The Anti-Diet Auntie Revolution

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Lisa Sibbett, PhD.

Lisa writes The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship, chosen family and community care. As a long time Auntie herself, Lisa often focuses on the experiences of people without children who are nevertheless, in her words, "cultivating childful lives."

We’ve been talking a whole bunch about community on Burnt Toast lately, and Lisa reached out to have a conversation about the systems that get in the way of our community building efforts—specifically our culture's systemic isolation of the nuclear family. 

This is one of those conversations that isn't "classic Burnt Toast." But we're here to do fat liberation work—and so how we think about community matters here, because community is fundamental to any kind of advocacy work. Plus it brings us joy! And joy matters too. I super appreciate this conversation with Lisa, and I know you will too.

Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link!

Episode 216 Transcript

Lisa

So my newsletter is about building kinship and community care. I live in cohousing, and I’ve been an auntie for many years to lots of different kids. I’ve always been really involved in the lives of other people’s children. And people who have lives like mine, we often don’t really have even language for describing what our experience is like. It’s sort of illegible to other people. Like, what’s your role? Why are you here?

And all of this has really blossomed into work that’s definitely about loving and supporting families and other people’s children, but I also write about elder care and building relationships with elders and building community and cohousing. And I have a chronic illness, so I sometimes write about balancing self-care and community care. 

Virginia

I have been an instant convert to your work, because a lot of what you write really challenges me in really useful ways. You have really made me reckon with how much I have been siloed in the structure of my life. 

It’s funny because I actually grew up with a kind of accidental–it wasn’t quite cohousing. We had two separate houses. But I was the child of a very amicable divorce, and my four parents co-parented pretty fluidly. So I grew up with adults who were not my biological parents playing really important roles in my life. 

And I have gotten to the point where I’m realizing I want a version of that for my kids. And that maybe that is just a better model. So it's fascinating to consider what that can look like when not everybody has those very specific circumstances.

Lisa

It’s a dreamy setup, actually, to have amicably divorced parents and extra parents.

Virginia

I’m super proud of all of my parents for making it work. My sister —who is my half sister from my dad’s second marriage—has a baby now. And my mom made the first birthday cake for them. There are a lot of beautiful things about blended families. When they work, they’re really amazing. 

And it always felt like we were doing something kind of weird, and other people didn’t quite understand our family. So I also relate to that piece of it. Because when you say "cohousing community," I think a lot of folks don’t really know what that term means. What does it look like, and how does it manifest in practice? What is daily life like in a cohousing community?

Lisa

There are different synonyms or near neighbor terms for cohousing. Another one is "intentional community." Back in the day, we might think about it as kind of a commune, although in the commune structure, people tended to actually pool their finances. I would say that cohousing is a much more kind of hybrid model between having your own space and being up in each other’s spaces and sharing all of the resources. 

So I really think of cohousing as coming frpm where so many dreamy social policies come from: Scandinavia. In Denmark and I think other countries in Northern Europe there is a lot of intentional urban planning around building shared, communal living spaces where there are things like community kitchens and shared outdoor space for lots of different residences. So that’s kind of the model that cohousing in the US tends to come from. And sometimes it’s people living together in a house. Sometimes it’s houses clustered together, or a shared apartment building. It can look a lot of different ways. The shared attribute is that you’re attempting to live in a more communal way and sharing a lot of your familial resources. 

In my cohousing community, there are just three households. It’s really, really small. We really lucked into it. My partner and I were displaced due to growth in our city, and needed to find a new place to live. And we had been talking with some friends for years about hoping to move into cohousing with them. But it’s very hard to actually make happen. It takes a lot of luck, especially in urban environments, but I think probably anywhere in the United States, because our policies and infrastructure are really not set up for it. 

So we were thinking about doing cohousing with our friends. They were going to build a backyard cottage. We were thinking about moving into the backyard cottage, but it was feeling a little bit too crowded. And then my partner was like, "Well, you know, the house next door is for sale." So it was really fortuitous, because the housing market was blowing up. Houses were being sold really, really fast, but there were some specific conditions around this particular house that made it possible for us to buy it. So we ended up buying a house next door to our friends. 

