While I had a truly exceptional dad, I have always depended on the kindness of uncles. All kinds of uncles: the ones related by blood, the ones related by marriage, the ones you “call uncle” because they’re related by family friendships; the ones you see all the time, the ones you see a few times a year but always on the same specific occasions and ones you see hardly ever, but always wished you saw more.
I’m not trying to overlook aunts here: I have been the beneficiary of some epic and life-altering auntage over the years. But it’s somehow less surprising when aunts make an emotional connection. I believe there are some intergenerational emotions that most men can only share — if they can share them at all — through their uncling. So, all my life, I’ve been extremely uncle-curious, and fascinated by niece and nephew relationships. (There is, by the way, a gender-neutral word for nieces and/or nephews — coined back in 1951. The word is “niblings” — children of your siblings. No big surprise that it hasn’t caught on for nieces and nephews, but I could imagine it coming back as the name of a snack food.)
The first important uncle I remember was my dad’s closest neighbor buddy on Kingsley Drive. He thought it was absolutely ridiculous for me to call him “Uncle Irv,” as my parents instructed. So, from the time I was four or five, as part of his general strategy to encourage me to be as irreverent as he was, he said I should just call him by his first name. When my parents vetoed this, he and I discussed this on the street corner one day, and came up with what we thought was the perfect solution: I could call him “Aunt Irv.” We found this far more amusing than my mom and dad did. And when you’re a kid, nothing is better than a grown-up who will let you make jokes at your parents’ expense.
Besides Aunt Irv, there was my Uncle Steve and Uncle Mike, who I saw at family dinners pretty much every week of my life until I left for college. Uncle Steve was the husband of my father’s younger sister, a generally mild-mannered accountant who would wrestle with me after dinner on the blue shag carpet in my grandparents’ living room. He did this because my father couldn’t: Dad had back surgery in his early 20s and was never able to roughhouse with his three boys, of whom I was the oldest. But when I began uncling myself years later, I came to understand Uncle Steve had another incentive to wrestle with me. It scored him big points with the very close family he had married into to have a “thing you always do together” with the first grandchild.
When I was done wrestling, I would walk down the long hallway in my grandparents’ house and knock on the always-closed door of my “cool uncle” Michael — my father’s younger brother by nearly 15 years. He was a suburban hippie who looked like James Taylor before he shaved his original mustache, and always softly asked to be excused from the dinner table as early as possible to escape the grown-ups, so he could huddle in his bedroom with his record collection and guitars. I was the only one allowed to visit him. And week by week he introduced me to every kind of music that mattered in my life: from Stevie Wonder to Bob Dylan to John Coltrane and Bill Evans to Mozart. He didn’t talk a lot, but he made music and musicians’ ideas come alive to me. He taught me how to listen and pay attention to album covers and liner notes. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, he also was the first to teach me about the challenges of mental illness and addiction, which is how we lost him at the age of 44.
Then there were the three-times-a-year uncles, my mom’s tall, gregarious kid brother, who early on branded himself as our “beloved Uncle Wally” and took us to baseball and football games; our great-uncle Sonny on my dad’s side, a World War II POW who never married but always arrived from Worcester with compelling sweets and cakes; our great-uncle Paul on my mom’s side, who looked like a handsome ‘40s movie cop, and brought us exotic carved gifts from his travels but never could marry his girlfriend, who was the wrong religion, but we called her Aunt Margaret anyway. And then there were a handful of great-uncles we knew just for a few years, until my Pop-pop had a fight with his brother and furniture store business partner, and we didn’t see them for another decade.
While I also had terrific aunts, they played less of a role in my young life — except for my father’s sister, Barb, who became my alternative universe “cool mom.” (When I realized I was falling in love with my wife, Diane, I told Aunt Barb first — because she was also the one who first noticed, and asked.)
