Oh my giddy aunt

The English language does not often let me down, but its lack of a feminine equivalent of avuncular is disappointing. How am I to succinctly describe a woman who was kind, caring, and convivial to my younger self, offering wry observations and wise guidance when I desperately needed those qualities? Some pretentious lexicographers propose the Latin word, materteral, but if that hasn’t caught on since Agrippina strutted sagely around ancient Rome, it’s not catching on now. We need another option.

I have been blessed with strong, competent, no-nonsense aunts, none more so than my beloved Aunt Sue. But after almost nine decades of strength, competence, and nonsense resistance, her body is moving down through the gears. Days or weeks from now, the wheels that have propelled her through life will stop turning. It’s almost certain that I will not get to say goodbye in person and to thank her for the inordinate value she added to my life.

Source of an alternative feminine creed

Time spent with Aunt Sue was comfortable and reassuring. She was unintrusive but quietly observant, unemotional but undoubtedly loving. She offered a life perspective that deviated from and sometimes contradicted my mother’s. But a trusted aunt is surely one of the few women who have an implicit right to contradict received maternal wisdom and offer an alternative feminine creed.

One of my earliest memories is the day in the late 1960s when Aunt Sue returned to Australia with her family, after ten years living in Canada. Canada: another country! How exotic. How unlike anything I’d experienced in my life until then. How inspirational. And now that I stop to consider it, how curious — and possibly linked to that time — that I eventually made temporary homes myself in foreign countries.

The SS Arcadia bore them home. Some 55 years later I can conjure a memory of burgundy lounges, wood panelling, and brass wall lamps in an onboard saloon. It occurs to me now that it is likely a false memory; would we have been allowed on the ship? And yet it remains an image that I can summon at will. 

I also distinctly remember — and this I believe to be reality — falling instantly in love with the pig-tailed, smiling girl who disembarked from the ship and who was introduced as my cousin. I was ecstatic that something as precious as a female cousin could appear in my then brother-filled life, dispatched from the belly of an enormous white ship. Kim was just 18 days younger than me, and with a four-year-old’s logic I assumed that made us instant best friends. That is what we became, at least from my perspective, well into adulthood. She is one of the greatest gifts Aunt Sue ever gave me. I loved my cousin Kim wholeheartedly. So did Aunt Sue. 

The homes that Aunt Sue created, and which featured heavily in my childhood, were stylish and impressive. They were a tasteful, carefully curated demonstration of unfamiliar affluence. They provided my first lesson in anthropology, socioeconomics, demographics, and their fickle variation between siblings. To me, her home was a North American TV sitcom set, complete with amusing accents, a microwave oven, fancy floor rugs, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; legacies of a Canadian life.

My cousin Rebecca (a chip off the old block), Sue and me

In time, one home gained an inground pool, adding to its appeal. That pebblecrete-lined marvel was bliss for me, a girl accustomed to running through garden sprinklers to meet my summer cooling needs. Visits to Aunt Sue meant hours of swimming and sunning with siblings and cousins in amphibious joy.

I was neither joyous nor swimming one sweltering day in my fifteenth year. Of course Aunt Sue noticed. Ignoring my feeble explanation that I just didn’t feel like it and wasn’t all that hot anyway, she guided me to her hitherto out-of-bounds-to-children bathroom — the ensuite. 

“It’s a French word”, she explained. A French bathroom, just for parents; whatever would they think of next?

My beautiful sensitive aunt then presented me with the first tampon I’d ever seen and promised to stand guard outside the door. I emerged sheepishly to confess that my attempt had been a painful failure. I would continue petulantly pretending I had no interest in swimming. Sue was having none of that. She took a second tampon and strode to the kitchen. Wielding a breadknife with feminine avuncular confidence, she cut the tampon in half. 

“Try again,” she commanded, handing me the demi-tampon (another French term, albeit one I just coined myself), which was now of questionable hygienic quality. At the time, I thought I would die of embarrassment. Now I realise that it was a typical strong, competent, no-nonsense act of love. A quintessential auntular, as opposed to a more jovial and back-slapping avuncular, act.

Sue was not always sweet and protective; her sharp wit and tongue sometimes combined stingingly. Like the time my siblings, cousins, and I were sharing a raucous meal with our parents. Aunt Sue, my protector, suddenly and unexpectedly became my provocateur. She declared I’d over-plucked my eyebrows. Silence descended and all eyes homed in on my forehead. Her comment was uncalled for and indiscreet. Yet a cursory look at my high school photos shows that she had a point. It was the 1970s and I was a girl with a dangerous collection of Dolly magazines, a pair of tweezers, a magnifying mirror, and a desire to fit in. I had gradually reduced what I thought was an unwieldly caterpillar brow to two crooked black threads. Sue’s comment was one of her less appreciated auntular interventions, but like most of her interventions, it had a positive outcome: I never again gave a pluck.

The auntular smile, undiminished

The last time I saw Sue, her dementia was advanced. We talked for an hour or so. Suddenly she stopped and asked how we knew each other. I told her and we both smiled. I think she’d smile again now if she knew she had given the neologism auntular to a world that is without a doubt desperately in need of feminine care and compassion.