Family photographs give us more than a record of how our children looked. They preserve the relationships, ordinary moments, and everyday pieces of family life that we may not realize we'll miss until years have passed.
When we take family photos, we may think we're preserving how our children looked at a particular age. How small they were. A toothless grin. A season of life.
But I wonder if, with enough time and distance, we begin to see something else.
TOne of my favorite childhood photos is of me as a toddler wearing oversized sunglasses, probably my mom's. Years later, I saw a photograph of one of my own toddlers wearing oversized sunglasses. Suddenly, I saw myself in my child.
The photograph wasn't just a record of what I looked like as a little girl. It connected two generations of our family in a way I couldn't have anticipated when I first saw that childhood photograph.
Maybe that's one of the things photographs give us that memory alone can't.
They allow us to see connections we didn't have the perspective to recognize at the time.
There Is No Perfect Time
It's easy to wait.
Maybe we'll take the photographs when the newborn stage is over and Mom feels more like herself. When the toddler is less unpredictable. When the house is cleaner. When everyone can cooperate. When Dad gets a haircut. When the children are old enough to behave.
Every stage has its challenges. And every stage has its joys.
The reality is there is no perfect time. There are simply moments that won't happen again.
Looking back, I wish I had understood that some of the most ordinary days would become the ones I wanted to remember most.
I think about a day when my children and I were making peanut butter balls. The kids were standing on chairs so they could reach the table. The youngest was wearing nothing but a diaper.
I would roll the peanut butter mixture into balls and place them on parchment paper. And then a little hand would reach over, grab one, and pop it into her mouth. It reminded me of that I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are desperately trying to keep up with the candy coming down the conveyor belt. Very few peanut butter balls actually made it to the chocolate.
But the kids were laughing.
They were having a wonderful time. It was messy and chaotic and completely ordinary.
And I wish I had photographs of it. Not because it was an important event. Because it was our life.
We Don't Always Know What We'll Miss
When my children were little, I took plenty of photographs.
Like most moms, I photographed the everyday things: the toys everywhere, messy faces, little activities that seemed funny or sweet or worth remembering.
But there are so many things I remember that I never photographed:
Favorite books we read so many times that the toddler memorized every word.
Their soapy-clean smell after a bath when I would snuggle them close.
Little hands reaching up for mine while we waited for the school bus.
The tears of a child (and mom) on the first day of kindergarten.
Children arguing over who got to sit next to me at the dinner table.
And, yes, even the giant turkey leg I once discovered hidden under the couch.
How many everyday moments like these have I forgotten?
That's the strange thing about raising children. We are living through their childhood while we're simultaneously trying to keep up with it. We don't always know which ordinary moments will become the ones we wish we could return to.
I think about one photograph I took of my three children sitting on the couch, each with their own box of Kellogg’s cereal, happily munching away.
There were so many rules being broken. We didn't eat on the couch. We didn't eat straight from the cereal box. And we certainly didn't eat cereal for dinner.
But the kids were delighted. They giggled when they were caught. And there was something about the three of them banding together in their own little act of rebellion that made me laugh.
So I took the picture.
At the time, it was simply funny. Looking at it now, I see something more. I see sibling closeness. I see simple childhood joy. I see three little people who had created their own tiny world together.
We don't always know what we're preserving when we take a photograph. Sometimes we only understand its meaning much later.
Sometimes the Photographs Reveal What Is Missing
There's another thing I discovered when I looked back through photographs of my own children: The photos were missing their mother.
At the time, taking pictures felt like an expression of my love for them. I was documenting their childhood. I was making sure I didn't forget all the little things they were doing. But looking through those photographs years later, I felt something I hadn't expected.
Loneliness.
I was there. I was loving them, caring for them, reading to them, feeding them, comforting them, and creating those moments.
But the photographs didn't show any of that.
They showed my children without the mother who was experiencing their childhood alongside them. And that matters. Because someday, our children may look through those photographs with us. Or they may look through them on their own. They'll see what they looked like. They'll see what they did. But they won’t necessarily see the mother who was there beside them, loving them through all these ordinary moments.
As our children grow, our relationships inevitably change. A photograph can’t erase the difficult seasons, but it can offer another perspective - a tangible reminder that our story together includes more than the moments that are hard.
Often We’re Too Hard on Ourselves
There is another reason so many mothers end up missing from their family photographs. We don't like how we look. We want to lose the baby weight. We don't feel like ourselves after giving birth. We're tired. We haven't had time to do our hair. We don't think we look young or thin or beautiful enough.
I learned something about this when my dad was dying. He was puffy from chemotherapy and steroids. He didn't look like the father I remembered from my childhood.
We knew his diagnosis was likely terminal, so we made time for family photographs. Those photographs are now some of the most precious photographs we have. Not because Dad looked his best. Because he was there.
Most of us don't have that kind of certainty when we decide whether or not to step into a photograph. We don't know which photograph will someday become precious. We only know how we feel about ourselves in this particular moment. And those are not necessarily the same thing.
What We Treasure Isn't Always What We Expected
I've noticed something similar in my work as a photographer.
Parents often come to me because their children are growing so quickly. But when they receive their images, I think something else often becomes meaningful: the relationships between them.
A child curled up beside Mom reading a favorite book. A sibling leaning in to nibble a baby's Thitoes. A family gathered together on the couch with the dog.
These photographs don't simply show us what a family looked like. They give us a glimpse of how that family loved one another.
So What Are We Really Trying to Remember?
Maybe it's not simply how our children looked. Maybe it's not the milestone or the perfectly coordinated outfits or the beautiful house.
Maybe we're trying to remember glimpses of a life that was moving and changing so quickly that we couldn't possibly take it all in while we were living it.
We want our grown children to be able to look at those photographs and remember things they had forgotten. To ask questions. To see their childhood through adult eyes. To understand their family in a deeper way. To recognize the connections that shaped them.
We want something tangible that can take us back to a life our memories can no longer completely reconstruct.