And then they also have a basement apartment and a backyard cottage. So there are people living in the basement apartment, and then, actually, the backyard cottage is an Airbnb right now, but it could potentially be expanded. 

So we have three households. One household has kids, two households don’t, and our backyard is completely merged. We eat meals together four nights a week or five nights a week. Typically, we take turns cooking for each other, and have these big communal meals, and which is just such a delight. And if your car breaks down, there’s always a car to borrow. We share all our garden tools, and we have sheds that we share. There are a lot of collective resources, and availability for rides to the airport ,and that kind of thing. 

Virginia

There are just so many practical applications! 

Lisa

It’s really delightful. Prior to moving into cohousing, we never hosted people at all. I was very averse to the idea of living in shared space. I was really worried about that. But because we have our own spaces and we have communal spaces, it sort of works for different people’s energies. 

And I certainly have become much more flexible and comfortable with having lots of people around. I’m no longer afraid of cooking for 12 people, you know? So it just makes it a lot easier to have a life where you can go in and out of your introversion phases and your social phases.

Virginia

I’m sure because you’re around each other all the time, there’s not the same sense of "putting on your outgoing personality." Like for introverts, when we socialize, there’s a bit of a putting on that persona.

Lisa

Totally. It’s much more like family. We’re kind of hanging around in our pajamas, and nobody’s cleaning their houses. 

Virginia

You have that comfort level, which is hard to replicate. It’s hard even for people who are good friends, but haven’t sort of intentionally said, "We want this in our relationship. "There are all those pressures that kick in to have your house look a certain way. This is something I’ve been writing about —how the hosting perfectionism expectations are really high. 

Lisa

Absolutely, yeah. And it’s just such an impairment for us to have to live that way.

Virginia

For me, it took getting divorced to reckon with wanting to make some changes. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was just necessary. There were no longer two adults in my household. The moving parts of my life were just more. I suddenly realized I needed support. But it was so hard to get over those initial hurdles. 

Almost every other friend I’ve had who’s gotten divorced since says the same thing. Like, wait, I’m going to ask people for a ride for my child? It’s this huge stumbling block when, actually, that should have been how we’re all parenting and living. But it really shows how much marriage really isolates us. Or, a lot of marriages really isolate us. Our beliefs about the nuclear family really isolate us and condition us to feel like we have to handle it all by ourselves.

So I would love to hear your thoughts on where does that come from? Why do we internalize that so much? 

Lisa

Virginia, you’ve been cultivating this wonderful metaphor about the various things that are diets. 

Virginia

My life’s work is to tell everybody, "everything is a diet."

Lisa

Everything’s a diet! And I feel like it’s such a powerful metaphor, and I think it really, really applies here. The nuclear family is such a diet. You have done, I think, the Lord’s work over the last couple of years, helping us conceptualize that metaphor around what does it mean to say something is a diet? And the way that I’m thinking of the Virginia Sole-Smith Model of Diet Culture is that there’s an oppressive and compulsory ideal that we’re all supposed to live up to. If we’re not living up to it, then we’re doing it wrong, and we need to be working harder. And there’s this rewarding of restriction, which, of course, then increases demands for consumer goods and forces us to buy things. 

Then, of course, it also doesn’t actually work, right? And all of that is coming out of a culture of capitalism and individualism that wants us to solve our problems by buying stuff. 

Virginia

I mean, I say all the time, Amazon Prime was my co-parent.

Lisa

I think the nuclear family is just part of that whole system of individualism and consumerism that we’re supposed to be living in. It really benefits the free market for us all to be isolated in these little nuclear families, not pulling on shared resources, so we all have to buy our own resources and not being able to rely on community care, so we have to pay for all of the care that we get in life. And that is gross. That’s bad. We don’t like that. 

