Hello! I’m Janet! I’m a wife, a mom of 2 girls, and my favorite place to be is home hanging with my family.

Recently, life gave me a pretty big perspective shift. I was diagnosed with BRCA which brought my risk of breast cancer to more than 80%, and it made me think a lot about what would happen if I weren’t here. I lost my dad to cancer when I was just 6 years old, so that kind of thought doesn’t feel abstract to me. It really stripped everything down to what actually matters. At the end of the day, it’s the people we love and the things that fill our lives with joy.

Leading up to my mastectomy, I found myself doing something that had been sitting on my to-do list forever. I went through all of our photos. For years they had been living in a trunk, scattered, decades mixed together. And I just started organizing.

It was emotional, overwhelming, and honestly really satisfying all at the same time.

And the girls were right there with me for so much of it. They loved looking through everything, asking questions, wanting to know who everyone was and what the stories were behind each photo. It turned into something I didn’t even realize we were missing.

There was one moment that really stuck with me. There’s a photo of my dad and my brother sitting in the living room of a house they didn’t recognize. My mom had told my girls stories about that house before, just little pieces here and there. And suddenly McKinley looked at the photo and it clicked for her. She realized this was that same living room from the stories she had heard. Now she had a visual to go with it. It wasn’t just a story anymore, it was real to her.

Since I lost my dad when I was young I never got to hear so many of his stories. I don’t know the little details that made him who he was. There’s one photo of me sitting on his lap on a tractor. I don’t remember that moment, I honestly don’t remember much of my dad, but that photo is proof. Proof that he was here, and that life happened.

And as I was going through everything, seeing photos of my dad, my aunts, my uncles, so many people who are no longer here, it hit me how much pictures really do hold onto what our memories can’t. Memories fade, but photos keep them in focus.

I wanted my girls to have that. I wanted them to be able to look at these photos and know who is in them. To hear the stories now, while I can still tell them. Because the people who came before us are part of who we are.

These photos will someday be the story of who they are. They’ll remind them where they came from, the things we did, the life we lived together. And more than anything, I want them to remember that I loved them fiercely.

As moms, there are so many different opinions on how we should be doing things, but the one thing that always comes up is how badly we all want a photo of our whole family. We try so hard to make it happen for each other with our phones, chasing that “unicorn” shot, but it never quite works the same way. Having professional photos of our girls from newborn to now is something I will never take for granted. Because someone else was behind the camera, I got to be fully present in those moments, like Madison’s first birthday when I was saying “so big” to get her little arms up. And now, almost 12 years later, I don’t just see that photo, I remember exactly how it felt.

What I’ve learned is that the photos only get better with time. The ones you didn’t think twice about become the ones you treasure most as your kids grow and change in ways you don’t even notice day to day. And while it can feel like family photos are something we’re doing for ourselves, they’re really not. They are for our kids, for their story, for our family legacy. I’ve seen firsthand what it feels like to not have those photos from earlier on, and how much they matter later. The only family photo we have with my dad was taken after his terminal diagnosis, when he was already so sick. There are no lighthearted memories tied to it, just the weight of knowing we almost didn’t get it in time.

Which is why I believe this so deeply now, make the time, be in the photos, and don’t wait.

There is something after a deep loss that shifts something in us. And now, even more so after everything I’ve been through, I feel it in a completely different way. Photos are proof that we were here. That we loved. That we lived.

I share photos constantly now. Birthday parties, softball games, school plays, if I take a photo I send it. I don’t let it just sit on my phone anymore. Because you never know what photo is going to mean everything to someone someday.

If there is one thing I wish others would learn from this, it’s this. Take the photos. Make the time. Make it a tradition.

Trust me, your kids will feel the importance and remember it fondly. My kids light up when we look through our old family photos. I hope that when my kids are grown and they look back on these family photos they know how much we enjoyed them at every stage and that they are so loved.

But then again, I already know they will…because it’s all right there in the photos.

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