I married Diane at 29, and within five years I had stopped being just a consumer of uncling, but a purveyor myself — five times in eight years. While we didn’t have kids of our own, we had two nieces on her side of the family, then a nephew on my side, and then another nephew and niece on her side. They are my uncle brood.
From my very first day of uncledom, I was fully focused on being a good one. If possible, an excellent one. So, I thought about what had made my beloved uncles great.
The keys to uncling seemed to be:
Be there. Listen. And, for the most part, shut up. Ask good questions, but offer advice only when asked, and even then, do so carefully.
If you must offer a perspective, never, ever pretend, even for a second, to be an alternative parent. You’re also not an alternative friend. You are something better and different and, ideally, someone less complicated.
Do whatever it is your nieces and nephews want to do with you, and be prepared, if they like it, to do it again and again — even if you didn’t understand why they liked it in the first place. You want a “thing you always do together”: an activity, a type of conversation, a song. And then, when they suddenly stop wanting to do that thing anymore, never take it personally. Just find something else to take its place.
Keep everything that is created during the time you are together; do your best to remember everything you’ve spoken about. There is no way of knowing what will be important later.
When you’re together, always pay. Period. Even if they’ve reached the point where they make more money than you. It’s not about the money, it’s about them feeling they are still being uncled. (This rule doesn’t count if you’re helping them with car or house hunting.)
Whenever possible, feed them. (Even if they’re just, well, nibbling.)
From my very first day of uncledom, I was fully focused on being a good one. If possible, an excellent one. So, I thought about what had made my beloved uncles great.
For the first couple years, I found uncling fairly easy, mostly involving responding to the phrase, “Take the kid while I do this.” First you hold them until the parents want them back, then you sit with them until the parents want them back, then you walk and play with them until the parents want them back.
As soon as they were old enough to draw, my wife, an author and artist, would bring them art supplies and paper and teach them anything they wanted to learn about drawing. I can barely draw a triangle, so I provided themes and structure. One year, we decided we were sick of all the books the kids were reading and it was time to write one of our own: It was the adventures of a singing shark, who the kids called “Eedee” — I have no idea why. (Whenever Eedee was confronted with a typical shark situation, he would say, “I don’t want to eat you, I just want … to sing!”) We came up with the basic Eedee story during Halloween, and at Christmas we arrived with printed copies of a 15-page book with the story at the bottom, but the pages blank so each kid could illustrate their own version. We still have all their books, including the sequel about Chompee the Alligator.
As soon as they were old enough to dance, I would DJ the family dance parties in the rec room. Diane and I also helped the kids write original, and often quite ridiculous, plays, which they then put on during our last evening together. (One favorite involved a publishing company for the undead called “Tuesdays with Zombies.”)
I lost my father when he was 62 and I was 39. The next spring, I convinced both sides of my family, with all the nieces and nephews, that we should start spending the week of July Fourth together at our family vacation house. A logistical nightmare, but an epic enterprise of the heart. This is the kind of gathering that normally can only be pulled off by grandparents using guilt and implicit threats of will revision. But it became my biggest annual uncle project, especially as the kids grew, but the barely-large-enough getaway house did not.
Since I was the one who got up every morning to buy baked goods for breakfast, I told all the kids that if they got up with me, I’d get them whatever treat they wanted: not just doughnuts and sticky buns but, if necessary, 7 a.m. milkshakes from the convenience store. Many of them continued to rise at dawn with me into their teens and 20s, which is unheard of.
Then came Uncle Wolf. One Christmas, I can’t recall what year, all four kiddos on Diane’s side were just old enough that they could no longer be counted on to play quietly without some disaster. They also kept bugging their moms, their grandma and their aunt, Diane, who wanted their own private conversation time. As is often true in my life, I was urged to “just … do something!”
So, I told the kids to put on their winter coats, and come outside with me. I hid, they came and found me, and when they did, I jumped out, growling loudly and started chasing them around and around the house. The kids loved this, and gave it (and me) a name:
“Uncle Wolf.”
