Articles : Tutorials - Digital

Reflections on the Past Year

how photos and scrapbook pages hold my memories

Since my birthday is so close to New Year's, January is always a time for me to reflect on my life. It's weird for me to be turning 28 this year -- a little too close to 30 for comfort, I guess. Every year on my birthday, I write in a "birthday journal," to recap the year and talk about how I'm feeling as I get one year older. I've been doing this for 8 years, and it's so interesting already to see the changes from year to year. But a funny thing happened as I started to think back on 2006: I drew a blank.

2006 was a rough year. The ONLY things that stand out in my mind are three medical issues that happened within a month of each other. In May I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. A decade of random health issues suddenly all made sense, and I had to make a major lifestyle change. Then on June 4th, Jake fell on the playground at church and broke his arm. I thought that was the worst day of my life thus far, until on June 8th he was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder. The whole summer was a blur of medicine, doctor's appointments, home therapy activities, and countless books I devoured in an effort to understand our new problems.

Surely there was more to 2006 for us than medical problems, I thought. Taking a breath, I made an effort to get beyond the blur of medical issues and find some good memories. For a moment, I honestly couldn't remember anything prior to May. After a moment of concentration, I had a break-through -- I remembered an afternoon in March after I visited my best friend at the hospital with her new baby. I picked Jake up from my mom's house, and on the way to the car he picked a flower for me. It was the first time he'd ever done that. But I don't remember the moment so much as I have a visual image of the scrapbook page I made about it that same weekend. And I begin to wonder -- if I didn’t happen to have my camera with me at that moment, would I remember it at all?

Let's see, I think. What else did we do in early 2006? . . . an image of Jake and my dad walking along the streets of Marietta, Georgia flashes across my mind. That's right, we visited my older sister in Atlanta in February. But once again, it's the scrapbook page that brings the memory to me, which opens up the other memories -- going for ice cream with three of my sisters, visiting the park Jake loves because it has a train, and a lunch date at Panera, just me and my dad.

The other day, my husband was talking about the last time we'd been to "Grandma" Beverly's house -- Beverly is the mother of an in-law, but we consider her family. He said he thought we had been there for Easter -- but no, I said, I remember having Easter dinner at MY mom's house. (And I've got the pictures to prove it!) We sat wondering for a minute, then I remembered having made a scrapbook page with a picture of me, hubby, and Jake that day. My eyes scanned our living room wall, and sure enough, it's one of the six 8x8 scrapbook pages hanging up in frames. "It was Mother's Day," I said. "Look at the top left scrapbook page on the wall." Well then. That's one way to win an argument!

As I write this, I start thinking further back -- back to finding out I was pregnant, back to Jake's birth, and to that first year of his life that passed in such a blur. Suddenly it occurs to me that any solid memories I have of Jake as a baby are tied to photos. Photos, more than anything, trigger the feelings and stories from the past. Without them, I hardly remember a thing.

I'm a visual person. If we're singing a new hymn in church, I don't want just the words in a bulletin insert -- I need to SEE the music to follow the melody. If someone is giving me driving directions, it's completely pointless to verbally explain them -- they have to be written down. If someone asks me to do something and I don't write it down, it is NOT going to get done.

The moments in life that I seem to remember the most clearly are the ones in my scrapbooks. Do I remember those moments because they're in my scrapbooks, or are they in my scrapbooks because they were so important to me that I wanted to make a page about them?

So many people talk about our scrapbooks being for future generations. Sometimes I think that's kind of presumptuous on our part -- we're assuming that someone is going to WANT to store and keep all the albums we make. (Jake's not even 5 yet, and he has 8 full albums!) And a lot of us WILL have people lining up, hoping to be the recipent of the albums. But I only have one child -- what if he doesn't have children? Where are all of the scrapbooks going to end up? No, for me that's not at all what this is about.

My scrapbook pages are how I mark the passing of time. My mom always talks about how time goes faster and faster the older you get. I'm actually already starting to experience this, which is scary -- if time is already speeding up quite noticably and I JUST turned 28, what are my days and months going to feel like when I'm 50? More and more, I'm seeing that my scrapbooks are the only way for me to have a touch point to my life as it passes by.

In January 2022 I will turn 43. If all goes as planned, my baby will be in his first year of college. I will open my birthday journal to reflect on the previous year -- and probably at that point, the previous 20 years, since it was a few days after my 23rd birthday that I discovered I was pregnant. I'll wonder where the time went, and I know that most of it will be a blur. What a comfort it will be to be able to pull out my scrapbooks and page through them, letting the memories come flooding in.

About the author ...
Jen Strange is mama to Jake, a full-time secretary, part-time piano teacher, and obsessive scrapbooker (since her son's birth in 2002.) An avid blogger since 2004, her DigiScrappin' with Jen blog serves as an introduction to digital scrapbooking, while her Stop Piracy blog is a centralized spot for learning about and fighting the piracy of digital scrapbook kits and designs. Jen has been digitally scrapbooking since April 2005; find Jen at www.jenstrange.com and Layouts by the Numbers

Submitted by strangejen