And you also have written, which I really appreciate, that it’s a very logical survival strategy to adhere to these ideals, especially the farther away you are from the social ideal. If you're marginalized in any way, the more trying to adhere to these ideals gives us cover.

To me, that all just maps onto the nuclear family without any gaps. Going back to your specific question about why is it so hard to not feel like in an imposition when you’re asking for help: We’re just deeply, deeply, deeply conditioned to be self reliant within the unit of the family and not ask for help. 

Both you and I have interviewed the wonderful Jessica Slice in the last few months, and she has really helped me.

Jessica wrote Unfit Parent. She’s a disabled mom, and she has really helped me think about how interdependence and asking for help is actually really stigmatized in our culture, and the kind of logical extension of that for disabled parents is that they get labeled unfit and their kids get taken away. But there’s a whole spectrum there of asking for help as a weakness, as being a loser, as being really deeply wrong, and we should never do it. And we’re just, like, deeply conditioned in that way. 

Virginia

Speaking of community care: My 12-year-old was supposed to babysit for my friend’s daughter this afternoon, she has like a standing Tuesday gig. And my younger child was going to go along with her, to hang out, because she’s friends with the younger kiddo. I was going pick them up later. But then we heard this morning that this little friend has head lice. And that did make the community care fall apart!

Lisa

Oh no. It’s time to isolate!  

Virginia

While I want us all to be together....

Lisa

There can be too much togetherness. You don’t want to shave your head.

Virginia

That said, though: It was a great example of community care, because that mom and I are texting with our other mom friends, talking about which lice lady you want to book to come deal with that, and figuring out who needs to get their head checked. So it was still a pooling of resources and support, just not quite the way we envisioned anyway.

Lisa

It always unfolds in different ways than we expect.

Virginia

But what you’re saying about the deeply held belief that we have to do it all, that we’re inconveniencing other people by having needs: That myth completely disguises the fact that actually, when you ask for help, you build your bonds with other people, right? It actually is a way of being more connected to people. People like to be asked for help, even if they can’t do it all the time. They want to feel useful and valuable and and you can offer an exchange. 

This sounds so silly, but in the beginning I was very aware, like, if I asked someone for a ride or a play date, like, how soon could I reciprocate to make sure that I was holding up my end of the bargain? And you do slowly start to drift away from needing that. It’s like, oh no, that’s the capitalism again, right? That’s making it all very transactional, but it’s hard to let go of that mindset. 

Lisa

Yeah, and it just takes practice. I mean, I think that your example is so nice that just over time, you’ve kind of loosened up around it. It's almost like exposure therapy in asking for help. It doesn’t have to be this transactional transaction.

Virginia

And I think you start to realize, the ways you can offer help that will work for you, because that’s another thing, right? Like, we have to manage our own bandwidth. 

You wrote recently that sometimes people who aren’t in the habit of doing this are afraid that now I’ll have to say yes to everything, or this is going to be this total overhaul of my life. And  No. You can say no, because you know you say yes often enough. So talk about that a little bit.

Lisa

Absolutely. I come at this from a perspective of living with chronic illness and disability where I really need to ration my energy. I’ve only been diagnosed in the last few years, and prior to that I just thought that I was lazy and weak, and I had a lot of really negative stories about my lack of capacity, and I’m still unlearning those. But over the past few years, I’ve been really experimenting with just recognizing what I am capable of giving and also recognizing that resting is a necessary part of the process of being able to give. If I don’t rest, I can’t give. And so actually, I’m doing something responsible and good for my community when I rest. You know, whatever that resting looks like for me or for other people, and it can look a lot of different ways. Some people rest by climbing rocks. I am certainly not one of those people, but...

Virginia

That is not my idea of relaxation. 

Lisa

But, whatever, it takes all kinds, right? And I think that the systems of community care are so much more sustainable the more that we are showing up as our authentic selves. 

Virginia

You talked about how you schedule rest for yourself. I’d love to hear more about that. 

Lisa

That was an idea that I got from a really, really, really good therapist, by far the best therapist I’ve ever had, who herself lives with chronic illness and chronic pain. 

