Friday, October 11, 2002

Scrapping with Scrapbooks

Perhaps you, like me, have just gotten into the groove of Autumn. The kids are back in school, it feels both novel and wonderfully familiar to coze back into sweaters again, and the turning of the seasons is trippingly on track. These days, I’m all but hooking my thumbs in my vest and strumming my tummy in self-satisfaction. But then, from some dark corner of my psyche, culture lobs a great fat water-balloon of guilt: “So . . . how are those photo albums coming along? What about your children’s baby books? Hmm?”

As if keeping up with the triage of daily life isn’t enough, there is – for women in particular – the eternal anxiety of how well, and whether, we’re recording our own family’s histories. While the taking of photographs may be a gender-neutral activity in many families, the far weightier task of sorting those photos into albums has usually fallen into the laps of women, as any visitor to the new store on Grape Road, Pages in Time, can tell in a snap. The name Pages in Time may simply describe photo album leaves, but the lingering phrase “in time” drums its fingers on my every anxiety: in time for what? Must the baby’s book be finished “in time” for her to . . . head off to college? “In time” for her to . . . have a baby of her own?

As someone who, with high hopes, has begun a baby book for each daughter that now spans all the way from infancy to . . . truthfully? Well, just infancy . . . I find myself alternately inspired and hounded by the new phenomenon of scrapbooking “croppers” who wield “punchers” and “templates” and work efficiently with “laserette die-cuts” to create artsy pages for baby and family albums. I smolder when I think of how many women I know who have guiltily tended untidy boxes of family snapshots, dutifully layering baby photos and school pictures and third-grade book reports in a compost of good intentions that never quite bloom into an album. An accomplished professional woman I know once lamented that she couldn’t show me a favorite old photo of her daughter in a Bostonian Make Way for Ducklings swan boat. “It’s in a stack somewhere,” she sighed. “I’m a bad, bad mommy for not having filed it in a baby book, aren’t I?”

Why is it that the best of fathers do not berate themselves for failing to keep up their family’s baby books and albums? Why is it that, according to the good women at the counter of the Pages in Time store, the number of scrapbooking men they know can be counted on your thumbs? I suspect it’s another outgrowth of early industrialism’s split between the private and the public, with women relegated to keeping family records while men kept the business ledgers.

But when I’m feeling particularly defensive about my inadequate albums, I chant Susan Sontag’s ominous line that “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” Why obsess over recording our lives when it’s the living, now, that matters?

The genre of the baby book, in particular, tends to etch an identical story over every child’s life, giving proof to another Sontag insight that “instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality.” As an illustration, think of that mandatory “Waving at the Door” photo marking the first day of Kindergarten, with the child poised between bravery and tears in stiff shoes and a new hair bow or bow tie. The baby book genre calls for a narrative of progress, but it’s the weighty task of the album-maker to craft the particular story that accompanies the photo. Should I label that photo “Off to School!” or “The End of Innocence”? Who am I to say? I think of the movie “Memento,” in which the uneasy power relation between a photograph and its scrawled caption results in murder (at least, I think so). Who are we to shape the story of our children’s experiences, like unauthorized biographers bulldozing their right to compose their own autobiographies?

Yes, these may be just excuses. I’d love to sell my children on the idea that I’m the ultimate post-modern mama, handing them scissors, glue and crayons, and letting them impose their own order on the images and scraps of their lives. But then I remember how much I cherish my own mother’s touch in my own quirky but lovingly fashioned pink 1960s baby book, embossed in silver with “I’m a Girl!” Two of my college-era pals have this exact same baby book, but we each return to these volumes for the distinct truths that hover somewhere between the images and the handwritten words.

So - I’m hip-deep in ambivalence. I can’t even decide what tune to leave you humming. Here’s the flippant take on it: “Hey, scrapbooking is just another wacky cultural phenomenon!” [play “Kodachrome"] . But what is underneath, what has spurred me to write, really, is the deep urge – a parental urge, not a maternal one – to give my daughters, in yet another form that bears my loving mark, too, the gift of their own lives. [play “Bookends"]

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on October 11, 2002
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