The night that my big sister Njiba went into labor with my nephew, her first son, I was in the middle of a St. Patrick’s Day pregame wearing a velvet dress that I found at the thrift store and cut in half for the occasion. She FaceTimed me on her way to the hospital and my friends and I shrieked encouragement into the phone. “You go girl, you got thissssss.” The next morning, I quietly crept out of my dorm room leaving my, ahem, friend, sleeping in my twin XL so I could go meet my nephew.
I had spent all nine months leading up to his birth thinking about what kind of aunty I wanted to be. I thought back to the smothering hugs I would get once a year from family members who claimed to have changed my diapers - I didn’t want my nephew to have to rack his brain to remember my name. I needed to be cemented as a fun aunt from very early on. And so, on the day my sister and brother-in-law brought him home from the hospital, I skipped my classes and rushed home to greet him. He was perfect. I gave him a tour of his room, taking great care to note the decorations I picked out for his nursery (safari theme, duh), and by the time I brought him back to his parent’s room, they were fast asleep. Aunty time. Score.
The summer after my junior year of college, I interned in D.C., disrupting my very tight bond with my nephew. Thankfully, if years of immigrant childhood have taught me anything, it’s to use any and every tool at my disposal to stay connected - no matter the distance. I spent years watching my aunt and uncle purchase calling cards so they could shout (always shout) over phone lines and keep in touch with our family. Thankfully, I was absolutely born in the right era - FaceTime exists! Hallelujah! I started FaceTiming my nephew every day on my lunch break, and our tradition continued once I graduated and moved to D.C. permanently. I don’t know when I started taking screenshots during the calls, but now, stitched together they create a pretty moving picture of our growing family. My sister’s second pregnancy is documented in these screenshots. My boyfriend Sean starts to pop into the screenshots, and then my nephews start to grow taller, lose teeth, show off fades, and call me without their mom as an intermediary.
There’s a lot of talk about how it takes a village to raise a child, but there’s very little instruction on how to be that village, especially if you’re a very young, very hot aunty. But I’m a firm believer in using the tools you have to make the reality you want, and for me, that meant knowing as much as I could about their little lives, anyway I could. I like to spend flights cleaning up my photos, and as I stumbled upon each of these screenshots I realized, these screenshots are a part of our family archive. They’re documentation of the ways my sister and I are working to write a new story for our family.
Recently my older nephew texted me: “hey auntie. how are you?”
My heart melted. I took a screenshot.