Dec 1, 2016 3 min read

While in the basement pulling out the Christmas decorations, I looked around and saw it: my life as a young mother. There were boxes everywhere – lidded, heavy plastic bins in sizes measured by the gallon. Most were 20-gallon boxes, but there were smaller ones, too. All had been labeled in black Sharpie pen with the word PHOTOS.

Dropping the bag of Christmas stockings, I pulled up a box and sat down to have a look. As I peeled back the lids of box after box, I was struck by some essential truths.

I took a lot of photos when the kids were little. By a lot, I mean hundreds every year. This was before digital cameras allowed us to delete any imperfect snapshot, and to store the good ones in a much more tidy way than in jumbled boxes. Judging from the contents of my cellar, I spent most of my waking hours squinting into a camera while asking my kids to hold still. I take it that Cheese was not mainly something to eat around here.

The photos were stuffed into envelopes from those mailers that came in the Sunday paper. Each week I would send in a roll to be developed; a week later the snapshots would arrive, along with three rolls of fresh film.

Most of the photos were bad. Ninety percent showed one of the following: out-of-focus image, kid making a face, kid with eyes closed, kid I don’t recognize, or my thumb.

Sometimes the few decent ones in each batch made it into an album. The very best were in frames. But that was rare for me back then. I took the photos, waited for them to arrive back in the mailbox, and then stashed them in boxes.

What does this say about me as a young mother? I have memories of those years, mental images more vibrant and permanent than any snapshot. Sitting there for those hours, poking through my kids’ earliest years, I couldn’t find many photos that recorded those best memories. Maybe things were different in the pre-digital years: when really experiencing a moment, you didn’t think to stop and take a photo of it.

For a long time, I had a superstition about throwing away photographs. Even the worst images of my children somehow held a bit of them and who they were, and to toss them would be destructive. That’s how I ended up with hundreds of bad photos. Over the years, I would find them stashed in junk drawers, or between books on the shelves.

But that basement will soon have to be cleared out for the next family who lives here. I can’t see taking 50 gallons of bad photos with me to my next, smaller home.

One of these days, I’ll head downstairs to edit my collection. Organizing expert Marie Kondo says that we should clear out the clutter, holding each item and asking if it brings us joy. If yes, you keep it. If no, you toss.

I’ll pull out the best 20 photos each for my son and my daughters and put them into albums. But after spending some time with all those photos, I realize that all the joy of those years lives not in those boxes, but in my head.