When our oldest finished high school, I created a video montage of “18 years in 18 minutes” for his graduation open house. Then I took the photos from the montage and arranged them into a digitally created photo album. I had two copies printed – one for me and one for him. 

I planned to do the same thing when our twins graduated high school a year and a half ago. I’ve tried to create traditions within our family, especially those that are about preserving memories. Much of the process was carried out then, creating the video montages and organizing the majority of the pictures into photo books online. After their graduation open house, I was waiting to receive the official graduation photos and for their eighteenth birthdays to occur before finalizing the albums. Those things happened, but I didn’t feel like finishing the books. I was at a loss as to how to complete them when I didn’t know which name to use on the book for the twin that had already changed his name. So I put the project to the side and figured I’d get to it down the road.

It has taken 18 months for me to come back to it. Lots has transpired in the meantime, including the transgender identification and name change of the other twin, a fairly intense midlife and faith crisis in my own life, and emergency surgeries and relocation from their home to an assisted living facility for my 80+ year old parents.

The past weekend has been spent on my own, while my husband visited family up north for a milestone birthday celebration for his dad. When his travel plans were made, I decided that this was the weekend to complete the photo albums, closing the book both literally and figuratively on my twins’ first 18 years. 

I had forgotten how much of the books were already complete when I abandoned the project a year and a half ago. It was fun and emotional to look through the numerous pages in each volume: hospital and coming home photos from their birth, every single official annual picture taken at the Sears photo studios, school pictures, sports team photos, and candid shots throughout the years. I swapped out a couple photos I knew the twins would no longer want in their books, ensured that the arrangements looked acceptable, and added the final pages with graduation and 18th birthday photos.

Now the hard part. What name would grace the cover of each collection? Should I use their given names? Should I use their preferred names?

After much reflection, I decided to use their given names using the First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name format on each. These compilations of images document the first 18 years of the lives of my twin daughters, whose names were lovingly selected for them. Throughout each book, those names are visible on the backs of their soccer shirts, on birthday cakes and cookies, and miscellaneous other places. My desire had been to see my kids through their 18th birthdays and then release them to seek their futures, hopefully having prepared them at least a little for life on their own. For me, in regards to my twins, that meant bringing them up to reach age 18 as girls. As part of the releasing, I let go (and am continuing to let go) of what those futures look like. Their futures are theirs to write, but their existing 18 years of history were co-written by us and their family of origin, recorded as the lives of our daughters.

It was interesting to note as I affectionately reviewed each page how one album recorded a gradual change throughout the photos, first from a little girl to a young woman, and then from a feminine visage to an increasingly masculine countenance chronicled over the last five years. The other album only shows the maturing of a daughter, with no hint of the impending transformation from a female to male image that has come since.

I don’t know how my twins will feel about the albums and the names that appear on the bindings. I know that their childhoods and teenage years had challenges, but were also filled with much love and joy. The memories recorded include so many smiles and silly faces. The history of family and the stories of milestones and adventures included should not be forgotten or hidden away. No matter what the future holds, and no matter that the past includes negatives alongside the positives, it is good to recount happy times passed and ground ourselves in our stories.

My twin daughters were sweet and beautiful. Those are my memories. Even if the memories we create moving forward don’t look the same, my memories of my twins’ first 18 years include much beauty and should be honored for the moments they represent. Beauty changes and doesn’t always last forever, but its value does not decrease because it is not eternal.

In the movie, Avengers 2, in a conversation between Ultron and Vision before Vision’s demise, Ultron tells Vision that humans are doomed. I appreciate Vision’s response and feel like it applies to my photo albums as well: “Yes, but the thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”

The beauty in my twin girls isn’t less beautiful because they no longer identify as girls. My memories, those logged visibly in these books and those indelibly imprinted in my heart, will always remain beautiful.

These photo albums have been sent to print. The chance to edit them has passed, just like the history contained within them.

New books are being written and created. They will contain their own beauty – filled with smiles and silly faces, milestones and adventures. There will be negatives alongside positives, and challenges intertwined with accomplishments. The images contained within will record continuing relationship between me and my twins, becoming beautiful in fresh and deepening ways, that will neither diminish nor be diminished by the beauty of times past.