I haven’t put a photo in an album since 2007. Let that sink in.

Springtime gatherings always remind me how I totally blew it as my family’s photo archivist. With graduation parties and other milestone celebrations popping up like dandelions, I’m facing the beast almost daily. My eyes fall upon impeccable, thorough, chronological picture displays. They’re theme-infused art installations, always monstrously lovely. The orderly shots of others’ lives tell such sweet stories, yet leave me in a dark room of guilt.

Maybe it’s because the last photo album I slapped together was in 2007. That’s not a typo. Nope. 2007. The one before that materialized in a little squeak of time between maternity ward visits, back in the mid-’90s. There have been a few false starts — some half-filled albums — but I can only claim two complete books since parenthood. Two.

Almost 23 years of marriage, sons now in college, and that’s it. The shame. Put a giant “A” on my shirt for Album-less; I’m the Hester Prynne of Kodak.

I still wonder how I survived the scrapbooking party craze. Because, really, inviting someone like me to a scrapbooking event is like sending a preschooler directly to MIT. These things are doctoral-level documentation. Did I fake it at these events? Did others know my little secret about the blank acid-free pages of my life, the Jenga stacks of Costco photo department envelopes teetering in my closets?

I remember thinking, pictures and memorabilia? Whoa. Glue dots, embellishments, ticket stubs, snapshots, participation ribbons, all together and prettified? I felt like a green-tinted daguerreotype alien lurking on a hostile planet. I remember purchasing a photo cropper, knowing I’d more likely use it as a cheese slicer. One must be practical.

I can hear the pixel-perfect parents gasping and wondering: Why? How? What’s wrong with her?

Nothing. I’m ready to own this. I am on the verge of setting myself lignin-free-free.

Indeed, my family pictorial history is mostly tucked in shoeboxes and stuffed in drawers. But there’s at least one mildly organized decade in some waterproof rubbermaids, containers that might or might not be kryptonite to photo paper. I don’t want to know if these “temporary” boxes are wrong, because I have a good 10 years labeled and stashed in that particular stackable tower. Then I dare consider my cellphone collection, precariously tethered to a scary cloud thing. It, too, grows and lurks in this free-range photo lifestyle.

In all, my picture “library” is a research center for chaos theorists. And I’m trying to be fine with it.

I’m not alone in the album-less spiral. Other kindred spirits have whispered to me. You miss a year. Then you miss two. Babies come along and all you can manage is to take the actual photos. Click, click, click. You’ll get to the albums once the youngest one sleeps through the night. No wait, when they’re both in school. That’ll be better. One day you try, and you fall apart because you realize the baby teeth from a mere handful of years ago are gone. You’ll get to it again later but you’ll glimpse the robot pajamas they outgrew and the Pinewood Derby cars that no longer leave a trail of dust but gather it instead. Overwhelming. Then, boom, they’re in middle school and high school and you almost weep from looking at the previous orthodontic years and you give up. It’s as if the rubber bands on their teeth actually shoot out from the pictures and hit you in the eye. It’s too much, for now.

Advice to new and future parents: If you don’t stuff the albums in real time, when everybody looks, on paper, as they do today sitting at your kitchen table, you will be repurposing shoe boxes for an eternity.

Words to photo-sensitive people like me: Random picture diving is in your future. I adore you. And, in my opinion, orderliness is overrated. Just keep snapping away. That’s one thing you’ll never regret.

This story was originally published May 24, 2016 at 6:31 PM with the headline "I haven’t put a photo in an album since 2007. Let that sink in.."