Becoming and Uncle everyone is excited, I'm not.

Dear Lindsay,
I just found out my brother and his partner are pregnant. (I’m not a parent myself. ) Everyone else in our family is all clapping and cheering and “oh, isn’t this wonderful” but I’m not feeling stocked about it. Partly, honestly I don’t like his partner.  I think she’s bad news and I was hoping they would break up, not get closer by having a baby!  Now she’ll be in our family forever because I’m sure my brother will be loyal like that to his baby’s mama.  I also just can’t seem to feel happy about bringing a new kid into this f-ed up world.  I already find it hard to relate to my brother, and I’ve only got a few months before it feels like he’ll be gone forever into dad-land.  How am I supposed to be a decent uncle when I feel like this?
Sincerely,
Soon to be Uncle

Dear Soon to be Uncle,
I feel yah.  I’m not of the opinion the every pregnancy is happy news.  Sure every baby is a definite wonder of existence and should be cherished, but I don’t think everybody should just storm with glee into parenthood.

At a basic evolutionary level I’m sure you can appreciate why our species needs to overall celebrate new babies.  Keep the species going, etc.  As we barrel as a planet towards an unknown future in many respects, I think it makes sense that some amount us are deeply questioning this long held default of procreation. You’re not alone in feeling like the world is a tenuous place to bring a baby into.  It’s ok to not be excited.  It’s ok for this to feel complex.  It is.

You might find a moment to be curious to your brother for example saying “I can only imagine what it would be like to be bringing a child into this f-ed up world…what is that like for you?”

There’s also grief involved here.  Your brother will be going through a huge life change, and you’re right that that will affect your relationship with him.  He’s entering dad-land as you call it, and you’re not.  So you’re got some grieving to do there. Maybe you need to commemorate the passage on your own, maybe with him.
I wonder what would happen if you told him your feelings about this.  I wonder if he’s feeling sad or scared too about how this will affect your connection with him.
It will take creativity, and experimentation, to find new ways of connecting with him, and discovering which things still carry over.  Time with you might become a welcome reprieve from dad-land for him.  Or it might be fun for you to join him in dad-land from time to time.
Mostly, you don’t know yet.

Also, I’m sorry to hear that you think your brother’s partner is bad news.  That sucks.  I wish along with you that he’d chosen someone who was for sure good news.  Sometimes people change, but honestly not often as much as we’d like them to.  So your long game is probably a mixture of limiting your time with her, finding modicums of goodness you can overlap about (maybe you both like pesto, or can geek our about paint colours) and otherwise mostly minding your own business.

And I get that your brother and his choices feels kinda like your business, because it’s adjacent in that it sounds like you want to be in your brother’ life and in your soon to be niece or nephew’s too.

Let it just be said, you don’t necessarily have to be a very involved uncle.  You definitely need to be decent in the sense of polite, kind, reasonable.  That’s the low bar that I think we need to always rise above.  But beyond that, you don’t necessarily have to be star uncle of the year.  You will always be related to this new kid, but you get to choose how close and involved you offer to be.  And in part your brother, his partner and eventually the child will also be part of determining how close and involved you are.

You could be super keen to be an uncle and then the kid could really not like you.  Assuming you’re a likeable person, that would be strange, but you might be a strange person in ways that really rub the kid the wrong way.  And that’s fine. There are lots of people in the world and I sincerely hope that this kid finds many adults other that their parents to connect with.  Maybe that’s you, maybe it isn’t.

You could also meet the kid and then be surprised at how drawn you are to the situation and to helping out and getting involved.  Maybe you and the baby’s mom bond a little over diaper bag design. Who knows.

This kid is as of yet a total wild card in the whole situation.  We don’t know yet how parenthood will affect your brother and his partner.  It’ll be a huge adjustment. We don’t know how that will affect you.  We don’t know what kind of particular delights and challenges this new human will bring into the family.

You’re not going to arrive right away at a solution for how you want to be an uncle. That’s new territory for you too.
You might love it, you might hate it. Likely a bit of each.
Your job is to work on developing the personal practices that keep you sane, healthy, grounded and moving towards wise.  Then assess the twists and turns of this new stage from that place.

Wishing you grace.

Hope this helps.

Lindsay