Sexy Aunt Mug
In honor of my nephew’s 6th birthday, I wanted to share an essay I wrote about his birth. A version of this essay was featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
I love you, Matteo. xoxo Aunt Fi
My family has a history of giving sexy coffee mugs as gifts. It is not weird, it is good. My sister, Lily, gave me my most treasured sexy mug when she told me she was pregnant. When she let me know we would both soon be bringing a new life into the world. Her: a baby. Me: a sexy, full-grown aunt.
She placed the mug in my palm and we both teared up. “It was the ugliest one I could find.”
I curled my stumpy fingers around its irregular handle and gave it a pathetic air swirl. I could feel the bold desperation of the mug crying out to my very soul. I gazed at it and my jaw collapsed, knowing I would never again behold a pair of fonts more cheerful or grotesque. The text on the mug read Sexy Aunt, and you’d better believe the Sexy was bigger than the Aunt. The Sexy triumphantly took up two thirds of the mug, the Aunt, a piddling third. Reminding us that an aunt who isn’t sexy, shouldn’t take up space.
There was a wholesome violence lurking within these fonts. The Sexy was not only colossal, it was medieval — Carolingian calligraphy fit for a scroll, unfurled by a maiden announcing she just lost an archery competition and is now looking to get fucked by the village barrel maker. Or the village fishmonger. Or even the village gongfarmer (the guy who empties the latrines.)
The Aunt font could only be described as Dungeon Nun — The Sound of Music of fonts. The Aunt font runs to the hills singing, “I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain. I have confidence that tonight I am getting railed by a real folksy-dom of a captain who enjoys harmonizing with his kids and stabbing Nazis in the ear if he has to.”
Everything about the mug screams: I have no children and that is good, because I am far too busy with “sex” and scrapbooking my regrets. It shouts: I just can’t stop sexting the assistant manager of Black Angus from this Marshalls dressing room. Welp, looks like he wants to have traditional audio phone sex so away we go. Hello Rory, I’m at Marshalls. Oh, you love the iconic swamp smell of Marshalls, do you? You disgusting, bad, bad boy. Well you’re in luck, Rory, because I buy all my underwear here and it doesn’t matter how many times I wash those suckers, they still retain that signature Marshalls musk of rejected jelly beans and wet hay. Hang onto your dick, Rory, because this Marshalls has an escalator. Yeah, it’s a big Marshalls. Why don’t you take the escalator down to my vulva, we’re having a sale on seasonal popcorn. Yeah those big tubs of holiday popcorn are on sale for $5.99 and they’re in the same aisle as the throw pillows, right next to the lighter fluid. No, there isn’t any universal order to Marshalls, it’s chaos, that’s why it’s so hot. Hang on, I’m just gonna have a sip of tea. Mmm-hmm, I’m drinking room-temp raspberry zinger out of my sexy aunt mug, Rory, try not to come all over the employee restroom at Black Angus. Don’t, Rory. Your superiors will find out and then you’ll never climb the corporate ladder of the Temecula Black Angus, and I want that for you because sexy aunts emotionally support losers. It comes with the territory. I see your potential Rory, it is minuscule, only the squinting eyes of a sexy aunt can see it — Okay did you finish? Great, because I’m attempting to try on a romper and it’s gonna take 55 minutes minimum.
¤
Sometimes I just stare at the mug and think, “God I’m sexy and an aunt, what a conundrum.” Growing up, I didn’t have sexy aunts to look up to. It’s not that they weren’t physically attractive, it was their behavior that wasn’t very sexy.
Here’s a good example of my aunts’ unsexy behavior: When my dad — their brother-in-law — died from cancer at the age of 62, they processed their grief by accusing me and my sister of stealing a rocking horse. We caught wind of the accusation via our mother. She said, “Um, I just talked to Aunt Marge. She thinks … Aunt Marge and Aunt Gladys think you stole Aunt Gladys’s rocking horse while you were cleaning your dad’s stuff out of Grandma and Grandpa’s cellar.”
“Oh my god, poor Aunt Gladys,” I said. “She must be in so much distress over this missing rocking horse tragedy. Jeez, first Dad dying six days ago and now this? I better call her.” Aunt Gladys, hi, it’s Fiona, the alleged rocking horse bandit. I’m so sorry your grief style is asshat, that must feel psychotic. Anyway, I just wanted to call and clear up the whole rocking horse fiasco. Okay. So. That rocking horse either never existed on the physical plane or my grandma sold it at an estate sale in 1977. I am truly sorry I can’t help you locate this mythical, wooden creature. Wait, actually Aunt Gladys? It’s time for me to come clean. I did steal your rocking horse and I just can’t stop riding it. I am riding your prelude to an aneurysm, I mean rocking horse, day in day out and it feels so damn good. I actually gave my dad cancer just so I could your ride your strictly figurative rocking horse off into the sunset. Just kidding, I ride it in the closet right next to your pile of skeletons, Aunt Gladys.
Lily and I had been planning this heist for years. We thought, “Hahaha, no one is gonna see this coming. Nothin’ to see here, folks, just a couple of grown-up granddaughters holding their grandmother’s hands because she just lost a son.” But then she forgot she lost him. She forgot she even had him, and there was a mercy in that. But there was no mercy in her hands, which shook with knowing. Our hands were suddenly speaking a language I had never spoken before. A silent, electric broadcast.
She wrapped her fingers around my wrist like a tangled umbilical cord. She looked at me and I experienced firsthand the heart superseding the brain. Her telepathic grief coursing through her body — a result of the love transfusion that had infected her blood since his birth. To love and grieve and die. You hardly need a brain for any of it. It was then that I leaned over and whispered into my grandmother’s ear, “Hey Grandma? Can you let go of my wrist now? There’s this rocking horse ... thing me and Lily have to get to and we’re kind of on a time crunch. Does Ocean’s Eleven ring a bell? With Sticklegs Sinatra! Yes! Oh my god, you’re such a delight. We’re doing an Ocean’s Eleven with Aunt Gladys’s rocking horse. Yes, the one you sold in 1977.”
¤
I was in the room when Lily shot my nephew out of her body. He flew like an arrow, but he landed limp, slick, and purple. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice like a snake. A nurse rushed to Lily’s side. “Your baby just needs a little help breathing.” Kevin, my brother-in-law, buried his face in his hands as three nurses transferred his baby to what looked like a hot-plate from the future and vigorously rubbed his tiny chest with their fingers. The world ended and began in the span of 40 seconds. After 40 seconds the baby cried and we leapt to the ceiling of the hospital. My mother and I threw our arms around Kevin and there was that unspoken language again. His body shook with the knowledge it was now suddenly made of glass. He stood frozen, struck by Love’s quiver, the arrow sticking out of his chest. I pulled the arrow out of his chest so he could hold his son. I yanked it out the only way a sexy aunt could — with my teeth. He asked Lily what their son’s name was. She said, “His name is Matteo and he has the sexiest aunt in Sherman Oaks.” I spit the arrow out of my mouth and held my nephew to my pumping heart. I cradled him like I cradled the cherub who shot his father. The cherub who shot us all. We worshiped the arrow Lily had launched from her body with the precision and triumph of Artemis. There we all were. Struck. Shattered. New. Our sexy mugs runneth over.