At the end of every year, I have a ritual of offloading photos from the cloud to an external hard drive. In the beginning years of this process, I created a new Photos library each year. As technology has evolved, I discovered that it was possible to keep all my photos in the same library, so this past year I had the arduous task of importing and merging photos from over a dozen different places. Let’s just say the task has taken a little bit longer than I anticipated, much to my partner’s chagrin.
For her, the task feels like an overstayed welcome. In her mind, reviewing photos from the last ten years seems like a nostalgic obsession with my previous marriage. In her version, seeing photos of my kids when they were little must make me yearn for the life I had before her. And that life included the kids’ father, therefore, the time I spend looking at photos is time I am spending with him rather than with her. While I can understand her logic, it is flawed. It doesn’t, and can’t, take into account all of the negative memories attached to the sweet things I have been surveying for the past month. The reason why social comparison is perhaps the most powerful tool for self-reflection is because what gets captured in photographs and timestamps is only the bits we want to remember. What outsiders looking in don’t see is the fight that was going on while the picture was being taken, or the disagreements that took place about the vacation the photos have captured. If anything, looking back at old photos, for me, validates the path I chose that left him in the past.
The problem with ending a relationship with a person you still love is that absence truly does make the heart grow fonder. The more time that passes, the more I am able to miss the good things about our relationship and the easier it is to forget all the stress and strife that came with them. It doesn’t help that in a decade of photographs, he only shows his face in a handful–many of them surprise selfies, a narcissistic need to insert himself in the history of the moments he captured. Inevitably in real life, we will have an interaction or argument that will remind me why our relationship had an expiration date. When that happens, it’s hard not to expunge all historical photography from the decade-spanning encyclopedia of days long past.
Despite sharing some of the delicious tidbits of the older kids’ lives with my partner, they are the tidbits that she didn’t get to experience with me. Whereas for me, they spark connection to the moments of sweetness and joy and goofiness I get to relive with our youngest child, for my partner, they are a reminder of the life I lived before her. The other challenge is that I didn’t recognize myself for so many of the years I’ve had to laboriously review in order to clean up duplicates and delete bad and/or blurry photos. Going back through the years when the older kids were little has shown me glimpses. While I remember myself as angry and serious, the pictures have captured a little bit of silliness. Silliness that I didn’t remember holding on to, only that I’d regained it in my partnership with my wife and parenting our bonus child.
I am grateful my children don’t know me as the rigid, tired, frustrated, and often grumpy version of myself. And while this is a version of myself I’m happy to leave in the past, it’s also a helpful point of comparison and a reminder of how grateful I am for this version of my family, a version I’d imagined many times (albeit never with a third child!). My own comparisons arrive at solid conclusions time and again that despite the twists and turns and complicated history my photographic catalogue illustrate, I have arrived at exactly the moment in time and space that I was meant to. Though I may have taken the road less traveled, it has made all the difference.
(mostly) full disclosure 