She initially suggested to me that whenever I travel--I have a hard time with travel--that, like, if I travel for three days, I need to book three days of rest. If I travel for two weeks, I need to book two weeks of rest. That’s a radical proposition to me, and one that I still am like, yeah, I don’t know if I can quite make that happen. But it did inspire me to think about what would work for me. And the reality of my life for many, many years, is that on a cycle of one to two weeks, I have at least one day where I just collapse and am incapable of doing anything. I can’t get out of bed. 

So this conversation with my therapist inspired me to go, you know, maybe I should just calendar a day of rest every week. Instead of having an uncontrolled crash, I can have a controlled crash, and then I’m making the decision ahead of time that I’m going to rest, rather than having to emergently rest when other people are relying on me for something, right? It just actually makes me more reliable to rest on a calendar.

Virginia

And it honors that need. You’re not pretending that’s not going to happen or hoping you can skip by without it. You’re like, no, this is a real need. This is going to enable me to do the other things I want to do. So let’s just embrace that and make sure that’s planned for. It’s really, really smart.

Lisa

Well, and you know, I’ll say that not having kids makes it much easier, of course. But I hope that there are ways that parents can schedule in little pieces of rest, even, of course, it’s probably not like an entire Saturday. But, the more that families lean into aunties and community care, the more that that space can be carved out. 

Virginia

So let’s talk about the auntie piece. Is it just something, like, because these friends live next door and they had kids, you found yourself playing that role? How do you cultivate being an auntie? 

Lisa

That’s a great question. For me it was kind of both always going to happen and a conscious choice. I grew up in a big family. I’m one of six kids. I spent a lot of time babysitting as a kid for both my siblings and all the kids in my town, and some of my siblings are a lot older than me, so I became an aunt in my teens, and so I’ve always had kids in my life. Really, I can’t think of a time when I didn’t have little ones around, which I think is a real benefit, not a lot of people have that kind of life. 

And I was raised by early childhood educators. My mom is a teacher. My grandma was a preschool teacher. My other grandma is a teacher. There are a lot of teachers in my family, and a lot of them worked with little kids, so there are a lot of resources available to me.

But then I also did have to make some conscious choices. I think that one of the early things that happened for me was one of my best friends asked me to be her child’s godmother, and that kid is now 17. I know, she’s a teenager, oh my god. 

So that relationship in my 20s started to condition me to think: How do I really show up for a family? How do I really show up for a child that’s not my own child? And then when we moved into cohousing, which was in 2019 right before the pandemic started. We knew that we would be involving ourselves more in the life of a family. 

At that time, my partner and I were hoping to have kids, and I ended up losing a lot of pregnancies. We decided to not become parents, but so we were initially envisioning sort of raising our kids together, right? And then when my partner and I decided not to have kids, one of the things that we sort of decided to pivot toward is like, well, we’re going to really invest in these kids who live in our community, which we already were, because the pandemic hit and we were a bubble. 

So many people know the story. All the adults are working full time. There’s no childcare. There are little kids. So it was really all hands on deck during that time, and it really pushed our community into a structure of lots and lots of interdependence around childcare and I spent a lot of time with these kids when they were really little, and that really cemented some bonds and forced us to make some very conscious decisions about how we want to be involved in each other’s lives. To the point that once you get very involved in the lives of kids, you can’t exit. Like, even if you wanted to. And so that changes your whole life trajectory. Moving to Mexico is off the table for me and my partner until these kids are at least out of the house, and that’s many years down the road, right? It would be harmful for us to separate from these kids at this point. 

So, there are conscious decisions and just sort of happenstance. And I think for anybody who’s interested in becoming an auntie or recruiting an auntie: Every situation is kind of different. But the piece about making conscious decisions is really important and requires sometimes scary conversations where we have to put ourselves out there and be vulnerable and take risks to let our loved ones know that we would like to form these kind of relationships. 

