I didn’t speak to my father much by 2011, when Margaret went to Cadet Camp.

I tried, as well as I could, to be a good daughter, but our conversations had always felt off, even when I was young.

I remember one night, when I was still at home, around age 14 or 15, and I was angry about something, trying to talk to him about it, and he asked me if I was on my period. It flipped something in me, something shameful that wasn’t mine to hold, but I did. I shut up. I stopped using my voice to stick up for myself. That was one of the first hard lessons that I learned — even if my anger was justified, losing my temper meant, at least in my family, with my own father, that I would be ridiculed and lose all credibility. I was the angry woman then, the contentious one, and he loved that word, “contentious.” He used it for every situation, blaming female hormones for any emotion.

Now and then, I’d still reach out. In 2008, I was still in college and trying to work on a website. It’s what my father did for a living, or so he claimed, so I asked him for help. He was never available, despite not actively working at the time. One day, with my last class of the day canceled, I decided to call and ask again if he’d help me with my website. He told me my mother and youngest siblings were in the hospital for carbon monoxide poisoning. Margaret was the sickest, with 20% in her system. They were all on oxygen in the hospital as they recovered. It had been a close call. They all almost simply just went to sleep and never woke up.

The interesting thing about that memory is that I thought he called me, unprompted. That he’d picked up the phone as soon as he heard and called everyone who didn’t know. But I’d written about it on Facebook, soon after it happened, and he hadn’t called me. I’d called him about his help on the website I wanted to build. He deflected by sharing about how my family almost died.

I never asked him about the website again and he never offered.

In 2011, he asked me if I could pick up Margaret from Cadet Camp. That was the first inkling I got of how serious she was about a military career. She was only 14, taking the week to participate in the camp. But she would need a parent there to pick her up, and he was heading out of the country on vacation with his live-in girlfriend (or, I should clarify, he was the live-in boyfriend. The kept man.). He wanted me to go get her.

I was living in Colorado, planning to head home for a visit, but I wouldn’t have a car. I asked him if I could borrow his for my visit. It would be sitting in his driveway, anyway. I could use it while I was visiting my mom and I could go pick up Margaret. He told me to ask my mother or my sister Grace to borrow their cars instead. “I don’t know if they’ll be working,” I told him. “I don’t know what their schedules are. It makes more sense for me to borrow your car.”

“Well, what do I get out of it?” he responded.

I think the sky got just a little bit bluer then. I could see everything a little bit more clearly. I was driving up the side of a mesa, in a friend’s borrowed car, and time slowed down in my momentary confusion until everything brightened. I finally understood. He’d just asked me to pick up my sister, as a favor to him, because he was heading out of town on vacation and wouldn’t be able to do it, and when I asked him to share his car, which would be just sitting in his driveway, he found no benefit to himself.

I realized then that any relationship with him would be transactional. It didn’t matter if it was money, or time, or information. He needed to come out first, arrive on top, on his terms.

I told him I’d figure it out and ended the call. I wouldn’t speak to him for another four years, and he never once tried to call me. By then, he’d been able to control the custody narrative. He’d gotten the three youngest children on a technicality, and my mother, who was already struggling, was forced to pay him child support until the youngest aged out of the system.

In regards to Cadet Camp, though, my mother ended up coming with me and my youngest sister to pick up Margaret. We got to see her graduation ceremony, something that would prepare us for our brother’s Army boot camp graduation a few years later. Margaret herself would join the Army a few years after he did. I didn’t know how to feel about it. She’d wanted to join the military from a pretty young age, but I had my reservations.

Part of it was my ultra-conservative beliefs. Of course, women could do anything that men could do. But SHOULD they?

Reflecting now, I think Margaret was the badass I’d always wanted to be. I’d taken martial arts classes, I loved the idea of a woman in the military, or taking on the stunts in the movie industry. I, however, was not strong, did not seem able to pursue any of that. And Margaret was.

I remember some of the conversations we’d had about the military years later — “You’re a civilian,” she’d tell me. “You wouldn’t understand.”

It struck me as odd. I wasn’t saying anything to indicate that I didn’t understand. In fact, I’d ask her to say more, to tell the entire story. But there was already the conditioning. Some might say brainwashing. Civilians don’t understand. Battle buddies are your family now. She started getting strong when she joined the Army. And that’s where she’d find her first long-term boyfriend, a young man I’d meet a year or two after that, sitting in a 24-hour diner in southern New Jersey.

Emblem of Our House is an on-going series about the death of my sister Margaret in 2018, published every Monday here and on Instagram @EmblemofOurHouse.