Happy Pride, Yesterday’s Horoscope readers! I wanted to share a local (to me) business that’s queer owned and happens to serve the best vegan sandwiches on the face of the earth. If you’re in Bushwick, Seitan’s Helper cannot be beat. The owners are geniuses and once said the funniest possible thing about my futility in moving a large piece of furniture in front of their shop that—without fail—makes me laugh every single time I think about it. My favorite sandwich is called the Sexy Devil, but the menu is so full of bangers you can’t go wrong.
MAY
Motherhood isn’t for you, Virgo. At least it isn’t for your foreseeable future. Though of course I can see beyond what’s mortally foreseeable, there are some mysteries I’m unwilling to spoil. So you’ll just have to decide for yourself if one day, instead of doing whatever you wish whenever you wish it, you would instead like to care for a cute baby that turns into a child that thinks you’re God until it abruptly becomes mortified by your every word.
No, no. Motherhood isn’t in the cards. However, you love children, and suspect the role best-suited for you is a Childless Aunt.
Your desire to be a Childless Aunt is perhaps due to your own Childless Aunt, who lived out of state and got to say things during her visits like, “I just got back from another month working in Brazil.” She took you to New York when you were a teenager and didn’t even get mad at you when jet lag lured you to sleep during Young Frankenstein. Your Childless Aunt has a kiln in her house!
With all this evidence, it’s a wonder everyone isn’t set on being a Childless Aunt. I suppose it’s a blessing that others enjoy child-rearing, otherwise the world’s reservoirs of nieces and nephews would dry up—rendering your dream title impossible.
You sometimes forget that you’re already a Childless Aunt.
You became one by:
Never making enough money to consider removing your IUD prematurely
Marrying someone who already had a nephew
Before you gather your torches and pitchforks and chase Virgo through the town square for forgetting about her own Aunthood, please understand that the forgetting is largely because Virgo has never met her nephew, who is a full blown adult (can vote/smoke).
The years of your Aunthood thus far have heavily featured a global emergency that rendered international travel complicated. Thankfully, your luck is turning around and you finally have the opportunity to don your Aunt crown (meet your adult nephew) this summer when he visits from Argentina. For the first few days of his stay he’ll be at a nearby hotel, but then you and your husband will leave town and he’ll spend a week at your apartment.
In many ways, this is a dream come true. But in others, this is a bright light showing you how significantly you have fallen short of the Childless Aunt you long to be.
After all, you never go to Brazil for month-long work trips, you can’t afford to take your nephew to a Broadway show (nor would you be able to forgive him for falling asleep during it), and your apartment could no more fit a kiln inside of it than a circus.
When you pictured your life as a Childless Aunt you pictured yourself primarily in silks, wearing a signature perfume scent so inextricably linked to your being that a mere whiff after your tragic passing could inspire immediate weeping and thoughtful anecdotes about your joie de vivre.
You thought you’d have a collection of music boxes, or opera binoculars, or even just the will to regularly put lotion on your legs. You imagined yourself reading the paper in bed wearing a vintage Pucci nightgown (which you do technically own, but are too petrified of ruining to ever wear. In your fantasies, you’re confident enough in your vintage nightgown collection that ruining one wouldn’t bereave you), sipping genmaicha tea out of a fancy tea cup you bought on a whim, melodically announcing that the upcoming season at Playwrights Horizons looks irresistible. You’d be wearing daring frames when you say this, which you bought without thinking about the impracticality of spending so much money on glasses that can only be worn with certain color combinations.
You thought you’d have a feather boa, or a friend with a horse ranch, or a psychic that makes house calls.
Unfortunately, you are not currently the Childless Aunt of your dreams. In fact, you probably couldn’t be further away from it if you tried.
When your adult nephew arrives in your home, it’s likely he will notice your dining room table doesn’t currently have any chairs. This immediately alerts your adult nephew to two things:
His Childless Aunt could not afford to buy chairs to go with the dining table she purchased (correct)
His Childless Aunt must eat every meal in her…bed? (mostly correct)
This won’t be the only sobering element of his visit. How will you recover from showing your adult nephew the linens you’ve set aside for him, linens that despite many, many washes and bleachings are still drenched in the shadows of your period blood? A drip dop here and there they are not, these sheets tell the story of catastrophe. These sheets should be in an evidence locker, not cloaking the bed of your visiting adult nephew.
The more you imagine the house tour you’ll give your adult nephew, the more you fear you haven’t the fortitude to face it. How will you meet his gaze when you tell him, an adult man, that your desk is “off limits” due to its glass top, which you just kind of assume will break one day and will be so irksome to replace that you have a “no one but me” policy to avoid simmering future resentments? Will he understand this policy is to protect the deep bond you’d like to form with him?
Will he heed your warnings about your freezer’s top drawer, which you somehow ripped to shreds in an eagerness related ice cream accident? Will he believe you when you say that the scar on your hand is from that drawer’s many horizontal stalagmites? Will he respect you after your tutorial of shrinking your hand as far down as it can go before reaching in between the drawer’s fangs for some ice cubes sprinkled with rogue bits of frozen kale?
Will there be a rainstorm while he’s in town? Will he be fast enough on his feet to fetch a pot from the kitchen to catch the rainwater from the persistent leak in your bedroom? Will he be offended if you run a few drills to see his potential?
How could this nephew cherish you when you show him that the hot and cold taps in the shower are reversed, and that even if you do everything right in that regard, anyone flushing their toilet in a mile radius will either make the water freezing or scalding—dependent on forces unknown.
Will he be fascinated by your compulsory explanation of the virgin Mary sitting on your desk? Will he accept your testimony that Mary’s presence isn’t because you approve of or respect the catholic church, you just love this particular Mary because it was your Nona’s? Will he want to hear fourteen stories about your Nona while you make sure he understands your opinions on catholicism?????? Does your adult nephew share your bone deep hope in the possibility of secularizing religious art?
From what I see from my little beanbag in the cosmos, your adult nephew is going to find you alarmingly over the top. The good news is that you’ve never met someone who didn’t find you alarmingly over the top, so you’re well equipped to weather the storm of people wondering if you’re having a spastic personal crisis or if you’re just Really Like That.
You are Really Like That, Virgo. And as much as you’d like to be a bejeweled woman with symphony tickets to die for, you’re presently too broke and neurotic to be the glamorous, carefree, patron of the arts you long to be. For now, I suggest focusing on making the most of the Childless Aunt you’re capable of being (Please help yourself to any of my flavorless soda water and alcohol-free alcohol) and build up from there. Maybe by the time your nephew is near retirement, you’ll be able to don an impressive embroidered shawl and really Wow him. For now, just work on filing down the daggers on your freezer drawer so that you won’t spend your first day with your adult nephew in the back of an ambulance.
I'm having a hard time putting into words how brilliant this is but it truly is brilliant. The way it gets at the benefits of being the Childless Aunt, the way we have these dreams and ideas of who we're going to Be When We Grow Up and then it never looks like that when we get there, the awkwardness of meeting a new important person to you who is nonetheless a stranger, I just loved all of it! So many little zinger lines, too, and I'm dying to know what was said about the futility of moving the furniture even tho I understand it's probably one of those You Had to Be There type things.