being an uncle: available revolution

Crush Life Manifesto: Mossy Space, January 2026

it was 6:30p on a sunday and rachel and maya walked into apartment 1 where the rest of us were gathered. eli craned his head back to make eye contact with maya. as soon as she saw him, she wriggled out of rachel’s arms, opened the double french doors, walked over, her arms out in her maya way, exclaiming “baba!” rachel shared that they had just come from swim class and went to grab plates of food for her and maya.

our check-in round continued. when it was eli’s turn he gave maya, now sitting on his lap, a chance to check-in; her first check-in at

a house meeting since her birth a little more than two years ago. certainly not her first house meeting but definitely her first check-in. she noted that she was at swim class and how she kicked her feet in the water. rachel prompted her with a couple questions to get her to share more and then others joined. betty asked “how did it feel?” maya paused, looked around a bit, seemingly unclear about how to answer. she was very verbally adept at two but hadn’t the confidence or the capacity to answer that particular question straight away. cathy jumped in: “were you excited? scared?” maya got it and responded confidently: “i was happy!”

and that was it.

that was the moment my life ended.

again.

as it had so many times.

with her and so many others.

watching little ones find their way to their truth absolutely destroys me.

something inside me cracks and something else inside me oozes out of those cracks. i don’t know what cracks (my heart?) or what oozes (my feelings?) but i do know that this repeated cracking and oozing is making me more human.

this is a story about uncling and the work it takes to uncle well.

at a certain point during the meeting, maya begins to get antsy. enough with sitting and talking; it’s play time!

“uncle lawrence, will you play with me?”

don’t have to ask me twice! i jumped up and said “yes!” by the time i stood up, she was already leading the way out of the circle to the rest of the apartment. we tromped around the kitchen for a while and then the hallway. she said she wanted to go check on her apartment. we went back, i communicated, and eli threw me maya’s PJ onesie. the implied message: get as far as you can into bedtime routine. i’ll come up at some point. text if you need me.

i bowed my way out and turned my attention back to the little one. we made our way upstairs, maya’s left hand holding the banister, my left hand holding hers, onesie tucked into my belt loop.

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this is a real picture of what our life is like these days. this is the context supporting the current reality of my uncling, which is probably my most joyful identity these days.

i live in a 5-unit apartment building that is as close to a co-op as you can get without shared ownership. a few times a season, i put maya down to sleep. frequently, when i hear them coming or going, i open my door to say hi or bye. maya knows which apartment everyone lives in and squeals with a huge smile when i spin the metal number two nailed to my door. we have traversed the stairs together many times, sometimes her in my arms, sometimes my hand behind her back as she crawls, sometimes me exclaiming at how big her steps have gotten as she holds my hand and the handrail.

having painted the picture, let me get clear. this essay is about three things: introducing myself to you as an uncle, how i came to be the uncle i am; it’s about sharing why i believe uncling matters; and it’s about sharing what i’ve learned, what i practice, what i propose other uncles might try.

so what did it take to get here? how did i become the uncle i am?

both of my parents were parented by extended family. there are older ancestral stories i do and do not know. even without a deep dive into them, those stories are out there, shaping me (and likely you, too), knowingly and not. my understanding of family includes it all. i try to keep what is wise and evolve what needs evolution.

growing up, i worked at vacation bible school and summer day camps at my church. i mentored (“discipled”) younger men in my christian spiritual community. i was mentored by older men in that same community. i know what it felt like to be cared for by someone further down the path than me and what it felt like to care for someone coming up behind me.

in 2011, my first nibbling, my fraternity brother’s kid, jayden, was born. he was the first baby that i really committed to. an hour here and there. eventually going on walks and working up to a first overnight while his mom, sooyeon, was away advancing her career.

i think about all the little ones that i know/knew and am/was close with since jayden. i think about asa and kohli and anthem —> chicken —> beniyanna and alvie and iona and neema and francis. i think about alma and zaire and darshan and alaena and natey and caden (RIP 2021) and jacob and selah and shola and inara and luuki and lulu and estella and nicolia and noël and noa and amari and emmett and maya. i think about the newest ones, too: helen and umimar and cassius and monae and riley and june.

uncling started to inform my work, and i began exploring uncling interventions in our society.

when i started dreaming about post-patriarchal futures in the late 2010s, i found that bell hooks’ definition of love offered a window into noticing ways that toxic patriarchy had harmed me. i realized that tending to those harms is one way (of many) to create a future beyond patriarchy for myself and others.

Love is a combination of care,

commitment, knowledge,

responsibility, respect and trust.

- bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

i started to think of each of those ingredients as a site where patriarchy had shaped me and i began to dream of how i could heal that shaping and create new possibilities for myself and, as a result, others. i realized that each of my shapings with toxic patriarchy had happened when i was a kid. it began to dawn to me that if i could heal, and then support kids around me to not have those moments of shaping (or at least dampen them or tend to them sooner), we could have a whole ‘nother reality in just a generation or three.

so even though i have enjoyed spending time with kids for most of my life, i started to see that that enjoyment could be transformational to our society (aka revolutionary).

and over the years that i’ve spent time with young kids, my practice has begun to inform some theory that i’m expanding and deepening in a few places (including this essay). in this crush life context, i wanted to share about three specific things that are fundamental to my uncling:

• time spent

• care offered

• presence

time spent

i have spent hour upon hour (mostly joyful, sometimes tearful, occasionally tender with struggle) being with my friends and their kiddos. this is a choice and has been a choice since jayden. if you know me, you know i live my life to the brim (overflowing even, some

might say >_>). but even as i try to squeeze every drop out

of this lifetime, i have chosen to prioritize opportunities

for connecting with young ones, especially babies. this has meant real tradeoffs. it means saying yes to regular (sometimes weekly) time with little ones and their parents just doing basic-ass daily life. it has meant saying no to things that feel more exciting or, in some ways, more urgent. things like organizing projects or volunteer board member roles or fun parties or, sometimes, entire relationships. more often than i enjoy, i have had to say no to new friendships because i knew that trying to add another person to my friend landscape would mean less time, availability, and flexibility for my nibblings and their families.¹

care offered

early in my uncle journey, i prioritized wanting to help my clearly exhausted friends by taking their kid off their hands so they could rest. my hope was to offer this as a form of care.

i learned two things slowly. first is that, in spite of the exhaustion, my friends didn’t WANT to be away from their kids. bringing a new human into this world (via birth) or a human into a new world (via other forms of family growth like adoption) is an incredible, albeit tiring, experience. i watched over and over as my friends seemed to buckle under the weight of the work.

but as i offered the opportunity to be with their kid(s) on my own so that they could rest, i often found resistance because they, in spite of the tiredness, wanted to be around their kids for as many moments as possible.

so, instead of jumping to offer babysitting, i started to

offer spending time as a secondary adult so the parents

could focus on whatever felt most important. sometimes that meant them being with their kid and getting to release things like planning for dinner or sanitizing bottles. surprisingly, i found that sometimes the parent(s) actually wanted to do things like wash the dishes or calmly cook dinner (not cook dinner while also trying to watch a child) because those activities made them feel parts of themselves that they enjoyed feeling. and that made for moments for me to hang with the child.

second, without enough time spent together, there isn’t enough trust for the kid to feel good/excited/comfortable/safe with me. after spending enough time with a kid, there comes a moment, an incredible moment, where the kid sees that other adult as another person they can ask for help, food, or play (there are other things, i’m sure, but with young kids, these seem to be the earliest types of asks). once that happens, i feel confident that this kid feels some real safety with me. of course, there are degrees to this (ex: safe to ask for food but not safe enough to ask for a diaper change), but overall, i’ve found that as time spent increases, so does the sense of safety.

and after enough time spent and trust/safety built, the moments of spending time solo with kids start to arise organically. “can you help me change their dirty diaper²?” becomes “can you play with the little one while i cook?” becomes “can you hang with them while i sleep?” becomes “can you put them down for a nap?” becomes “can you do bedtime so i can go away for a night?³”

so i learned that spending time with the whole family unit was a necessary pathway into offering care for the kid (solo or not) and the parents.

presence

in the process of spending time and learning how to offer care, i found that you can do them really well and you can also do them quite poorly.

there are ways to be with a child that are about what the adult wants to do and there are ways to be with a child that are about what the kid wants to do. sometimes those two things overlap, but not always. for example: yes, responding to a request to get out the markers

is presence. noticing that the child is fascinated by uncapping and recapping is presence. assuming that getting out the markers means drawing and needing to get to drawing… whose agenda is that?

no matter how many times i’ve changed a kid’s diaper, we are in ongoing consent. sometimes my role is to go with them to the room and play until they’re ready to ask for a parent to come change it. sometimes my role is to actually change the diaper. being present has meant letting go, over and over, of the thing i think i’m supposed to be doing. it has meant tending to my feeling of failure that i wasn’t the diaper changer or that we didn’t get to drawing. it has meant countless moments where i am the one who gets up from the table to go play so the other adults eating dinner can keep talking about building revolution in our homes and worlds.

as i tend to those feelings, i have learned that being present with

kids makes other presence possible.

this essay can’t cover all that i want to say. there are so many more practices, observations, and suggestions that have come up as i’ve written these few. suffice it to say, this journey towards uncling is big and deep and wide and so so important to the relational fabric of our society.

i genuinely believe that if we change how men in our society relate to children, almost everything about our world will change. there are many pathways to that change and i’m positively obsessed (thank you, octavia butler, for that concept) with uncling as one of them. will you join me⁴?

1. and even with all of this, i still feel like there’s more ways i can deepen this intentionality. in spite of making the space i have, there are still nibblings who i have lost touch with over time, or ones who, because of how busy i am, i don’t get to spend as much time with as i want or as they want.

2. fun fact: did you know that most men don’t change a diaper until they have their own first kid? wild, eh?

3. there’s an element of this equation that is about the parent(s) feeling comfortable and confident that i know a kid well enough to be able to care for them. do i know where the diapers are? what the allergies are? who to call if something goes sideways? for brevity in this piece, i’m not expanding on that part, but know that it’s in there.

4. fun fact #2: we are making progress. “In 1982,# 43% of fathers reported never changing a diaper, but a 2000 study showed that figure had dropped to just 3%.” baby steps, ya know… onward!