I’m too embarrassed to calculate how many. Grace, the eldest, graduated three years ago.
Some of them have made it out of the folders. The cutest ones, the ones with missing teeth or cute fun buns and ribbons. The ones where I wasn’t in a rush for work that morning and actually did their hair.
Some have been stuck on the fridge, slotted into a wallet or passed onto the grandparents, who diligently stick them in an album.
Then there’s the stack of school yearbooks gathering dust on the bookshelf next to some parenting books that have sat there optimistically for years.
The Instagram algorithm must have known that guilt was creeping in.
Because among the targeted pop-up ads for anti-ageing eye creams, car vacuum cleaners, and bras for small-chested women was one entitled My School Days.
It was an album designed specifically to proudly display your child’s progressive decline from adorable to awkward adolescence.
The algorithm had me in its grasp. I clicked the link. It said BACK IN STOCK. A clever marketing tool that promotes an urgency to purchase lest it sell out again because a parent who cares more about their child than you added to cart while you were still weighing up the cost of postage.
Then, when I saw that the method of showcasing the annual photos was to stick them in with those pesky little blue photo dots, I was out. Have you ever tried to work with those bad boys before? They are more likely to stick to your finger than the page.
But the seed had been planted. The time had come for me to find an aesthetically pleasing album that would position me as the organised yet sentimental mother that I had always aspired to be if pursuing a career, fighting the patriarchy etc. had not got in the way.
So down the rabbit hole of online shopping for albums I went.
I settled on one with the old school sticky plastic pages that you peel back. I could work with that. Then I paid extra (what a sucker) to get the girl’s names monogrammed in different colours on the front.
I was late to this party but I was coming in hot with the good champagne.
The albums’ arrival coincided with the girls going away for a few days for school holidays so I busied myself with my special project.
I began by sorting the photos by child, then lined them up on the lounge room floor, year by year, from Kindy onwards.
Then I poured meticulously through each yearbook, scissors poised, to cut out any evidence of my child’s participation in school life. Choir, Book Week, Sports Day, Swimming Carnival, reading a book below their capability on a beanbag in the library, dressed up in a kimono, I snipped them all out like an avid Scrapbooker from way back.
It took me hours and hours. I could have caught up on The Bear.
Until finally the floor played host to a yearly snapshot of the children. How their face shape and hairstyle had changed, the way their smiles went from wide and uninhibited to shy and self-conscious.
I cried for their childhoods.
I waited for the girls to return home so we could stick them in together and reminisce about whether or not they liked their teacher that year.
I was so smug.
A week later Frankie, the youngest, came home from school and said this year’s school photos had just been delivered to the classroom and hers was not among them. FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER WE HAD FORGOTTEN TO ORDER THEM.
Her perfect album would have a gaping hole where Year Seven should have been.
I must chase that up…
Bec
Follow Rebecca at @bec_morse
