Photo Sadness

I'm feeling sad this morning. It's not because of ALS, although it could be a winner for sad-making pretty much every day of the week. No, this mornings sadness has to do with one of the side effects of my divorce. It actually started last night. I had visitors, including three young men, ages 8, 10, and 16. It reminded me of how much I love children, and how much I miss having my own. Those were wonderful years, when my kids were little. Those memories can still bring both a smile and a tear to me.

The sad part, for me, comes in two forms. First, I don't see my grandchildren often enough. That is mostly my fault; I am the one, after all, who moved to Calgary. It's expensive for my children to come here, expensive enough that it rarely happens. Second, other than those which I got from my Dad and a couple which I have digitized, I have no pictures of my children in their younger years. The notable exception is Ricky. Thanks to digital photography, I managed to keep copies of most of our pictures from 2002 onward, a time when Ricky was only 12 years old. So I have his teenage years.

It is my ex-wife's revenge, a spitefulness and cruelty, that she will not share with me any of our family photo albums. Her reasoning, as it has been explained to me, is that she is afraid she will not get those albums back after I die. I see the fear, irrational as it is, but I think it is more than that. My feeling is that she doesn't think I deserve to have these memories, since I "abandoned" her and our children when I left her, notwithstanding that our children were all adults and had pretty much all left home. This is another way for her to punish and control me, albeit a failing one.

This means I have no pictures of our children's early years; no baby photos, no childhood or pre-school photos, nothing from picture day at school, nothing from their graduation, no Christmas pictures with children climbing over mounds of gifts, no days at the beach, no pictures of them fishing at the lake. There are a million memories, but I would like to see a few pictures.

That's what is making me sad, that I should be denied this small pleasure, the gift of pictures from years gone by. I wish there was some court I could go to, some judge or commission I could appeal to. But they are her possessions, kept by her during the divorce. It did not occur to me that she could be so cruel and spiteful. I should have known better. As the saying goes, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

So I remember, then realize how much I cannot remember. And I get sad.