I’ve been meaning to organize our family photos for about fifteen years. Four shoeboxes, two albums nobody ever finished, three drawers, and about nine thousand pictures on my phone, going back to whenever I got my first one that took decent pictures.
I finally started on it this spring.
And there was so much in there. We were lucky, and I don’t say that lightly.
My son graduating from medical school, grinning under that ridiculous hood. My daughter’s wedding, the whole tent of it. Our twenty-fifth anniversary, on the coast, both of us pink from the sun.
Then, further back, the small stuff, which turned out to be the stuff I sat with longest.
Birthdays in the old kitchen with the yellow counters. Both of the kids on the driveway on the first day of school, backpacks nearly as big as they were. My son in a phase where he refused to be photographed without his goggles on.
I went through box after box, year after year. And somewhere around the third one, I noticed something I couldn’t stop noticing.
I’m barely in any of it.
Not gone from life. I was there for every bit of it. Gone from the record of it.
I was the one holding the camera
It didn’t take me long to work out how it happened, and there’s nobody to blame in the story.
I was the one who said it. Everyone, get in, come on, two minutes.
You know how that goes. The groaning. My son at fifteen refusing to stand next to his sister.
My husband checking his watch, not unkindly, just already halfway to the car. Somebody’s eyes closed, and we do it again.
I’d line them up on the steps, back up a few feet, count them down, and take the picture. Then we’d all go do whatever we were going to do.
And the thing is, if I didn’t do that, it didn’t happen. Nobody else was going to think of it. Not because they didn’t love each other. It simply never crossed anyone’s mind that a moment was passing and somebody ought to keep it.
So for thirty years, I was in the room for every single photograph and standing four feet outside every single one.
Occasionally, somebody would say, “Want me to take one with you in it?” and I’d wave it off.
We were already late. I hadn’t done my hair. It was easier to keep going than to hand over the phone and explain which button.
There are exceptions, though. I am in the wedding pictures. I’m in the graduation ones, and the portraits we did at a studio in 1998 with everyone in matching blue.
All of those have one thing in common: Somebody else was doing the photographing, usually somebody paid to. The only reliable way I got into my own family’s pictures was to hire a stranger to think of it.
What else did I archive myself out of?
That’s the question that got hold of me, sitting on the guest bed with the boxes.
Because once I saw the shape of it, I couldn’t stop finding it.
Every holiday for three decades, I planned. The lists, the timing, the who-can’t-eat-what. And in the pictures from those days, there’s a table full of people eating, and I’m not at it, because I was in the kitchen getting the next thing out.
The trips. I booked them, I packed for four people, and I knew where the passports were. I have almost no pictures of myself on any of them.
The birthdays. I made the cakes. Which means that in thirty years of birthday photos, I am never once in a picture with a cake I made. I’m the arm at the edge of the frame, setting it down.
And it went past what a camera could have caught anyway. I was the one who knew my kids’ friends’ names, and which friends had stopped being friends.
Shoe sizes. Which one couldn’t have peanuts and which one just didn’t like them. Dentist in the fall, physicals in August.
When their grandmother’s birthday was, and the card in the mail a week early with my handwriting in it and both kids’ names signed by me.
There’s no photograph of any of that either, and that’s what stayed with me. All of it existed because I was doing it, and none of it left a mark that says I was there.
More Bolde Stories
It wasn’t only me
For a while, I thought this was a private failing. Some shyness in me, or some habit I’d let run too long without checking it.
It isn’t only me, and it isn’t only my generation.
Years ago, a woman wrote about missing from her own family’s pictures, and it went everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of women read it and went and looked at their own albums and found the same hole.
Hundreds of thousands of women don’t find the same hole in their albums by coincidence. That’s not a quirk. That’s how the job is built.
Whoever does the arranging is almost never in the arrangement. And in most houses of my era, and plenty of houses now, the person doing the arranging is the wife.
Mine was a little different, though, and I think the difference matters. A lot of the women in that wave were staying out of photos because of how they looked. Postpartum, tired, not wanting the evidence.
That wasn’t me. I wasn’t hiding from the camera. I was operating it. Which is plainer, and somehow sits worse.
But before I let myself off entirely, nobody banned me from those pictures. My husband would have taken one any time I asked, and would have been glad to, and would be baffled to learn I’d counted them up.
I didn’t ask. Asking felt like making a fuss over myself, and there was always something else to do.
And I’ll admit the other half of it. Being the one who handled everything was a role I was good at. I liked being the one who remembered. There was a small pride in it that I’m only now seeing the price of.
Some of this was done to me. Some of it I did.
What I do now
I can’t be put back into thirty years of photographs. There’s no fixing it, and I’ve stopped picturing a version where it went differently.
What I can do is stop repeating it, which turns out to be an ordinary and slightly awkward practice rather than a grand change.
When my son comes over with the kids, I hand him my phone. Take one of me and them on the rug. He always says sure, like it’s nothing, because to him it is nothing.
At dinners, I get in. I don’t hang back near the doorway to be the one who takes it. I sit down and let somebody else figure it out.
I asked for one at Easter, standing with my daughter by the car, and she looked pleased in a way that stayed with me for a week.
It isn’t the same as having the old ones. But I keep doing it.
I’ll say one more thing about the boxes. My own mother is hardly in them either. A handful from her wedding, a few from when she was a girl, and then almost nothing for forty years of being somebody’s mother.
I never once wondered about that until this spring. It looked normal to me, the way a thing looks normal when you’ve never seen it any other way.
And it isn’t for me, in the end. I’m not going to be sitting on a bed one day, going through boxes looking for myself. My kids will be.
When they do, I want them to find their mother in there, and not only the evidence of what she organized.
Though there’s one more thing I can’t shake. My daughter is thirty-four now. Two little ones, a phone with thousands of pictures on it.
She’s in almost none of them.
So I’ve started taking them for her. Her on the floor with the baby. Her at the sink with the little one on her hip. She hasn’t asked me why. One day, she’ll understand.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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