The other night my father-in-law walked into our house laden down with huge, dusty pages loosely tethered together in the form of an old-school scrapbook. As he carried it in, gold photo corners and tiny telegram messages fell from the pages. Without inferring any lack of sentiment it appeared he was keen to get rid of these pages and the trail it was leaving in its wake.
This mound of pages, which he now insisted take up residence at our house, turned out to be a veritable trove of memories of my husband's baby years stuck to the faded, blue pages with stick glue that had long lost its stickiness.
The book was 49 years old, the same age as my husband, and let's just say my husband has fared better. Then again, he hasn't been stuffed into a cupboard for the last 47 years and left to rot.
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(It will be no surprise to any parent that the process of documenting his childhood kind of dwindled when his brother was born. I have since seen his brother's book; it tapers off when his sister was born.)
I begged him to gush at the book and show his father how much he loved taking a walk through the first two years of his life. But I could see in the way he turned the pages without looking at what was on them that he didn't give a jot about his one-year-old self.
The fact that his father was now passing the book on to him made it clear, too, that he'd been there and done that and he also didn't need to be reminded of the years 1968 and 1969 through greeting cards and letters from his aunt.
It made me think about all the things I have been collecting since my son's birth – before it even. The positive pregnancy test, the ultrasounds, the jaundice glasses he wore in the hospital, his discharge notice after two long months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. There was the outfit he came home in, the millions of photos and birthday cards.
The collection grew as he started school and works of "art" came home to be placed in, what I thought at the time, was the all-important art folder. There were teeth (yes I am that person who collected her child's teeth when they fell out) and more and more photos.
Most of it is in a box somewhere in the garage. I have been sure to keep all the photos safe(ish) but some nights I drive myself mad thinking I need to put everything on one hard drive so that I have it in the future. And then I think about all the videos we made of him when he was a baby, that I diligently converted from VHS to CD, and I start to feel the weight of now having to convert those to a digital format and I don't even know what box they are in, let alone where I would store the hours of him blowing bubbles at a camera.
It got me thinking about all this paraphernalia we collect representing important moments in our lives. Do all those trinkets and memorabilia mean anything? Did documenting his life changes somehow make it more precious? I don't think so.
I think back to those days of babyhood where I'm sure my son thought my camera was attached to my head as I took photographs of every move he made. And I know it's a lot more intense now with Facebook and Instagram and people looking for any way to document their lives. Yesterday I read about a technology that enables you to tattoo the sound waves of your baby's first cry so that you have it forever recorded.
I'm glad I don't have the tattoo of his first cry or even his first word. Because where do you stop? I already feel like I may have wasted my time adding to garage storage instead of living in the moment.
Did I spend all that time documenting his life and collecting keepsakes so I could enjoy it later instead of enjoying it then with him at the time? The truth is I'm not even enjoying it now – it's just collecting dust because I don't have the time to watch his entire life play out again day-by-day via teeth, report cards, art works and school merit certificates.
I like to think that one day my son will be interested in seeing his Year K report card and the bunny suit he came home from the hospital in, but deep in my heart I know it will languish in the garage, and when I try to make him take it on when he is an adult he will look at it simply as more stuff, and his partner will look at us and think "I cannot believe they want me to store this old junk".
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