Love the life you're living

Declan is my youngest of seven children. The night before he started kindergarten I was downstairs cleaning up after dinner when I heard him wailing from his bedroom.

Declan was not a wailer. He was a very cheerful, jolly kid with a lot of energy who just didn’t cry much, which is exactly why I dropped what I was doing and ran upstairs as fast as I could. I was fully expecting to find blood, but instead found a five-year-old in his bed, sobbing his eyes out while clutching a photo book to his chest like his life depended on it.

It was a little book his preschool teacher had made for him for graduation. She had printed photos from that year of school and dropped them in a dollar store album, one for every kid in the class, and that night he’d been flipping through it and become overwhelmed with emotion. By the time I got there, he could barely get the words out. “I never wanna grow up,” he said. Instead of blood, I got a small boy mourning something that hadn’t even happened yet.

In the moment, I remember thinking it was almost adorable—a soon-to-be kindergartener getting sentimental over a photo album. But it wasn’t really about the pictures. Declan had a good life and he loved it just as it was. Going off to “big boy school” the next morning felt big and scary in a way that I don’t think he really had words for. He wanted to stay little a while longer. I thought it was cute how he wanted to freeze time.

But the next thing I thought that night was, “I’m a failure.” It was sad that those few photos were all he had to show for his first 5 years of life. As a younger mom, I was a die-hard scrapbooker and his siblings had beautiful, thick scrapbooks of their young lives. But as time went on and I got busy and then burned out, I quit scrapbooking. Now his whole life was trapped on my phone—tens of thousands of photos that neither he nor anyone in my family was seeing. I started Chatbooks to solve that real problem.

That was 13 years ago. I’ve shared that story over the years as the founding a-ha moment of Chatbooks. And since that night I have made up for things. Now Declan has dozens of Chatbooks full of photos of his life. It’s still a little sad he doesn’t have one of my OG scrapbooks—they are very cool. But looking back I’ve decided that it doesn’t actually matter if you have a scrapbook, a Chatbook, a dollar store album filled with snapshots, or all three. Life goes by too fast and what actually matters is finding a way to love the life you’re living.

For me, printing photos to document our family’s story has helped me do that. Like Declan, I wanted to freeze time too. I knew the dreaded day would come that my babies would be all grown and leave me with an empty nest. But guess what…that day is finally here. They’re all adults now and Declan will be moving out before long. And I’m really okay with it!

I’ve thought a lot about why that is, and I think it connects to a research study we did last year. I wasn’t asking this exact question back then, but reading through what we learned now, it explains a lot about why I feel this way.

We surveyed over 15,000 families about the who, what, and why of their photo habits and one of the things we heard over and over is how anxious people feel about losing their photos. Nearly 80% worry their digital photos will literally disappear and be lost to future generations. That is a legitimate fear and why I’m a huge advocate of printing your photos as a “bookshelf backup”. But there was a different kind of loss that was mentioned just as often.

When asked to describe in their own words what photos and memories actually mean to them, over 70% of people’s answers came back to grief. That stat surprised me at first, but then it made sense, because grief and loss are just a part of life. We all lose people, watch our kids grow up, and watch versions of ourselves disappear as new ones show up. There’s no escaping it. And 73% of the families surveyed shared that they found comfort in photos after losing someone they love.

One woman wrote, “We’ve learned that we can survive something unimaginable, and that knowledge quietly shapes how we move through everything else. Grief has taught us patience, empathy, and the importance of holding on to hope even in darkness.” Another wrote about looking at photos of her husband before and after cancer and surgery: “We feel more grateful and strong—strong enough to tackle anything that comes our way.” Someone else wrote about the quieter kind of loss, just time passing: “Photos remind me that even on the hard days, this version of life is something I’ll miss one day.”

As I read through the many responses, I was reminded of research done by Dr. Marshall Duke and Dr. Robyn Fivush at Emory University. They developed something called the “Do You Know?” scale, a set of questions about family history, and found that kids who know their family’s stories, the hard parts included and not just the highlight reel, are more resilient. In fact, these kids even coped better after 9/11. Knowing their family story didn’t protect them from hard things happening, but they had proof that their family had already survived hard things and made it through. Not only does this track with the data in our research, but I was thrilled to learn that 97% of parents reported that printed photos helped them tell their family’s story to their kids.

I’ve been through hard things in my life and in my 30+ years of mothering, and I’ve felt this same resilience. It’s partly why I’m not the blubbering mess I expected to be at this point. Instead of dreading the ache of an empty nest, I’m full of gratitude for the beautiful life we’ve lived, the hard chapters included. Printing the photo is the first step, but talking about it is where the important work happens.

I don’t know if Declan remembers that night on the eve of kindergarten. He’s 18 now and still figuring out what’s next. But whenever he does move out, I’m positive every Chatbook we’ve made for him will go with him. But honestly, making those books was never really for him. It was for me. I needed proof that the life we built mattered, and not just the highlight reel. And I don’t need any of my kids to stay small to remember that I truly do love my life.