My favorite aunt
My sweet Aunt Judy who was so good to me growing up is coming to visit tomorrow. I look up to her in so many ways and she was really there for me when my dad was at his shittiest.
I think I’ve mentioned her before. She is kinda a bad ass. She’s a retired professor nearing 80 and was the second woman ever at her university to get tenure. She taught education and was an expert in teaching reading to very young kids.
She’s always been very independent and she never married or had kids and has spent much of her life learning, reading, and traveling and she has friends across the globe. (I really, really suspect she’s a lesbian or queer or ace but she’s never been comfortable talking about that stuff at all and I don’t push.) She’s always been deeply involved in the community as a volunteer teaching kids reading (to this day!) Before she got her PhD, she quickly rose to being a principal in some very poor, underfunded inner city schools in Indianapolis where she championed bringing more resources. (I remember people used to stop her sometimes when we were out and about in Indy and would thank her for what a good teacher/principal she had been and she would always remember them and share some small memory with them.)
She is so generous. She has helped my brother pay for quality preschool for my nieces. She and my grandmother took me on a trip across Europe 20 years ago, when I was 13, which opened my mind in a BIG way to understanding the vast world outside my Central Indiana existence, especially when we toured Auschwitz and they engaged me in some very in-depth examination of what we saw. She’s always been very progressive and often writes emails to me complaining about how hard it is to find peers she can get lunch w/ in Indiana who aren’t “racist Trump supporters.”
She’s my dad’s much older sister (she was 16 when he was born) so they always had a relationship more like she was also his aunt than sister as their childhoods didn’t over lap at all. He had a lot of resentment against her because acted as another parent instead of a sibling in some ways which bothered him. And because she is fat and unmarried he used her as this like shameful thing that he held before me as “what I could turn into.” Stuff like “watch out if you’ll end up like Aunt Judy” if I did anything he didn’t like.
When I was really little, that threat did worry me. I didn’t yet have the ability to understand what was happening and although I loved her, my dad’s opinion mattered at the time and I remember worrying that maybe I WOULD become her.
Now, I have the perspective to see both her and my dad as full people and have my own opinions and I’d choose Aunt Judy’s life over my dad’s any fucking day of the week. I would have been LUCKY to turn out like her and in many ways I have become more like her over time.
Anyway, I love my aunt. She’s coming tomorrow for what she is referring to as her “last trip to Austin” (she used to come here on business pretty frequently, but her last trip was 2010.) So her saying that makes my heart ache but it is probably true. I want her to have a good time and feel comfortable and happy in my home and to be proud of me and feel the joy I live in the life I’ve built. So I should probably get back to cleaning instead of feeling some feelings right now 😭😭