The ladies inside had another name for it: They called it “the running of the children.” And it was so successful — both fun and incredibly exhausting — that for years, whenever we were together, the kids wanted to play Uncle Wolf. One year, my nephew Eli hadn’t tied his sneakers, and one fell off while Uncle Wolfing. I grabbed it, growling of course, and threw it into the tree in the front yard. And it got stuck there. So, we had to throw other things at it — including his other sneaker — to get it down. The next time we played, they wanted the sneaker in the tree again.
We did this for years. And it kept the kiddos going through good and challenging times. Not long after the millennium, both of my sisters-in-law were getting divorced. So, while the kids still wanted to do fun things, like Uncle Wolf, and early morning shopping for sweet treats, they also needed someone grown-up to talk to who wasn’t in the middle of a marital dispute. Whenever we were together, I made sure that if any of them wanted a private moment to talk — about anything — we would find it. In a family where people were almost pathologically unable to keep secrets — actually, what am I saying, that’s all families, right? — whatever was told to Uncle Steve stayed with Uncle Steve. I relished my role as a “kiddo whisperer.”
I discovered Skype only because it allowed me to talk to my niece and nephew in Maryland, who would tell me about their “Spunky Kids” group at school for families going through divorce. I played guitar when I was a teen but hadn’t picked one up for years. When my nephews expressed interest, I bought a used electric guitar from a friend and helped teach them both to play over Skype. I wanted to do everything I could before they reached the age when they wanted nothing to do with elders.
Be there. Listen. And, for the most part, shut up. Ask good questions, but offer advice only when asked, and even then, do so carefully.
That moment never actually came (not yet, anyway). But once the nieces and nephews were in college from sea to shining sea, things did change, of course, and I had to find other ways to remain tethered. We still meet yearly in the summer, and my nephew Eli still gets up with me every morning, and we talk for two hours over freshly made doughnuts and coffee before anyone else wakes up. But mostly we stay connected through Zooms and text chains and a private Facebook group, punctuated by periodic gatherings for special events.
Unfortunately, for a while, too many of these events were funerals and memorial services. Especially through the three-year period from 2015-2018 when Diane lost her dad, I lost my Aunt Barb and then my mom, and then my Uncle Steve — who had been helping me hold it together after losing mom and Barb, and I was doing my best to help him. Then Diane lost her mom.
It seemed like an endless spiral of grief, and soon there was almost nobody left in either of our families who were older than us. Keepers of family history, gone; emotional mentors, gone; leaving us and the next generations of our families to negotiate a new normal.
Some days I was still able to uncle through the tears, some days I needed the nieces and nephews to reverse-uncle me. I didn’t want to appear needy — who needs a needy uncle? — but I also wanted the kids to know that some of the multigenerational comfort I sought could only come from them. And they rose to the occasion. They texted, they Zoomed; they indulged their uncle. I couldn’t have been more grateful.
My nephew, Jake, on my side of the family, had recently moved to our city with his girlfriend — now his wife — and we connected more often. I have a half-court basketball game that I’ve been nurturing for over 30 years — some players now have kids old enough to play, and Jake started joining us so the young people could guard each other. And sometimes he comes out to breakfast with me after a morning game, to talk and to listen. He knows one of the things that make me feel best is to be of emotional service to him. Uncling makes me feel good.
After he moved here, we started encouraging all the other nieces and nephews to move here, too. Miraculously, four out of five now have, and the fifth, Emma, and her wife, Dakota, are forever looking at real estate in our town. I am in uncle heaven.
Last week, I was playing half-court hoops with my regular group of guys, including one of their sons, and my nephew Jake (who I always pick for my team). At one point during the second game, one of our teammates, Jon, saw I was wide open and Jake, who was dribbling the ball, hadn’t noticed. Jon didn’t want to call out my name, because then the other team would notice, too. So, he just yelled out, “Uncle!” And within a second, the ball was in my hands. I was smiling so hard, I almost missed the shot.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.