Virginia

As someone on the side with the kids, my fear would be that I’m asking this huge favor, and like, oh my gosh, what an imposition. Because kids are chaos and these friends have a lovely, child-free life--I love my children, standard disclaimer. 

Lisa

Kids are total chaos.

Virginia

Kids are always in whatever vortex of feelings and needs that that particular age and stage requires and asking someone to show up for that is, it’s big. It’s big.

Lisa

Well, I definitely can’t speak for all childless people, definitely not. But there are a lot of aunties who read The Auntie Bulletin, several thousand people who read The Auntie Bulletin, and a lot of shared values there in our community. 

Something that I think is a common feature among people who are aunties, or who want to be aunties, is: We really recognize how much we benefit from being in relationship with families. 

There are a lot of people, myself included, who were not able to have children and really want to have a child-ful life. We would feel a loss if we didn’t have kids in our lives. And so this was something that I was reckoning with during the pandemic, when my partner and I were providing really a lot of childcare for another family. People would ask me: Do you feel like you’re getting taken advantage of? What are you getting in return? 

What I realized during that time was, I’m getting paid back tenfold, because I get to have these kids in my life for the rest of my life, but I don’t have to do the hard stuff. And that’s really important. Parenting, I don’t have to tell you, is very hard. As a person with chronic illness and disability at this point, I’m very glad that I don’t have kids, because I don’t think actually that I have the stamina. It's not about capacity for love, it’s just about straight up physical energy. 

And so I’m able to have the benefits as an auntie of being parent-adjacent, without the cost. So I’m the winner in that transaction. And I think a lot of aunties think that way.

Virginia

Well, that’s really encouraging to hear. And I think, too, what you’re talking about is just having really good communication, so people can say what they can do and also have their boundaries honored when they have to set a limit. That’s key to any good relationship, so it would apply here too. 

Lisa

Yeah, totally.

Virginia

Thinking about other barriers that come up. I’ve been reading, and I know you’re a fan too, of Katherine Goldstein, and she’s been writing such interesting critiques right now of how youth sports culture really derails families’ abilities to participate in community. 

That’s a whole fairly explosive topic, because people are really attached to their sports. So, I’ll save the specifics of that for some time I have Katherine on to discuss this. Are youth sports a diet? Yes, absolutely. 

And we are not a sports family, but when she wrote about it, I immediately recognized what she meant, because every fall I noticed that my kids' friends become much less available for play dates because it’s soccer season. And it’s like, waiting for when soccer practice will be over, so that so-and-so might come over. Suddenly, even as a non-sports family, I feel like I’m loosely revolving around these schedules. 

And to bring it back to your work: That is one aspect of parenting culture that is really feeding into this isolation problem and this lack of community problem. This way that we’ve decided parenting has to be so intensive and performative around sports makes people actually less available to their communities. 

So this is a long way of asking my question: Do you think what we’re really talking about here is a problem with the institution of marriage or the institution of parenting, or is it a bit of both?

Lisa

That’s so interesting. I do think that youth sports is, like, by far, the kind of biggest engine of this. But there also are families that are, like, deep, deep, deep into youth performing arts that would have the same kind of function.

Virginia

 Dance is another big one. Competitions taking up every weekend.

Lisa

Or youth orchestra, sometimes those can be incredibly consuming and also incredibly expensive. 

So going with the grain of the parents that are really hyper investing in their kids activities: They will find community in those places often, right? It's a sort of substitute community for the length of the season, or whatever. And then my question is: What’s the culture within those spaces? Is it like, hyper competitive? Is it about getting to the national championship? Is there a sense of community? Is there a sense of supporting kids around resilience when things don’t go the way that they want them to? The cultures within these spaces matter.

And I think it just ties back to the way that the nuclear family is a diet. Because we are so deeply incentivized to be fearful in our culture and to treat our problems with money, goods, services, activities. And the fear, I think, for a lot of parents, is that their kids are going to not have a good and happy life. 

