Letters to the Editor
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As a parent, I read this letter with horror....
Before you decide to dedicate your life to helping to raise your sisters' kids, you need to have long and careful conversations with your sisters AND with thier husbands to understand what the boundaries are, and recognize that YOU have NO POWER to insist on more authority or access to the kids than they decide that you should have, and that they have the right to re-draw those boundaries at any time.
My siblings and I have had vastly different experiences of our family of origin and don't have anything close to the same opinion of it, and the same is true of my wife. You might be stunned to learn what your sisters and their husbands want in a family, how they plan to raise it, what their belief systems are....and you'd be a fool to decide that you can influence them.
If one of my siblings or my wife's siblings decided to do this, we'd be horrified and opposed to it and work carefully to ensure safe boundaries for our kids. Think that over carefully. You're not going to be a part of their nuclear families, not a part of the key decisions, and it's their right to push you out of any interaction or even decide that your influence on the kids is bad for them in situation A or B, when you believe you know what's best and want to be there.
I'm sorry to be so negative. I think your dedication to these kids is awesome, but I think you need to acknowledge that it's not up to you what role you play in thier lives, and it can change on you without notice or input from you. It strikes me as dangerous to try to find fulfillment in something like that.