Mind Moves: One of the benefits of being part of a large family is that your children are conferred with immediate membership of the extended clan. The nature of the clan is to care for its own.
The ancestral ties, the sequence of succession and the strong connection of kith and kin, surround the newborn with a relational chain of familial concern.
There are cousins with whom to be close or competitive. There are grandparents to adore and be cherished by. There are uncles and aunts, facsimiles of parents or engagingly different in age, appearance and perspective. From this important family network, one much neglected relationship is a child's lifelong attachment to a favoured aunt. This role is insufficiently attended to by psychotherapy, yet it is one of serious significance to the developing child.
From the child's point of view, the unattached sister of its mother or father brings to the clutter of family connections, a perspective on life that is not available from other family members preoccupied with rearing their own children. But the single aunt, as family member, contributes enormously to family life, playing a role of unique importance in the world of a child by her emotional availability and distinctive love for her nieces and nephews.
And while the bond between a child and married aunts, mothers of cousins, may often be strong, for many there is exciting exclusivity about being "the special child" or, if really lucky, the godchild of the "maiden" aunt.
Indeed, a surprising number of adults still recall with the primitive jealousy of childhood, their dismay when single aunts married and produced their own. Despite all the reassurances, deep in their hearts they knew that abdication of their own unique emotional space was inevitable with the arrival of infant dethroners.
In the past, many children experienced their first train journey and first introduction to city life or rural life by a holiday with their aunt. For a child sent alone, she was the person who would provide the treats and the experience of being, for a precious few days away from siblings, the object of total attention.
Others, whose aunts lived nearby, had the reassurance of her proximity to the family home, the sweet security of her as babysitter, her support for their own parents, her presence in times of crisis often relieving children of inappropriate adult burdens, her financial assistance in emergencies, her role as safe source of venting, disclosure, advice or asylum for adolescents out of favour at home.
In the past when universities were few and confined to the major Irish cities, had it not been for aunts providing a home close to campus, there are numerous past college graduates who might never have been able to avail of university.
Aunts often dedicated their lives to elderly grandparents, modelling the role of carer. Alternatively, many provided the first representation of self-sufficient womanhood, validating career aspirations and independent living. Some had stories of past passion and tragedy. Meanwhile, those mysterious cloistered aunts, who were nuns, guarded the family with a mantle of prayer as petitioners for exams, recovery from illness, job success or suitable husbands while others were feisty liberation theologians in foreign lands, demonstrating a different dedication of life for others.
In a more conservative and penny-pinching era, young aunts were sometimes those magical liberated goddesses who knew the art of extravagance, the joy of living, had wardrobes of clothes, time to indulge in daily make-up, use expensive perfume, collect objects d'art, buy non-essentials and treat a child to a meal that was not made at home.
Different, although equally endearing, were the aunts who were teachers who provided the secret grinds that made school bearable. They had time to share books and money to buy them, gifting a child with love of learning and educational aspirations that struggling parents had no energy to entertain. Even the older more stern variety of aunt, those feigners of formality, guardians of etiquette and good behaviour, concealed a revealing twitch to the lip that a child could discern and behind which lay a layer of love that only an aunt can provide.
Indeed, did not David Copperfield flee to such an aunt and receive the life-long benevolent benefaction of this eccentric loving woman? Literature is replete with aunts. While it has too often stereotyped the 'maiden' aunt, failing to paint her deep dimensionality, it has at least recognised how grossly undermined and un-rewarded she has been.
Clinical accounts of the role of aunts have alerted psychotherapists to the mental health significance of this role. Free of the demands of direct parenting, many have championed the vulnerable, the bright or the least favoured child, have seen behind outward adolescent arrogance to the deep sensitivity of a young person's heart, have stepped in to mother on incapacity or death of a mother and have saved more childhood lives than they may ever know.
It is to be hoped that when their own time of need arises, nieces and nephews will remember in equal unselfish deeds the unconditional debt owed to such aunts.