The anxiety crawled up my throat from my stomach.

People were looking at her on the train.

He wasn’t her baby, and she was only 12. I knew there was no way that the baby was hers, of course, but she was young, and she was looking at him with tenderness and wearing him in a baby wrap on the Q train, and everybody was watching.

He was the infant son of the family I was staying with in New York City. From 2008 to 2010, I lived with a few different families from the community I had joined there while I was earning my degree from Brooklyn College. I wasn’t able to afford a place of my own, even working multiple jobs, and in exchange for providing child care, I was able to stay with some people. That’s probably when certain ideals started to shift. I always had wanted to get married and start a family of my own, but having that sort of expectation and pressure started a shift. Years later, I’d attend a church where I told the pastor that I wasn’t interested in teaching Sunday School or volunteering for the nursery. I had nothing against children, still wanted my own family, but a slow burn was happening, accelerated back then in 2009. I hadn’t wanted to be a missionary, pastor’s wife, or teacher when I was younger, and I wanted to do more than traditional expectations even as I grew older.

Where Margaret and I were very similar, however, was in enjoying children and wanting a family. So she held the baby that day, and I grew anxious watching people watch her. I still haven’t disconnected from the weight of what others might think. That’s an ongoing battle.

But that day, Margaret didn’t notice or care. She was so excited to hold the baby.

A year or two later, we had another niece and nephew join the family, the same year I moved to Colorado. They were born two weeks apart, in the same month as their mothers’ birthdays. Margaret was the aunt that would wear underwear on her head when her nephew asked her to, no questions asked. She was the aunt that would hold his hand when he wanted to say hi to Elsa, but he was too shy. She was the aunt that always seemed calm and patient, ready to play with the kids, even the ones not related to her.

A few years after that, she was in a serious relationship with a guy that she’d met when she went through army bootcamp. They got kicked out of the military together, but their relationship survived. I met him in New Jersey, where the three of us went to a 24-hour diner and he seemed nice enough. She had messaged the family group chat when they were on their way from the south, looking for a place where they could crash when they arrived in Pennsylvania. “For my little family,” she had said, and I asked immediately if she was pregnant. Family implied a child, I said.

She wasn’t, but that’s what she was trying to build.

A family. 

Something of her own.

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.