When my eldest son was a little boy, I did something that felt quietly monumental in the moment and slightly ridiculous — I created a Gmail account in his name.
He was 3 years old. Far too young to know what email was, let alone care about it. My BlackBerry (yes, I had a BlackBerry, it was 2010) probably looked more like something he could play games on.
At that stage of life, his interests were vast but often limited to dinosaurs, Duplo, bouncy balls, and snacks. Lots of snacks. There was also him asking “why?” approximately 275 times an hour. But I had the vague sense that childhood moved too quickly and that memories — especially the small ones — had a way of dissolving if you didn’t trap them somehow.
I was also pregnant with his twin brothers, so preserving what I could of his “only child” status was important ahead of such a big change. So I opened the account and wrote him his first email.
I wrote down things I didn‘t want to forget
The plan was simple. Over the years, whenever something happened that I didn’t want to forget, I would write to him. When he turned 18, I would hand over the password and let him open the whole archive at once. A digital time capsule, except instead of artifacts, it would contain the messy, funny, sentimental observations of a mother trying to keep up with a growing boy.
I assumed I would write occasionally. It would be fun. Instead, I wrote a lot.
The big moments were easy. The first time he caught a ball. It was at a kid’s birthday party at a sports gym. That earned a lengthy email complete with my highly technical analysis of the play (“you ran very fast and didn’t drop the ball and everyone started yelling!”). Birthdays, school milestones, and the various phases of childhood enthusiasm — dinosaurs, sharks, Bigfoot, Sesame Street — each found their way into the inbox.
But over time, I discovered that the emails I liked writing the most were about the smaller things. Sometimes they contained only a sentence or two.
One afternoon, I wrote about how the sun hit his hair as I looked back at him in his car seat. It caught the light in a way that made me stop where I was, in the driveway, and just look at him. I pulled out my phone and quickly wrote an email. It was the kind of moment that would normally disappear five seconds later, but writing it down felt like pressing pause.
Another email documented the day he very patiently helped bathe his brothers. I watched as he knelt over the tub with great seriousness, telling them that it was “bath time,” repeating instructions until one of them threw a wet face cloth at his head. But he maintained composure throughout his huffing and puffing with frustration.
Those moments never make it into photo albums, but they are the ones that can begin to define a person.
It became kind of like a journal
Over the years, the emails piled up. Some were long and reflective. Others were barely a few sentences typed quickly before I forgot the moment that inspired them. Some included motherly advice that he didn’t ask for. Sometimes there were stretches when I didn’t write at all. But when I did write, the emails always ended with how much I love him.
The account became a strange journal. Except the audience was a future version of my son.
Every so often, I would wonder what it would feel like when he opened them. Would he read them all? Not read any? Would he laugh? Would he be embarrassed that I kept calling him cute and adorable too much when he was a toddler? Or that I was “that mom” at a football game when he scored a touchdown.
Then, suddenly, 18 arrived.
I gave him the password
Handing over the password felt weirdly ceremonial. It was the end of a project that had been quietly running in the background of our lives for nearly two decades. A teeny act of parenting that required no school forms, no carpools, sports equipment, or doctors’ appointments, just the occasional email and the belief that someday it would matter.
When he logged in for the first time, he wasn’t opening a typical inbox. He was opening 18 years of moments that might otherwise have vanished: graduations and birthdays, but also the sunlight, the shoelaces, and a thousand other things that seemed ordinary at the time.
Parenthood has a strange relationship with time. When you’re in the weeds of it, the days feel so long and chaotic. The lunches to pack, socks to match, and endless reminders to clean bedrooms.
But when you look back, it all compresses into a handful of flashes.
A laugh at the dinner table.
A muddy pair of cleats.
A boy kneeling down to help his brother.
An inside joke.
The email account turned those flashes into something permanent.
Once I realized how meaningful it had become, I did the only logical thing. I created accounts for his younger twin brothers, too. Their inboxes are filling up with the same stories, observations, and evidence that wearing socks outside without shoes will cause holes.
Someday, they’ll receive their passwords as well. And it won’t just be opening emails. It will be a record of sorts, of a childhood lived alongside their older brother. A childhood full of shared kitchens, backyard games, and the small daily acts of kindness that siblings rarely notice in the moment.
By then, the house will be quieter, the bedrooms cleaner, and the years of noise and motion that once defined them as kids in our family will have softened into memory. But inside those Gmail accounts will be proof that time didn’t simply rush past us unnoticed. It was captured, one small moment at a time, as they waited patiently for the day they would look back and see not just who they became as young men, but how deeply they were loved every step of the way.
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