So then there’s what Annette Lareau, an educational researcher, calls concerted cultivation, particularly among more bourgeois middle class families of trying to schedule kids to the hilt, to make sure that they get every opportunity in life, and they can therefore succeed through every hurdle, and never have any adversity. Or that the adversity that they have is character building adversity in some way. And so I think that the hyper-involvement in kids activities does come from fear that’s motivated by capitalism. And is that an issue of parenting culture or marriage culture or capitalist culture or gender culture?

Virginia

All of it. Yes. I mean, one thing I think about, too, is how these activities create their own community. But it's a very homogenous community. The child-free folks aren't there, because it’s only soccer families or dance families or whatever. And you’re only going to get families who can afford to do the activity. So it's a self-selecting group. 

This is not to say I’m doing a great job cultivating a more diverse community for my kids. I live in a white majority town. This is hard for all of us. We’re not saying you all have to quit your sports! But if that’s your primary community, that is going to narrow things in a in a way that’s worth reflecting on. 

To bring this a little more fully into the Burnt Toast space, where we talk about diet as metaphor, but also diets specifically: One question I am asked a lot from the aunties in the Burnt Toast community, is, "How do I show up for the kids in my life that are not my own, I don’t get to make the parenting calls, but for whom I still want to model anti-diet values?" Maybe there’s stuff the parents are doing with food that's sending a weird message, or dieting in the home, that kind of thing.

Lisa

Well, my sense is for myself—and I try to preach this gospel at The Auntie Bulletin— is that there are a lot of these moments for non-parents who are really deeply invested in the lives of kids, where it’s not our call. And it’s just a tricky terrain for aunties or any kind of allo-parental adults who are involved in the lives of kids who aren’t their own kids. 

I’m really fortunate that most of my friends are pretty on board with an anti-diet philosophy. The people who are close to me, where I’m really involved in feeding kids are on the same page. But it comes up in other ways, right? Where I might have a different perspective than the parents. 

My sense is really that aunties do need to follow parents' lead that it’s actually quite important to honor parents’ decision makings for their kids. And we can be sort of stealthy ninjas around how we disrupt cultural conditioning more broadly. 

So I’m not super close to their parents, but we’ve got some kids in our neighborhood who are buddies with the kids who are a big part of my life. And those neighborhood kids get a lot of diet conditioning at home. There’s this little girl, she’s in fourth grade, and she’s always telling me about her mom’s exercise and saying that she can't get fat and she can’t eat that popsicle and things like that, which is really heartbreaking to witness. And it’s exactly that kind of situation where it’s like, I’m invested in this as a just a member of our society, but I also care about these kids, and it’s just not my call, you know? 

So I can just say things like, "Well, I like my body. I feel good that I have a soft body and I’m going to have another brownie. It tastes really good." And just kind of speak from my own experience, where I’m not necessarily trying to argue with their parents, or trying to convince the kid of something different. I’m just modeling something different for them. And I think it’s totally fine to say, "In my house, you’re allowed to have another brownie if you want one!"

Virginia

That modeling is so powerful. Having one example in their life of someone doing it differently, can plant that seed and help them reframe, like, oh, okay, that’s not the only way to think about this conversation. That’s really useful.

Lisa

And I think affirming difference whenever we have the opportunity to do so is important. When a kid comments on somebody’s body size or shape, you can just always say, "Isn’t it great how people are different? It’s so wonderful. There’s so much variety."

Virginia

Related to modeling and fostering anti-diet values: I think there is a way that this collective approach to living and being in community with each other runs quite counter to mainstream narratives around what is good behavior, what are social expectations, and which groups do we let take up space. 

I’m thinking about how the group of soccer moms is allowed to be a community that everyone has paid to participate in, while the Black neighborhood having a block party might have the cops called on them. So, talk a little bit about how you see collectivism as also an act of radicalism.

Lisa

Yeah, thank you for that question. It’s such a good one. 

