There always seems to be one teacher who needs pictures of his or her students’ family; I understood it in elementary school when most young kids are still trying to figure out who’s connected to whom and why — especially since most parents throw them curve balls by calling longtime friends “Aunt” or “Uncle. But in high school?

And there never was a problem back in elementary school, because I was a SAHM and married and I was keeper of photographs, as most mothers are.

But now, I am a full-time working divorced mother, and “family photo” has a different meaning. Our family looks different now. Which family is the teacher talking about?

Everyone has seemed to go digital nowadays, and even school and athletic photos often come that way. But the story of my family is told in photographs taken by 35mm cameras and Polaroids and (mostly) organized — well, at least pasted into — photo albums. Well, that was the family “then.”

Years ago, my kids and I liked looking through those albums— look, there’s Mom and Dad getting married, there’s a pregnant Mom at the baby shower, there’s Dad holding you in the hospital, there’s Grandma playing with you at the park, there’s the family on our first vacation. The pictures tell the story of their lives.

Then, when my kids were around ages 9 and 12, our family changed and so did our photo-taking.

My photos are all digital now, too, and none make it into photo albums anymore. They don’t even make it off the computer. We don’t sit around and look at photos anymore, although that might be more a factor of their ages — 15 and 19 — than anything else.

We were once a family of four, now we are two families of three, and whatever photos that were displayed throughout the house from that time are now all put away; that family only exists in photo albums and memories.

The last photo I have of us as a foursome shows a smiling, happy family. And now it’s being called into use for whatever reason by a high school teacher. It feels awkward. Not because I miss my marriage — I don’t — although I do acknowledge feeling at the time like there was so much ahead of us. And there was, just not what I had anticipated. Yet once I had made up my mind — and that took a long, long time — to leave the marriage, I never looked back. I don’t regret my divorce. But I am fully aware that my kids feel differently about it, and photos of our family then are visual proof for them of what is gone.

Many people are so angry at their former spouses that they want to destroy the photos of them in happier times. I don’t feel that way about my former husband, but even if I did, I could never do that — those photos are my children’s story. They’re my story, too, or least part of it.

So I e-mailed my son the photos, and went to bed. When it’s time for him to return to me from his dad's  in a few days, I will ask him about them — who needed them and why. But I will tread carefully around why a picture of our family “then” was what he wanted, not a picture of our family “now,” the three of us.

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. It may not be truer than in a divorced family.

How do you handle family photos, pre-divorce and post-divorce?