Everyone has a Story

I scrapbook. I am pretty sure it started when I was in junior high. My friends and I took pictures wherever we went and posted them in photo albums with silly captions, cutting out the silhouettes of each other. With "Throwback Thursday" I'm sure you've seen my hair in a cheer picture or me in a  silly prom dress on Facebook. If you haven't seen them, I haven't changed a bit, except for maybe the hair. The invention of the straightener saved me from being stuck in the 80's forever.

As I got older, I still cut out pictures, but now I have a fancy term for it, "crop." I still write captions but now call it, "journaling." My scrapbooks no longer contain the dead flowers from prom night or the ticket stubs from a concert, but pictures of people and places I have been with stories I don't want to forget. Stories are told through each photo and each journal entry reminding me I was a free-spirited teen who loved to dress up for spirit days or shove myself in a shopping cart with five of my closest friends and push it through the neighborhood. When I look back it reminds me of best friends, backpacking for the first time...for a week, road trips to Arizona to see a band, and families I shared dinners with more times than I can count. It is nostalgic and I am reminded how many people have influenced my life throughout the years. Some of those memories fade away as we live our lives and make new friends, losing contact with those who seemed they would always be there, but the pictures and stories remind us that we mattered and had a place in this world.

I started scrapbooking as a child because I wanted to keep those memories alive forever, thinking they were the most important of days. I didn't learn it anywhere, I just did it. Maybe we all did it. I still have albums that won't close because they are stuffed with notes from friends, corsages, certificates, ribbons, and other random stuff I just couldn't throw away at the time.

As an adult, I scrapbooked for similar reasons but my stories were intended to be passed down to my son, Jacob; never did I think there would be a far more important reason. After the books started piling up, I realized no wife of his is going to want to take on all of these. What will ever happen to them? I enjoyed the creativity and the good times with friends, so I let it go and kept creating. It was in 2008, I think, I came to realize my scrapbooking hobby was for us, for our family, and had been since 1995.

Stay with me, I am going somewhere with this...

Through the years, we often have looked through the books and remembered the annual trips to the water park, the fair, Disneyland and the park. Every summer looked the same, but physically we were changing. Camping trips with friends, vacations together and holidays with family filled my books, along with stories of who brought the homemade pie, who won the watermelon eating contest AGAIN, and who visited that summer. Jacob laughs at his dad in a cowboy hat with hair on our wedding day, requests I take out some pictures of him and wonders why mom is wearing that. Rob looked at them, too. Unlike a lot of my friends albums, mine are tattered and torn in places.

It was 2008, I learned something that changed my life forever and made every page in my album more important than it ever was before. When Rob told me he had lost his memory, I was in shock. I had no idea how to respond. Ironically, I don't remember what I said but I know a lot of ideas went spiraling through my mind. The car accident was in 1995! He didn't have amnesia or some disease, but a complete memory loss. Weird, huh? Of course, there is much more to that story, but that's his story  My story is how important those photo albums became once I realized he used them to live day to day. The stories told him who people were, what we had done, where we had been, and most importantly, that I was his wife. The pictures of the same faces showed him who mattered in our lives and why. The memories didn't come back, but as time went on and he recognized the faces on a camping trip or when he was approached in the local grocery store, it was a little easier. And since he was still living with me, he was building new memories.

We, or should I say, I, have somewhat learned how to live with this loss and our lives are different because of it. A few days ago, Rob said to me, "we are not conventional, but we have it pretty good." Our lives have been re-formed in a way others don't understand and quite frankly, they may think we are weird at times, but through this experience

Rob has taught me

to live freely,

to respond immediately to a call,

to make decisions and don't look back,

to treat others selflessly,

to take risks, 

to continue writing our story

and

to wake up every day and decide to be my best.

Believe me, there is much more, but nonetheless, I have learned to "dance in the rain." I may not always be good at it, but I know there is a story that I didn't write and we are part of it.

God had a plan for us from the beginning and our story now continues.