A soccer community that is literally pay to play, where there are increasing tiers of elitenes—that is coded as very respectable in our society. Whereas a block party in a neighborhood of color is coded as disrespectable, unrespectable, disreputable. The music is loud and the people are being inconsiderate and their bodies are hanging out. There is all of this stigma around collectivism.

I find for myself it’s very insidious and subtle, the ways that collectivism is stigmatized. I have a theoretical allegiance to collectivism, but it takes having to actually ask for help to notice our friction and our resistance to that. You were talking about that earlier in the follow up to your divorce. And I’ve had that experience, when I’ve needed to ask for help around my disability and chronic illness, and there’s all of a sudden this feeling of like, oh, I shouldn’t ask for help. Oh, there’s something wrong with that. 

And I think that there actually is a dotted line there between our resistance to asking for help and that feeling like we’re doing something bad and anti-Blackness, anti-brownness, anti-queerness. Community is so, so essential for queer folks who have had to find their own family, choose their own community for for for generations. There’s this kind of whiff of disreputability around collectivism, and these narratives around these kids are running wild and bodies are hanging out and the music’s too loud, and like, what’s going on there? What are they eating?

Virginia

There are so many ways we police it all.

Lisa

It’s all really, really policed. I think that’s really well put. So I think it's important to reclaim collectivism and reframe collectivism as legitimate, valuable, important, meaningful. Collectivism is something that a lot of people who live in dominant white communities have actually had taken from us through the medium of compulsory individualism. We need to reclaim it, and we need to not stigmatize it in all the communities that are around us and our neighbors.

Virginia

Maybe instead, we should be looking at other communities as examples to emulate.

Lisa

As resources, absolutely. The disability community as well.

Virginia

I think that’s really helpful, and I’m sure it gives folks a lot to think about, because it just continues to show up in so many small ways. 

Even as you were describing that I was thinking about the stress response that kicks in for me after I host a gathering, and my house is left in whatever state it’s left in. And it’s like, of course, the house is messy. You just had 12 people over, and there are seltzer cans laying around and throw pillows out of place. That’s because you lived in your house. You used it. 

But there’s this other part of my brain that’s so conditioned to be like, well, the house has to be tidy. And now it looks like you’re out of control. But it’s that kind of thing, that inner policing we do, that is very much related to this larger societal policing that we participate in.

Lisa

Absolutely, yeah.

Virginia

Any last tips for folks who are like, okay, I want to be doing more of this. Particularly folks who want to connect with child free folks, or for child free folks who are listening, who want to connect with more families with kids. Any little nudges, baby steps people can take towards building this?

Lisa

My big nudge is to practice courage, because it’s scary to put yourself out there. You have to be vulnerable when you ask to build a relationship that’s deeper with people. And I think it actually is analogous, in some ways, to forming romantic relationships. You have to take some risks to say what you want, and that’s a scary thing to do, but there are lots and lots of people out there who want to be more involved in the lives of families. And there are lots and lots of families out there who need more support.

Virginia

When you were talking about the pandemic, I was like, I would have killed for an auntie. 

Lisa

Every family needs an auntie. 

Two adults I love, Rosie Spinks and Chloe Sladden who both have wonderful newsletters, have been writing about this lately, that even having two adults is just not enough to run a household in the structure of society that we live in. I think that that’s right, even if you’ve got a man who’s pulling his weight, to crack open a whole other can of worms.

Virginia

Which, yeah.

Lisa

They’re rare, but it does happen, and even then, it’s not enough. We actually need more adults to make communities run than we get with the way nuclear families are set up. So it’s a really worthy thing to seek out aunties, and for aunties to seek out families, and it’s just a little bit scary. And you also have to be persistent, because when we offer, parents will usually say no. Like they don’t believe us. They think their kids are too wild and whatever. So parents have to persist and and families need to persist in being welcoming. 

Virginia

I would also add on the parent side, as much as I appreciated what you said before about aunties have to respect parents having the final call on stuff: It’s also an exercise in us having to loosen up a little. Not everything is going to go exactly the way you want it to go. The bedtime might look differently, meals might happen differently, there might be more or less screens, and we have to be less attached to those metrics of parenting and touchstones of our parenting day, and realize that the benefits of our kids getting to be with other people, way outweighs whether or not they eat three cookies or whatever it is. 

