Baby pictures

We were in Bar Harbor, Maine last week with Ned’s extended family. It was our first summer vacation with our son. We hiked (which he loved), tried swimming in the pool (which he hated), and gave him French Fries for the first time (neutral). I have such good associations with East Coast summers from my own childhood, and Maine got me excited to spend more of them with Rowan.

When I was little, our family lived in British Columbia, and we would go to Massachusetts and Long Island most summers to visit extended family. The days were hot and sticky and not at all like dry BC in July and August. My sister and I would swim in our aunts’ and uncles’ pools and get launched into the air by our older cousins. My grandma would make a sheet cake just because her grandchildren were coming over. She would also take us to get sugar-coated cake donuts and generally spoil us rotten. 

There’s a mysticism to these memories because many of them have no physical evidence. I think my parents have a couple pictures of me, my sister, and cousins in the pool, but I don’t think there are any pictures of us eating our grandma’s sheet cakes or going to Mrs. Murphy’s Donuts. I can easily bring up one of those memories with my family, and they’ll know what feeling I’m trying to evoke. But explaining those memories and conveying those feelings to someone outside of our family takes time and effort.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a writing professor in college was that you should never try to describe a character completely. You should always leave gaps for the reader to fill in with their own imagination. That’s what makes reading a novel or any other text so engaging. It’s the fact that you get to co-create a world with the author.

It’s like how I hear stories about Ned’s grandparents and the vacations they would organize with their kids and grandkids to New Hampshire every summer. I don’t think I’ve seen any pictures of those vacations, and so I’ve gotten to paint a picture in my own mind. I get to imagine what the lodge looked like, what Ned’s glamorous grandma would wear to dinner, and how big the pool was where Ned would play with his own cousins. If Ned were able to show me endless photos or videos from those vacations, I imagine it would feel less personal and much less creative to picture those scenes in my own mind. 

At the same time, the relatively few photos I have from my own childhood feel precious. They’re often what rekindle my sense of connection to grandparents who have since passed, or to younger versions of myself or my family members. When we were in Maine last week, I kept remembering the photos I had seen of my parents on the beach with their babies and felt a deep connection to them. During a few of the summers when I was a baby and then toddler, my parents took us to the beach in Rhode Island or Connecticut with my dad’s side of the family. There are pictures from those vacations in my baby photo albums. A few of them are burned into my brain: the picture of my dad holding me on a beach, him in a red shirt and me in my swim trunks. A picture of me standing behind my grandpa as he sat in his beach chair, my hands on his shoulders. 

My son will have thousands of baby photos and videos to look through when he’s older. I imagine this will be a burden for him. It’s like leaving all your possessions behind for a loved one with no directions on how you want your estate to be split up. You make other people sift through everything and decide for themselves which items hold meaning. Whereas, when I look through photos from my childhood, the albums have already been doubly curated. There was first the curating my parents did when they decided to use up film to capture a specific moment. Then, there was the curation of putting their favorite photos into an album with limited space.

I think about those photo albums my parents created as a text. You can read them through different lenses, one of them being the authors’ intent. What did my parents intend when they took a particular photo or when they chose it for the album? What did they feel when they looked at that picture that made them want to put it in the album? I learn not just something about myself as a kid when I look at those albums, but also something about my parents and what kinds of memories they wanted to pass on to us. 

Ned and I, for better or worse, have some amount of influence over how Rowan will remember his childhood and his relatives. It’s a big responsibility. I know we can’t control it, but I do hope we can share stories with Rowan that he feels proud to tell to future friends and chosen family. I hope we share just enough photos to fuel his imagination, not to overwhelm him. I hope to clean up my iCloud storage at some point. Most importantly, I hope he gets to experience the heartbreaking joy of being a kid at the beach in the summer, without worrying about any of this at all.