photo albums

Without kids, what pictures go in the album?

Sue Fagalde Lick family photos, photos of children and grandchildren , , , , , ,

Daughters Day. Son’s Day. Last week, social media was loaded with photos of people celebrating their children. As if Mother’s Day and Father’s Day weren’t bad enough. I had to look away.
It’s not just hard on childless people. What about those who have kids but not of that gender? Or worse, whose children have died or whom they never see?
I understand why parents take and post lots of kid pictures. It’s the same thing that makes me focus my camera on my dog all the time. They’re cute. They’re ours. We’re proud of them. We want to show them off. We want to mark the milestones and the changes as they get older. I get it. I just can’t look at it too much before I start feeling sad.

Big yellow dog with white face seen in profile in passenger seat of a car in front of the vet's office.

Photography has changed drastically since I was young, back in the days when people picked up their photos at the pharmacy or photo store, showed them to their friends, then put them in albums, labeling each picture with names and dates.

My dental hygienist, whose life revolves around her kids, said no one does photo albums anymore. True? I hardly ever print out my photos. I stopped doing albums ages ago. My pictures are not even well-organized on my phone and my computer. No one looks at them but me.

Do people still display family photos in their houses? If I had kids and grandkids, I suppose I’d have their pictures all over the place. Instead, I have paintings, knick-knacks, wall hangings, and pictures of relatives who are no longer alive.

I do have a growing accumulation of photos of my great nieces and nephew on my computer, but that’s where they stay.

For generations, my family collected photos and put them in albums. I have inherited pictures from my parents and grandparents, most of them attached to black pages with white or gold stickers slipped over the corners. They’re falling apart. I also have my modern color photos on sticky pages. Those are fading. I have scanned some of the most precious photos to share online because that’s the only place I share pictures these days.

I don’t know where my photos will go when I die. Honestly, I don’t think anyone in my family will want them. But what a tragedy to throw them away. It’s like throwing away a life.

What to do with the photo albums and other family heirlooms is one of the sticky things about not having children. If we had children, I’ll bet we would still be preserving their photos in some way, whether in a traditional album, a Facebook memory book, or a fancy scrapbook. We’d be making virtual slide shows and videos. We’d want to save all those memories and pass them down. But without children, is there any point in doing it?

When my husband died, I mailed lots of family photos to his brother and his kids. But I still have many pictures of precious times I spent with him, including those days when I felt like kind of a mom with his children around. I’m keeping those pictures for me.

Life is so transitory these days. You take a picture, post it online, get some likes and comments, and move on. Is that just the way it is now? Should I stop living in the past? Does it matter that Facebook and Instagram are bound to disappear as technology changes?

What about you? Do the happy family photos online bother you? Do you save your photos in albums or hang them on the wall? Most of my pictures are scenery, dogs, or selfies. Without kids, what do you photograph? Do you have a photo collection? Where will it go when you’re gone?

I look forward to your comments.

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Pictures of Kids? Not So Much

Sue Fagalde Lick family photos, photos of children and grandchildren, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

We sat around a table at the senior center last week passing around photos for a writing exercise. I was a stranger in this group that meets every week. I had come to check out the visiting writing teacher. My seat faced a wall-sized mirror, so I was looking at myself all the time, feeling too young and overdressed for this group.

The people were incredibly friendly, but I soon felt like an outcast in another way: Most of the photos included children. Kids lined up along a fence. Kids posing at Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa. Kids in the front row of family reunion pictures. You know the kind, where the original couple is surrounded by the many generations. Yeah. I don’t have a lot of those pictures. My albums are full of dogs, cats, buildings, beaches, mountains, and flowers.

The picture I brought, which inspired some smiles, showed my first husband, my father and my brother all leaning down looking into the back of the VW bus that we took on our first honeymoon. That was in 1974, when I was 22 and had no doubts about being a mom someday, and no clue that the marriage wouldn’t last. The honeymoon, a road trip all over the western U.S. and Canada, was great. At home, we didn’t do so well.

But back to the pictures. I suspect most of us don’t keep actual printed photo albums anymore. I don’t, although I have quite a few from the past. We store pictures on our phones, tablets and computers and post them on social media, but it’s still the same. My friends show me pictures of their children and grandchildren. I show them pictures of my dog or the weird bear statue somebody draped in garlands this Christmas (Bondage Bear, I called him). I have some pictures of my nieces and nephews, but I don’t see them often, and it’s not the same.  I take a lot of pictures to accompany my blogs and other writing projects. But I’ll never line my children up on the front porch for the annual first-day-of-school photo. Or pose with their kids at Christmas.

What does that leave me to share or to save in albums? And who would I save those albums for? When I die, who is going to care?

I rarely get my own picture taken. Most of the pics I put online are selfies or photos I paid a professional to take. No one seems anxious to save my image or put it on the wall like the 1800s picture of my great-grandma Louise that I study at my dad’s house, looking for features that have been passed down, trying to sense the kind of person she was. Does anyone believe all those Facebook pictures will even exist in a hundred years? (remember floppy disks? Gone!)

I have been thinking about piecing together a family-tree style collection of photos of all my loved ones, especially those who have died, so I can look at them all in one place. The tree will not go on beyond me. My line goes only backward, not forward. I’m a twig that will never reproduce. So who would I do it for? Me. It would make me happy, and that’s good enough.

My brother, the only person with exactly the same ancestors, might be interested, but he is surrounded by children and grandchildren these days. His branch of the tree is getting heavy with new branches.

Back to that photo I passed around. The seniors got a laugh at the old VW with its “lawnmower” engine in the back. My ex, shirtless, squatted in front of the engine. He was the real mechanic in the group, but my father, still dressed up from the wedding, was bent over supervising while my brother, back in jeans and tee shirt, stood back, looking worried. It was his bus that we were about to drive all over hell and gone with “Just Married” painted in blue all over it and only three working cylinders. I could write a lot more about that picture than I could about yet another string of blonde, blue-eyed Oregon kids.

So what do you take pictures of? Do you put them in albums or other kinds of collections? Who will care about them when you’re gone? Does it matter? Please share in the comments.