Not On My Own Blog I Don’t

I have a new niece. She’s adorable in that way that all brand-new-borns are. All pudgy cheeks and cute baby noises and wee toes.

But.

I don’t feel much of anything for her. I love her because she’s my niece (my husband’s sister’s child, to be exact), but I am not as gooey and head-over-heels in love with her as I know other aunts are over their nieces and nephews.

My sister-in-law has two other children in addition to this new one and I feel roughly the same thing for them. They are nice, but … meh.

I know that part of my antipathy towards them has to do with my nephew. He’s the oldest and he’s challenging. He’s high energy and low listening. That is absolutely not his fault (well, the listening is somewhat his fault, but more his parent’s fault) but it still means that I am less than enthusiastic about spending time with him. (Where “less than enthusiastic” means he drives me batshit crazy)

My other niece (the new niece’s older sister) is OK, but somewhat … wet. She seems to always be drooling or sporting a runny nose and neither of those are my favorite. I barely want to kiss my own children when they are like that, let alone someone else’s.

This is all complicated by the fact that my sister-in-law asked me to watch the two older ones (we’ll call them T and E since that makes things less complex) while she is on maternity leave. How do I go about spending two days a week with two children that I don’t care all that much for? And WHY don’t I like them? Why aren’t I excited that I have a new niece? And what the hell am I going to do with four children under four?!

I can’t help but wonder if my sister had children if I would feel different towards them or if this is some deep personality flaw in me that I don’t like other people’s children. I also wonder if my lack of feeling towards T, E and H (the new baby) are due to my deep feeling that these children should not have been born to these parents.

My sister- and brother-in-law should not have had children when they did and they absolutely should not have continued to have children and certainly not in the timeframe they did. {T, the oldest, will be 4 in a couple weeks. E, the middle, will be 2 this coming Monday and H was born this past Monday. 3 children, 4 years.} My brother-in-law is a slug at best and an ass at worst. His idea of discipline is to yell at the child from a seated position. When the child does not respond to the yelling? He yells louder and uses their middle name. Still no response? Louder still and full name. None of which is effective unless you peel your butt off the couch and enforce it  first. My sister-in-law works in child care, so her idea of discipline is “T, why are you standing on my leg? That hurts. T, please get off my leg, you’re hurting me.” (all of that is said in a very saccharine voice) Now, I understand that she can’t belt a child in her care one while she is at work, but this has drastically affected her parenting abilities to her children. And the end result is that her kids are running wild.

Even more frustrating is the fact that brother-in-law is taking next week off work to be home to help sister-in-law with the baby. BUT I get to take care of the older ones because brother-in-law doesn’t feel capable of handling them. Translation: he’s hoping sister-in-law will be sleeping a lot while he’s taking care of the baby, who he’s also hoping will be sleeping a lot, thereby leaving him with an uninterrupted and guilt-free pass to futz on the computer and watch movies all day.

End result: I’m a bad aunt. And I don’t know what to do about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.