aunts

on childfree friends

wedding season.

It’s been a few years since the summers of weddings. That era in life when, from April to October, the diary is filled with weekends away and confetti in the bottom of handbags, of scouring the January sales for dresses that might fit the atmosphere of a converted barn in Yorkshire or a palazzo in Tuscany. When I was in it I indulgently moaned about it - four in eight days! The expense and the exhaustion! - and now I am on the other side I wonder when the next wedding might be, if it might be years or even decades before another. If I’ll be clutching the invite sent by one of the toddlers we have watched grow from babies, in a whole universe away from now.

On Saturday I watched one of my oldest friends get married. I steamed her veil and her dresses; I made her look me in the eye and told her that there was enough time for her to get ready; I held her bouquet and I watched her happiness make her even more beautiful than I’ve ever known her. Later, when everyone was warm with champagne and the heatwave was waning, I said a few words about how we met, about my favourite things about her, all the strange quirks of a person that you might be lucky enough to learn if you’ve known them in all the shades of what it is to grow up together. And my son heckled me all the way through.

I raise him (and the wedding) because the bride became one of his aunts while he was still in utero, a firm fixture of the childfree-by-choice friends who I’m fortunate enough to have in the metaphysical “village” - the collection of people it theoretically takes to raising a child.

When I was pregnant with my son, it was these friends - the friends who existed, understandably and willingly, in child-free lives - who I feared losing the most. I imagined us drifting into other universes, separated into planets where luxurious lie-ins existed, along with gourmet sandwiches arrived in Deliveroo bags atop of the weekend bits of the paper and other planets where the talk was only of wake windows and soft play. I didn’t want to become someone solely identified by the fact I had given birth, but I couldn’t see a world in which this very fact wouldn’t divide us.

But I also couldn’t imagine the reality of what unfolded: that my child-free friends would become something new. That the existence of a baby would change our relationship, but for the better. That the aunts, if you like (there is a very good uncle, too, but they are mostly aunts), would be the people you adored before you became a parent, only now they arrived with small, wind-up chicks in their handbag or their favourite childhood book. That they would devise a silly game for your toddler, unique to the two of them, that they actively wanted to play.

That these sophisticated adults in crisply ironed, white clothes, would become part of your child’s lives, with names they would mispronounce and that actually that was only fair, because months, years before your child could speak these people - these people you have crawled out of nightclubs with, have taken early morning walks with, watched the sun rise at festivals with - would have devised new nicknames for your child more charming than those you could have dreamt up. That they would check in with you, persistently, even when you took days to reply. And you could talk, knowing that there wouldn’t be a playdate on the horizon, because you both still cared about what was happening in one another’s lives.

I’d spent so much time worried that the difference between us - this betrayal, even, of my having a child, when I’d thought our friendship was formed of such inherently child-free things - that I’d not stopped to realise that the things we had in common would become a sustenance that would sometimes feel like it was keeping me alive. That my child-free friends would be the ones to turn up on a grotty Friday afternoon, after a sleepless Thursday night, with lunch and the energy to make a den in the garden so that I could lie down and my son would be entertained. That they would suggest such spontaneities as an afternoon pint in a pub garden. That they would offer the hand-me-downs of unworn clothes and a moisturiser that didn’t suit them, in the thick cardboard bag of a boutique I’d no longer go into, and help turn me into someone who isn’t too knackered to get dressed properly.

And it turned out that they feared the disconnect too. Some ask after my “mum friends”, as if they were rivals, as if they have more ownership over me now, with their knowledge of tantrums and nap schedules. Some caveat every supportive, sympathetic voicenote with a reminder that they are not as tired as me, that they don’t know of my experience (I think everyone’s tiredness is particular to them, and as real as anybody else’s, for what it’s worth). Some simply remind me of the person I was before all this, and it makes me feel alive in a way I didn’t know I had missed.

The toddler stayed up late at the wedding, existing on a feast of thickly buttered soda bread, olives and hugging the legs of unsuspecting male guests. When we finally dragged him away, he gave the bride a hug. I’m not sure when I’ll next go to a wedding, but this one will last me until I do.

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