandmother their comeuppance and saved my little brother. Just like Sally J. Freedman, I could be a hero in my own mind. With Margaret I was just another hormone-filled freak.

Postmaturity

"Postmature" is what they call babies who stick around in the womb too long and are born past their due date. While it would seem good and healthy for a baby to stay in that kind of protected environment for as long as possible, it's actually not--babies who are postmature can have trouble breathing, hypoglycemia, lots of scalp hair, and something called "meconium staining" on the skin which means that the baby has pooped all over itself and the poop had nowhere to go. Babies that are postmature can also be too big to deliver vaginally.

I was born three weeks late. It was a relief to my parents that I was at least born two days before I would no longer qualify them for a tax write-off for 1968. Unlike, many postmature babies, I was a normal weight (6 lbs) but I had a ton of hair. My father's first remarks upon seeing me were than I resembled Phyllis Diller, and if you ever saw her, you would know that it's not exactly a compliment. And once I arrived, I wondered if my parents wished I'd stayed in there a bit longer: I was a colicky, constantly screaming, and overall unpleasant baby, at least in the first year.

They rarely let babies reach postmaturity now before a planned C-section is done. For that reason, babies are much more likely to be premature than postmature.

I have read a lot of student writing recently about the idea of maturity (growing up too fast, over-scheduled children, suggestive clothing for young girls) and often hear 22-year-olds referring to themselves as "kids" and people over 30 as "grown ups," although many are paying on their own for college and are much more independent than I was at that age. I have been thinking a lot of how we define adulthood, especially since I just read a study that said that most people over 60 see themselves as much younger than they are (and feel much younger, genuinely, which is pretty good news, right?).

It really struck me,though, when I read a nonfiction piece aloud to my class about a babysitting experience I had when I was 13. I wrote of riding bikes on the weekends with neighborhood kids, and my students thought I should take that part out: "It makes you sound like you were much younger than 13." But I did ride bikes then! They know enough about nonfiction writing to have a ready answer to my protest, though.

All of this made me think of things my mother never would have done at 40--things I regularly engage in that she would never have dreamed of doing:

1. Playing a Nancy Drew video game for three hours straight. Also, owning all of the Nancy Drew games.

2. Blogging and Facebooking--yes, they didn't exist then. But even so.

3. Wearing my hair long (her rule: over 30, cut your hair short)

4. Eating freezy pops. Also, calling them freezy pops.

5. Spending a whole day off reading and catching up on movies and my soap opera (to be fair, she had two kids and was busy all the time...)