One of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me was from Kerri Kelly, author of the fabulous book, American Detox. “Don’t give people advice unless they ask for it,” she said, shaking her head no and walking me back from the ledge of having given someone I look up to as a mentor advice they hadn’t asked for and weren’t interested in!
I still give what probably seems like a lot of unsolicited advice, but now and again I remember and pause first, asking myself, “Is this person asking me for advice or do they just want to let me know what’s real and what’s happening for them?”
Aunty Carol likes to give advice.
She’s had a lot of surprises in life, and imagines she’s learned a thing or two from her mistakes. She wants to spare other people some of those mistakes – and clear out room for them to make new ones for themselves. Because, of course, mistakes are the way we learn and grow.
At some point, Aunty Carol pulled her advice into Aunty Carol’s Playbook, and spotlighted those quips on Instagram. You can still find some of them if you look back far enough; they all have the same look and feel!
Aunty Carol wears bright colors and loves to dance.
She may appear to be extroverted – because she can be the life of the party – but she is really introverted, and needs to leave people behind to repair and regroup afterwards. She likes to travel alone, sleep alone, and hang out (perhaps a bit too much) with her own unwritten poems.
Aunty Carol was a vegetarian for thirteen years.
But when she was pregnant with her first child she started eating hamburgers every chance she got, and has never quite given that up! She loves to cook, and notoriously changes ingredients in nearly every recipe, just to see what happens. When she travels, she likes to eat where the locals eat and try things she wouldn’t get to try anywhere else!
Aunty Carol is an insomniac.
As a little girl she brought her books under the covers and read them with a flashlight. Like other kids slept with stuffed animals, she slept with her books. This was one of many things she and her younger sister disagreed about when they shared a bedroom for 10 years.
Lately, Aunty Carol is much more interested in listening than giving advice.
She wants to be that person you can count on to listen to you and love you no matter what. You can lean on her shoulder and say nothing, and she will comfort you gently while your thoughts settle down and you figure things out for yourself.
Of course, I am Aunty Carol – or sometimes Aunty Chaya, in honor of my grandmother’s older sister.
I had two Aunt Sylvia’s, one on each side. My father’s older sister Sylvia called me “doll,” like my grandmother did, making me feel a bit like their plaything. She was more serious about Jewish rules than my dad. She never served milk with meat; she never ate pork or seafood; and she observed a whole bunch of Jewish holidays we didn’t even talk about in our house. She bought me a wonderful gadgets for my kitchen, when I moved into my first house – we still use the ramekins she bought for me to make individual souffles, remembering a time she was visiting and I made a salmon and onion souffle for dinner!
[content warning] My mother’s sister Sylvia was a whirlwind. She had hair the color of autumn leaves and lived with the boldness and unflinching worldview of a true artist. She drank Ballantine’s scotch like water, becoming louder and more demanding as she slugged back the last bit left in her glass. Her abstract impressionist paintings filled her house with restless energy, and the grand piano had a room of its own. I remember my mother and her mother fighting over the phone, my mother pleading with her older sister, and then hushed conversations about my aunt’s attempts to end her own life. When she succeeded in the spring of 1974, my father was already very sick with cancer and chemo. That chapter sits heavy in the bottom of my chest and yearns to be written out … but not today …
I also had Aunties who were not relatives. Roughly my mother’s age, they stepped in to comfort me after my father died. Even after I had a career and children of my own, I loved taking them out to lunch, laughing and learning with them. I will tell you about those Aunties another time too …
When I took on the name Aunty Carol, I yearned to be for younger women what those women had been for me. I wanted to be a badass believer for people who needed that person on their team.
Next week, I’ll share the blog I wrote for my birthday in 2020 when I gave myself that moniker!
In the meantime, I invite you to write an ode to someone who is (or was) an Aunty or like an Aunty to you:
- What did she/they DO for you?
- What did she/they SAY when you needed she/them to say it?
- What are the 3 most important things she/they taught you?
- What is a way that she influenced you … her ideas flowing through you and into your everyday ways of being?