Emails to My Kids
Before my kids were born, I created Gmail accounts for them.
Not to use right away.
Just to exist.
I started sending them notes. Short messages. Observations. Things I noticed about who they were becoming. Things I wanted them to hear someday, without knowing exactly when that someday would be.
At first, I sent them often. Then life got busy, and the notes came when they came. There was no schedule. Just intent.
One day, I got a notice from Google about not logging in. Something about inactivity. I don’t remember the exact wording — I just remember how it made me feel. It bothered me.
Emails can be deleted.
Accounts can be closed.
Systems change without asking.
The idea that these notes — the best things I’d written to my kids — could quietly disappear because of a policy or a missed login didn’t sit well with me.
So I did what I tend to do.
I built a small, serverless system on AWS.
It didn’t have a fancy interface. It didn’t need one. After the initial setup, I never had to log in again. I just kept sending emails, and the system caught them and saved them. Permanently. They couldn’t be deleted through the UI. There was no “clean up” button. No accidental loss.
It worked. Quietly. Reliably.
But then I realized something else.
The system made sense to me — and only to me.
If something happened to me before I could hand those notes to my kids myself, all of those messages would still exist… but no one would know where they were or how to get to them.
That’s why I saved a note explaining it.
Not the emails themselves.
Not the infrastructure details.
Just where the system lives, what it does, and how to access it.
That note isn’t for my kids.
It’s for my wife.
Because if the worst ever happened, I don’t want the words I wrote for my kids to stay trapped inside a system I never explained. I don’t want the best parts of me to be lost simply because I forgot to leave directions.
So I wrote them down.
Not because I expect something to happen.
But because I don’t want love to be lost to logistics.