Sweet memories are made of these

This writer still prints out her photos to remember her precious moments.

UNTIL recently, I never had to think about what to take with me if I had to evacuate my home in five minutes. A relative and her husband who live in a suburb of Perth, Australia, told me that they have had to leave their place twice because of bush fires nearby.

The first time, they scrambled out of the house in a chaotic flurry, but the second time, they were prepared. They packed their essential items – passports and documents, including the house title deed – as well as a carton of photographs accumulated over the years, and kept them in a room near the front door so they could exit as fast as possible.

If my house caught fire, I’m not sure I would be as ready.

I think of all the photographs scattered all over the place, high up in the cabinets and deep within hard drives in boxes, and I shudder at the thought of losing these precious memories collected over the years.

Between me and my husband, I have always been the sentimental one, so the role of official family photographer has fallen to me.

Some parents pay professional photographers to take styled shots of their two-weekold newborns curled in womb-like poses in baskets or flowerpots. Others go for family shoots in parks and get portraits framed up.

I had hardly the energy (or spare cash) to do any of that, but I convinced my husband and sister to pool together some money to buy a second-hand semi-professional camera.

A friend once told me that her mother made scrapbooks for her and her siblings when they were young. She put in cards and hongbao (lucky red packets) from relatives, newspaper clippings and magazine cutouts from the day and week of their births.

Her projects were a real labour of love. She kept their hair from the first haircuts, tracings of their hands, and their umbilical cords.

Impressed and inspired, I bought five plain books, hoping to follow in her footsteps. Clearly, I was too ambitious.

The exhaustion during the initial months of being a new mother wore my enthusiasm down. Even filling one book was tough.

I managed to furnish a few pages, with events like the night before my son was born (having dinner at a friend’s place), his first bath, his first outing to church. His first pair of shoes, first Christmas (he was born on Dec 17), birth weight and height, and his first visitors are all recorded too.

But three-quarters of the book has since remained bare. It is hidden among photo albums, serving as a reminder of my over-zealousness, just like the many journals I had started and left half-filled.

So I settled on photos. Every few months, I repeat the process of choosing photos of my son and spending hundreds of dollars sending them to a shop for printing, buying old-fashioned 4R albums to sort them into, then labelling them by months.

It gets rather tedious, but I want to keep doing it because my son will not stay this way for long. He is only this small once.

I go to work one day and he has learnt a new word or gesture when I come back. I go abroad for a couple of days and he starts climbing the stairs on his own.

The early parenting years are arduous and tiring when you’re in the thick of it, but you also think – how do children grow up so soon?

The tiny hand that used to clutch your finger as he falls asleep will soon release yours readily to run on his own, go to school and, in time, may hold another’s.

As a parent, time seems to play with my mind – the days and hours crawl by, and on some difficult nights, I dread looking at the clock because each time my son wakes up crying only an hour has passed.

But other times, I blink and wonder how my son is flipping, crawling, taking his first unsteady steps, then walking and running.

I want to remember all this when my memory starts to fail and the mind becomes hazy.

That’s why I prefer pictures in hard copy. So moments become more permanent and I don’t easily forget.

My family’s collection of slip-in photo albums is a treasure trove. There’s something about holding old 4 inch x 6 inch photos and how they take you back to a simpler time.

Places were significant – my parents’ first home where I lived for four years, the house we grew up in, our playroom where we fought and my sister threw a red pen at my face, the bedroom where I tried hard to move a book with my mind and eyes, just like Roald Dahl’s character, Matilda.

There were the birthday parties, camping days in parks, and winter trips to visit our relatives overseas.

I suppose we became more resistant to taking photos as we turned into awkward teenagers, so there are fewer photos from those years.

Today, though, with the advent of smartphones and affordable digital cameras, people are producing so many more photos

Some find their way to social media feeds, but not many make the transition to print.

I have trouble locating my own old photos because they are floating somewhere in the outer space of external hard drives. And who knows, will the advanced computers of tomorrow be able to read our electronic files of today?

So I will keep on printing my son’s pictures – for me to remember and for him to look back at and be thankful for the years of life given.

As I write this, I am on holiday with my son, my husband and both sides of our families. This is the first time all of us are travelling together and our WhatsApp chat group is flooded with photos.

My son is running with reckless abandon against the wind, along a grass patch overlooking pure white sandy beaches and the pristine Indian Ocean.

Our families are watching in amusement, while I take out my camera, kneel and snap as he runs towards me, giggling and smiling with his hair all askew.

These are the moments I don’t take for granted. The world gets quiet and, for a second, time seems to stand still.

I put the camera down just in time for my son to run into my arms, knocking me over, and I hug him tightly.

Later at night, I go through the photos I have taken. I pause at this one, looking at my son’s innocent, gleeful face, and I know this will be a snapshot I will add to the albums. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network

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