SurvivingInfidelity.com Forum Archives

dmari posted 4/7/2013 01:14 AM

Do you have or would you have wanted wedding pictures of your parents?

HurtsButImOk started a thread regarding what to do with pictures. Personally, I threw a lot away but I'm holding on to a few wedding pictures for the kids. Then I got to thinking, hey, I should ask the gang (you guys)!

My stbx parents were divorced (no infidelity) and he did not have any pictures of them together at all nor did he want any. His mom remarried and are still married (30+ years) and we didn't have any pictures of that wedding either.

h0peless posted 4/7/2013 01:27 AM

I am and both parents cheated and married their APs. I don't want wedding pictures (I think the same is true for my siblings) but I do still enjoy looking at old family pictures.

HurtsButImOK posted 4/7/2013 01:40 AM

OHHH me, pick me!!!!

I never thought of it before your question dmari but as a child raised by a single mum with a "disney dad" (divorced due to infidelity I was conceived during seperation - yep thats me the HB baby!!!!) I never even ever asked to see the wedding photos.

Maybe it is relative to how involved the 'absent' parent is. My dad was mostly a no show so past photos were just not important to my brother and I.

dmari posted 4/7/2013 01:59 AM

Good to know!! Thank you! I hope others will give their 2 cents.

JW123 posted 4/7/2013 03:03 AM

My parents divorced due to my Dad leaving for OW. I DONT want pictures of my Mom and Dad's wedding day - to me it was all just a joke. I gave XH all the photo albums of our 15 years - BUT I am told he has since used them to show the kids how happy he made me and all the good times and that THINGS JUST CHANGE!!!!!

LOL - My Dad married OW and she had her wedding pictures up everywhere. HATED seeing them. The day of his funeral was the last time I saw or spoke to her - i heard she moved on really fast like in a month or so.

So to answer your question...no I dont want wedding pictures of my parents. It is a reminder that we were not good enough for my Dad (even though on his deathbed he showed remorse)

Looby-loo posted 4/7/2013 03:35 AM

I am not a child of divorced parents, but they were unhappy together and perhaps in hindsight, should have separated.

My mother accused my dad of cheating on her and cut up her wedding dress in a rage. I was devastated by this as a child. When she died, my dad told me that he never cheated on her and that she spent her whole adult life tormented by something that just wasn't true. I have no reason to doubt him as he talked to me about it at such an emotional time; he was so cut up about the fact she never accepted the truth.

I have their wedding photos and love them. No matter what way you look at it, wedding photographs depict a happy time, a happy day and a milestone in two people's lives. It is a little piece of family history that will no doubt bring sadness to those in the photos if they have since gone their separate ways. It is however still family history and meaningful to the children of that marriage.

Wedding photos of broken marriages evoke mixed emotions.

Personally, I believe keeping them is the right thing to do. Perhaps put them away so that the children of divorcees can decide for themselves whether they would like to keep them or not.

I wouldn't take that choice away from the family and am grateful that my mother didn't destroy hers. I still wish she hadn't destroyed her wedding dress.

bluelady posted 4/7/2013 06:54 AM

My parents divorced when I was 9 and my sister was 7. My dad, whom we lived with, had a copies of their wedding picture framed and hung one in my room and one in my sister's room. He said that he wanted my sister and I to remember that he and our mother had loved each other very much.

Even when my dad remarried and we moved into a new house with our stepmother, Dad hung the pictures in our new rooms. I assume our stepmother was ok with it. I never heard her say anything about it.

DecimatedHeart posted 4/7/2013 07:25 AM

I never minded seeing wedding pics of them, and still have pictures up of us as a family. I devastated my mother though, when I told her I didn't want to wear her wedding dress. I thought it would be bad luck since they were divorced, in an ugly divorce that shredded my childhood, no less. My sister wore it years later, and is still happily married while I am in hell, so maybe I should have worn it since the joke was on me lol.

TXanTB posted 4/7/2013 09:39 AM

I am, and my parents carefully saved and passed down their wedding photos to me (lonely only).

I like having them, and have saved my wedding photos for my kids to have one day in return.

They aren't able to handle seeing the happiness in the photos and understand why we are now divorced, but as they get older that will change.

What they choose to do with the photos is up to them

trebleclef posted 4/7/2013 10:17 AM

My parents divorced when I was 11. I have several of their wedding pics. I don't have any emotion attached to them. They are just family history like a genealogy or an album with great uncle so-and-so long deceased.

hurtbs posted 4/7/2013 11:26 AM

I am not, but my SO is. He saved a couple of momentos his father was throwing out during the divorce. He told me that he has them because he wants his children to know where they came from. I suspect they also have some meaning for him as well.

newlysingle posted 4/7/2013 11:55 AM

I am a child of divorce, but not due to infidelity. My dad was an alcoholic and passed away shortly after the divorce. My mom still has their wedding pictures and even has an old family photo framed on the wall of her house. She never re-married though, so that might make a difference. She wanted us to know that both of them loved us despite all of my dad's problems.

I plan to keep our family photos and the wedding pics for the kids. They can do what they please with them in the future.

