Parents’ Vow Renewal, They Excluded Me From Photos “You’re Not Really Family” Then the Judge Arrived
The invitation to my parents’ vow renewal arrived on cream card stock with gold lettering. Richard and Catherine Thompson request your presence as they renew their vows after 40 years of marriage. Riverside Country Club.
Saturday, June 22nd, 4 p.m. Family and closest friends only. I held it in my hands in my apartment, studying the elegant script until the loops of the letters blurred.
Family. The word felt hollow. I was thirty-four years old, and I’d spent thirty-one of those years knowing I wasn’t really family.
Not to the Thompsons. I was adopted. A fact they’d never let me forget.
People love to say adoption is a gift. A rescue. A second chance.
A Hallmark card with a bow. In our house, it was a receipt. Proof that I owed them.
Proof that I had to behave. Proof that if I ever pushed back, if I ever asked for too much, they could hold up the paper like a court order and remind me that I wasn’t theirs the way David and Michelle were. My earliest memory isn’t of toys or cartoons or bedtime stories.
It’s of a photograph. I was maybe four, sitting on a carpet in a living room that smelled like lemon polish and money. Catherine Thompson—my mother, my adoptive mother—stood behind the couch with one hand on my shoulder.
Her fingers were light, careful, like she was touching something fragile she wasn’t sure belonged in her home. Richard Thompson stood beside her, smiling for the camera. David, six, sat in the center like the sun.
Michelle, three, had curls and a white dress and a grin like she knew she could get away with anything. And me. I remember being told to sit on the edge of the couch arm so I wouldn’t “throw off the symmetry.” I remember being told to keep my hands in my lap.
I remember Catherine leaning down and whispering, “Smile, Olivia. This is for the family album.”
When the photo came back from the drugstore, Catherine slid it into a thick leather book on the coffee table. David asked why I looked different.
Catherine laughed like it was adorable. “Oh, honey,” she said, “Olivia’s special. She’s ours in a different way.”
Richard added, “We chose her.”
I didn’t understand what that meant then.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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