I am Gen X; of course I don’t remember my Netflix password. That is why I have children. My movie-watching days will end when they move out. I can picture them as adults: on the phone with me, rolling their eyes, trying to explain how to turn off my phone’s flashlight or how to access that Kindle book I bought.

My lack of tech skills spills into the photography department: I don’t take a lot of pictures on my phone. This is because 

1. When my kids were younger–before they had phones of their own–they took thousands of pictures of plastic horses on my phone. I couldn’t locate a picture I was looking for if I wanted because I would have to dig through all those horse pictures. Horses in the grass. Horses on the rug. Every combination of horses together and apart. 
2. My kids are now in a phase where they do not want their pictures taken. And what else would I take pictures of? So, the camera on my phone is basically useless.
3. I don’t know how to find my pictures after I’ve taken them. I can see them on my phone right after I take them, but I mean in the long run, like when I get a new phone. I know my pictures are “in the cloud,” whatever that means. I am starting to think it means that my pictures have gone to heaven and will never be seen again.

But that is ok because, according to my 15-year-old, all I have on my phone are “three random pictures of black phoebes,” which are a dapper flycatcher birds of the western US, which sounds lame but isn’t actually but all that bad, apparently, because, according to her, “all Dad has on his phone are pictures of bad welding jobs, like he drives around town and whenever he sees something that isn’t welded right, he takes a picture of it.”

So here we all are, on vacation in Japan, and we are somehow sharing photos to an album. Now, I can’t do that on my own, of course. I have to go back to the email where the album was shared with me to click on the link to get to the album to add to it. Well, that is not quite true; I don’t have much to contribute, so it is more like I go to the album to see what everyone else has added.

My daughter caught me trying to Google “Google Photos” because I forgot there is an app I can directly go to without having to search for it on Google. That is how Gen X I am.

The only pictures of my kids in Japan are of the backs of their heads because they do not want to have their pictures taken. Well, someone (not me, obviously) shared the album with my mom, who has been asking where the kids are. I am tech-savvy enough to be able to zoom in on the back of a head or a familiar purse, so she can tell that those are, in fact, my actual children with me; I’m not just taking pictures of the backs of random strangers.

So yes, one day my kids will move out, and I will forget my passwords. I will lose access to streaming services and photo albums. I will call them for help, and they will very patiently tell me I’m doing it wrong.

But for now, they’re still here. They’re in the photos. Technically. Somewhere. In the cloud.