When I was in my late twenties I sat in the living room of my parent’s house, going through boxes of family photos, while the rest of the family was outside talking about everything they talked about when they were together. I went through the photos and when I found one of me I’d take it out, and put it in the stack of pictures that I thought no longer belonged with the family photos.

                What is it about families that binds us together whether we fit together or not? If you want an answer to that question, you came to the wrong place.

                On that visit I took all the pictures that I could find of me and I took them away. Did I not want to be a member of the family anymore? Did I think I wasn’t a member of the family? My stepmother didn’t care for me much, that was a fact. (Someone asked me recently, when I’d mentioned that she hadn’t liked me, “Why?” What a question! I don’t know why. Why not? had always been my impression of the situation.) Growing up, I didn’t have much of an identity, except as the oddball of the family. No one ever really wanted me around. I had an older half-sister and an older step-sister, and to them I was a child. I had brothers, a whole (which is an odd sort of thinking of a person, as whole), two steps, and a youngest half-brother, and all except the youngest thought little of me. The youngest was born when I was 13, and we were close until I turned 18 and left home, and then, except for the occasional visits back home, he had only his mother’s disapproving words of me to believe in.

                No one noticed that I’d removed the photos. Who looks at boxes of family photos anyway? I put the boxes back, sans my photos, and while they knew I’d been looking at them, they hadn’t known that I‘d removed the ones with me in them. I knew they wouldn’t care, they’d probably appreciate the effort.

                I didn’t want them to be reminded of me.

                Sometimes I didn’t want to be reminded of me.

                And I forgot all about it, mostly, though the memory of excising myself from the family while they sat outside laughing never entirely left me.

                When my youngest brother married, just several years ago, 10 years after his mother, my step-mother, had died, he and his fiancée had gone through the family photos, looking for pictures for a slideshow. They emailed me, asking for pictures, saying they hadn’t been able to find many of me. I didn’t send them any because I didn’t want my face up there, on the screen, where everyone could see it and sense my embarrassment, as if a picture itself could show them my soul.

                (It’s as if I’m not even a modern day American, but a member of an ancient tribe who believes the soul can be captured with a photo. In most things I am progressive, so I won’t let this little belief detail bother me too much.)

                At the wedding reception I watched the slideshow, and halfway through I had to get up, and go to the restroom, where I cried, because there was no sign of me in the family pictures, and I had, as I had wished, ceased to exist.

                Wow, how easy was that? With one ill-thought out action I can erase myself! It’s as if I never existed! But if I wasn’t there, where was I? Did I emerge fully grown, without a childhood?

                Not hardly. I can’t be that easily erased. I do take after my mother, who was always running from the camera, hesitant to be captured on film. But fortunately picture takers persevered, and despite her diligent efforts there remain many pictures of her for us to remember her.

                We don’t need pictures, but they help. They show us the parts we’ve forgotten, the things that start to slip away, that even though we know them, seeing them reminds us of things forgotten. I have no children who will want to see pictures of me after I’m gone, and that’s okay. But still I hang onto the old pictures of me, even though they’re of no interest to anyone other than the people who see me every day anyway. Maybe, I think, if I hang onto them, I’ll have proof that I once existed. Perhaps someday I’ll need that proof, just in case, so I hang onto them, and I keep them with all the pictures of all the people and animals I’ve loved.

                They are proof that I existed, at least in my own life.