FaithFool posted 4/7/2013 12:05 PM

My dad found his second wife when I was 10 and the divorce happened a year later.

My mom went through a bohemian phase and took up decoupage -- she hacked up all their photos in what was then I suppose an artistic way (tore the edges to look scalloped) and stuck them onto a plywood circle, slathered the whole thing in laquer and called it a table top.

None of my siblings wanted it after she passed away so I'm still lugging the damn thing around.

Someday I want to mount in on the wall on a spindle so you can spin it around to look at the different pics.

I could have killed her at the time because I'd love to have those photos whole and in an album, but everyone who sees this thing thinks it's awesome.

MissMouseMo posted 4/7/2013 15:47 PM

I am a child of divorced parents and I recommend keeping the photos. They cannot be replaced if you are mistaken in throwing them away.

As others have said, they are reminders to your children of when you both were happy and optimistic. Nothing since will change what was a hopeful start - and you both are their parents for the rest of their lives.

They are small and flat so it's not like they take up a lot of square footage. If you don't want to see them, put them in a box and secure the lid.

History may thank you - and your kids may one day also.

My two cents anyway.

[This message edited by MissMouseMo at 4:29 PM, May 8th (Wednesday)]

josie11 posted 4/7/2013 22:33 PM

I am the child of divorced parents. They had a long, unhappy marriage because my father was a very, very difficult person, and my mother could never make him happy or prevent him from raging at her and us kids. He beat us, too. She was stuck with him because that was just how things were then for unhappily married Roman Catholic couples. They were married for about 24 years, until social mores changed enough that being a divorced Catholic actually became an accepted "thing."

All that being said, I cherish their wedding photos. It's amazing to me to see them so young, beautiful, and hopeful, before the difficulty of family life together took them down.

My mother told me she realized she'd made a terrible mistake on their honeymoon because my father threw a gigantic fit over a trifle, and there were other ominous events at the time, but she was already pregnant with me. I was born 9 months after their wedding, and 6 more children soon followed, one every year, with miscarriages in between. Again, just the reality of Catholic families in the 60s.

I also treasure the few wedding photos I have (maybe 5 in all) because they are the ONLY images I have of people who died shortly afterward, including both grandfathers and one grandmother. The photos show other relatives looking impossibly young and glowing with happiness on the steps of the church.

I love those pictures. I saved my wedding pictures for my own children because I think they'll appreciate them one day. They are packed away, and I think it will be years before we look at them again.

[This message edited by josie11 at 11:15 PM, April 7th (Sunday)]

dmari posted 4/7/2013 22:40 PM

Thank you for responding!! I loved reading them all and it has definitely helped me to make the decision to not toss out the pics! Love you guys, dmari

SBB posted 4/8/2013 07:15 AM

My view is a little longer term. My kids may or may not want to see them but their kids and grandkids?

I've kept a single photo of the wedding day. The family/group shot.

I hate seeing it or even thinking about it but it is the only photo of my girls entire family all together.

Ashland13 posted 4/24/2013 19:55 PM

My parents are divorced. My mother left my father, but there wasn't cheating that was ever found. She was hanging out with people she met at work that my father didn't know, but never found doing anything.

She left the tv-like "Dear John letter" and snuck off to my brother's, which I thought was heartless to tell one sibling and probably my sister, but not me?

Anyway, I don't know if either of them have wedding pictures or my siblings, but I don't. My father would be more likely to hang onto them than her.

If I come across a picture of them together, it makes me cry, fourteen years later.

As for STBXH, its too soon for me so I just left it all when I moved out of the upstairs of our house. I can't even look at it, it makes me cry and throw up. I burned some of his pictues but kept a bunch in the photo albums for DD and baby to be and I didn't touch any in DD's room.

I've wondered if she would ever ask to see any again, for she used to enjoy seeing them.

Undefinabl3 posted 4/25/2013 11:48 AM

I am a child of divorce, I dont know if there was infidelity involved, though its suspected that my mother was cheating on my dad.

Both of my parents were married within a year of letting us kids know they were getting a divorce, which means neither let the ink actually dry before diving back into wedded blissdom.

I personally would like to keep at least some pictures of my parent's wedding. It is a part of their history, and my history - and honestly, its not like they hate each other.

I will say though that if you would have asked me 10 years ago, i could have cared less about the pictures - but now...My grandparents are in many of those pictures, and they are no longer with us. An uncle that was killed in a car accident a few years after they married are in some of those pictures....and friends and family...they are there.

At some point it becomes less about the fact that they are at the wedding, and just the fact that they are pictures of them.

Save them, tuck them away, let your kids decide later if they want them for their own memories.

tabitha95 posted 4/25/2013 12:00 PM

I'm not a child of divorced parents, but my dad was a child of losing one parent to her suicide because my grandfather was leaving her for another woman.

He still likes having pictures of his parents together. I asked my mom about it before and asked if it was painful. She said that it's his parents and he didn't see it that way.

I think we all see things differently. I left all the wedding pictures with EX. I don't know what he did with them.