Lisa

Yeah, the more that we live in community, the more we all learn to be flexible.

Virginia

Which is really the work of my life, learning to be more flexible.

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Butter 

Lisa

I feel like this is pretty nerdy, but this is my true self. The Substack algorithm fed me a newsletter yesterday that I’m so excited about. It’s about The Babysitters Club, which was, like, my favorite thing.

Virginia

Oh you shared this. Oh, my God, I keep thinking  about it. 

Lisa

And then yesterday, I ran into my childhood best friend on the beach. I’m visiting my parents right now. We read a lot of Babysitters Club together. So I’m going to tell you this guy named Andrew Knott, who I had not heard of before, but the algorithm fed it to me, wrote a post called A Classic Children’s Book Series Has Me Questioning My Parenting, and he’s reading The Babysitter’s Club together with his daughter, who I think isa tween. So for those who aren’t familiar with The Babysitters Club, where have you been? But major cultural touch point, most important books of my childhood. And, you know, very like auntie-formative books as well. Yeah, he has this really great argument about how the babysitters in these books did like, 100% of the parenting for a lot of families.

Virginia

They absolutely did!

Lisa

It’s like, this weirdly dystopian situation where the parents are just like, I guess we’re gonna go to Atlantic City for a couple days. Have fun kids.

Virginia

Yes, yes, they took two 12 year olds along to babysit a family of eight children on a beach vacation and the parents are nowhere to be found. For sure, Mary Anne and Stacey can handle all of the Pike children roaming around the Jersey Shore. It’ll be no problem.

Lisa

Yeah, I don’t know. It made me laugh so hard. I feel like I’m always on the lookout for, like, good takes on my favorite books of my childhood. And I’ve got to say this one is an absolute winner. 

Virginia

And intersects so well with your work.

My Butter is that I was thinking about the sort of evolving work of being more in community. And a really lovely win I had recently over the summer —and it also relates to what you were saying about scheduling rest— is that a friend of mine and I now have a standing Wednesday morning date, where we meet to walk in a local garden. We've been doing it all summer — every Wednesday, 10am, we walk in these gardens for an hour. And they are now about to close for the season and we're figuring out a replacement place to walk.

But when I say walk—I mean, like, stroll, maybe stop and watch bees on flowers for 10 minutes. We’re just talking and strolling and we are not wearing athletic clothing. I call it a workout because it mentally gave me permission to put it on my calendar—that’s my Wednesday workout. But it is not cardio in any way. We’re just strolling around, chatting and and it’s just such a nice touch point. And I’m really proud of myself for making time for that connection with someone. And she’s a good friend, but prior to doing that, I could go three weeks without seeing her easily. And now we always see each other once a week, and we have invited other friends to join us. 

And the really funny thing, or really, thecool thing was one day, I went and did the walk with her, and then I had a doctor’s appointment. And historically, in the last year or two, my blood pressure has been inching up a little bit. It’s been a smidge high. So I was getting nervous for the blood pressure reading. And my blood pressure was normal to low! 

Lisa

Oh my gosh. Gosh, because you’re looking at bees with your friend.

Virginia

I texted her, I was like, I truly think we’re lowering my blood pressure. 

Lisa

Yeah, it’s not weight loss. It’s looking at bees, on a schedule with your friends.

Virginia

It’s having a weekly appointment to watch the bees with your friend.

Well, thank you, Lisa. This was so much fun. Such a great conversation. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can support your work. 

Lisa

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Virginia. I’m at The Auntie Bulletin, which is the auntie.substack.com and that’s the main thing I’m working on right now, so I hope people will come check it out. Thank you so much for having me.

Virginia

It’s really fantastic. And there’s just, if any part of this conversation has resonated, there’s like, so much more over on The Auntie Bulletin. So folks need to go check it out. 

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The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!