Last week, I talked about scrapbooking first years. First years are intriguing because the moment when a first year begins varies. For example, albums about a child’s first year typically begin either with a sonogram photograph or photographs when the child is born. If the album begins with a sonograph photo (or a positive pregnency test) and then continues until the child’s first birthday, is it still a first year album?
Some scrapbookers create separate albums chronicling the pregnancy separate from the child’s first year suggesting that the pregnancy is not about the child as much as it is about the mother.
For other scrapbookers, the birth of a child is what prompts them to take up scrapbooking. The child comes to symbolize the beginning of the family even though the scrapbooker was more than likely part of a family before the child came into existence. It is as if the family did not exist before the scrapbook put the family into existence.
Other scrapbookers made the decision to scrapbook before having children because of their own lack of knowledge about their own parent’s lives before children. Children sometimes wonder what their parents were like before they had children. Because few people document their lives prior to having children, it is difficult for children to understand what their parents were like before they were parents. Parents have always been parents without any evidence to the contrary. Without a scrapbook documenting life before children, it is as if a person had no life before their children were born.
If you have children, did you begin scrapbooking before or after you had children? Why? Did you scrapbook a pregnancy separate from the child? When do first years begin and end?
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Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
