The day my oldest was born, once we were finally home from the hospital, I got my phone out and made her an email address. Nothing fancy — just her name and something symbolic, the way you’d set up an account for anyone. I typed a first message before I’d even really figured out how to hold her properly one-handed. I don’t remember the exact words. I remember it was short, and that I cried typing it, and that M asked what I was doing and I said “writing to her” and he understood immediately, the way he does.
The idea was simple. Every so often — a milestone, a weird Tuesday, something in the news, a photo I didn’t want to lose in the scroll — I’d send her an email. Not a diary exactly, more like letters to my children the way people used to actually write letters, except I could attach a photo and send it from my phone at a red light. The plan was that one day, whenever felt right, she’d get the login and years of her own life would be sitting there waiting for her, written by someone who was actually there for it instead of remembering it wrong twenty years later.
Three accounts, and it got harder every time
I did the same thing for the 9-year-old, and again for the 7-year-old, one account each, one at a time, obviously. And for years I was genuinely good at it. I wrote from my desk at my old job on my lunch break. I wrote at 11:30 at night after everyone was finally down. I wrote in the fog of nap-time windows that never lasted as long as I needed them to. I wrote all through the pandemic. A lot went into those inboxes. I told my oldest about the day everything shut down — what the empty streets looked like, how strange the quiet was, how her biggest complaint that week was missing a friend’s birthday party. I told the 9-year-old about the time she stood up in the bath on her own and looked so proud of herself she almost fell right back down. Small stuff, mostly. That was the point.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: writing to one kid regularly is very doable. Writing to three, on top of actual life, is a different math entirely. The emails got shorter. They got less frequent. Sometimes I’d remember all three at once and send a slightly guilty round of “me too, mom loves you, more later” just to keep the streak from fully dying. But I was still doing it. Sporadic beats nothing, and I told myself sporadic was fine, that they’d understand sporadic, that a full life is a legitimate reason for gaps.
The call that stopped all three at once
If you’re new here, a few years ago I had surgery, and a phone call afterward told me what they’d found was cancer. I’m fine now — caught early, treated, fully recovered (still pray, still ask the universe for more, on the regular) — so this isn’t a story about being sick. It’s a story about what happened to three email accounts. Because sometime in that stretch, I had a thought I had never once let myself have while writing any of those emails before: I might not be here when they read these.
That thought did something to the whole project that I still don’t fully have words for. Every email up to that point had an unspoken assumption baked into it — that I’d be somewhere in the picture when my daughters finally sat down and read years of their own childhood back to themselves. Once that assumption cracked, even briefly, even though I turned out fine, I didn’t know how to write another word. What do you say to a kid who might be reading this as the last thing her mother ever told her? I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t, actually. I haven’t sent a single email to any of the three accounts since that day. Almost five years of silence, all at once, across all three inboxes, and I think about it more than I let on.
The night I almost opened the inbox again
It came close to breaking, actually, just this week. After my 11-year-old told me she’d gotten her period — I wrote about that whole afternoon here already — I sat on the edge of the couch that night with her account pulled up and the cursor blinking in an empty compose window for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time. This felt like exactly the kind of thing the project was built for: a real, specific, once-per-kid moment, the sort of detail I’d want her to have in her own words years from now instead of a hazy secondhand memory of the day it happened.
I typed “Dear” and then nothing. I sat there long enough that M came to see why the bathroom light was still on, found me on the couch instead with my laptop, and just sat down next to me without asking anything. I closed it without sending. Not because the moment wasn’t worth writing about — it clearly was, I’m writing about it right now — but because I still hit the same wall I hit five years ago the second I try to write to her directly instead of about her. I don’t fully understand the difference myself. It’s there anyway.
What actually stops you from writing the letter
I’ve circled this a lot in the years since, trying to understand what specifically I was afraid of putting in writing. And I think part of it, underneath the mortality stuff, was a bigger question I’d never had to answer out loud before: what do I actually want to pass down to them. Not just what happened to me medically. What I believe about family, about who gets access to you and why, about what love is supposed to cost.
That question kept dragging me back to my own family. My mother had cancer twice — once when I was around 15, and I don’t think I fully understood what that meant at the time; again when I was 29, and that time I flew home crying the entire flight because I understood exactly what it meant. Neither of her cancers were genetic. Mine wasn’t either. She’s one of ten siblings, so I’ve joked, not entirely kindly to myself, that we’re both just “special” in a way I’d like to stop being. But that’s a health thread. There’s a different, harder thread I haven’t written about here at all.
The part about my brother
I haven’t spoken to my brother since 2019. I’ve mentioned that here in passing before but never actually explained it, and I’ve decided I want to, mostly because of everything above — because if I’m ever going to write my daughters something honest about family, I can’t leave out the one relationship that taught me the most about it.
I was raised, the way a lot of people are, to believe that family is the one bond that survives anything — that you forgive it, absorb it, keep showing up for it, no matter what. For a long time I did exactly that with my brother, and for a long time I genuinely could not compute the alternative. My brain would just short-circuit at the idea of stepping back from him, like the thought itself broke a rule I didn’t know I’d agreed to as a kid.
I went to therapy for about a year to work through it. I remember the waiting room better than I probably should — a dying plant by the window that somehow never fully died, the same three magazines for months. I brought in old messages and emails, laid out the actual history instead of the version I’d been telling myself, out loud for the first time, to someone who had no stake in it either way. My therapist, after hearing all of it, told me plainly that what I was describing had a name: emotional abuse. Not a falling out. Not a personality clash. A pattern. She told me that cutting contact was reasonable, healthy, and honestly overdue. It still took me a while to actually do it, and longer to stop feeling guilty about it, but I did it, and I haven’t looked back the way I thought I would.
I’m not going to lay out the specifics here — partly privacy, partly because the details aren’t really the point. The point is the belief underneath it that took me forty years and a licensed professional to unlearn: that sharing blood with someone obligates you to tolerate whatever they do to you. It doesn’t. I’d like my daughters to know that at 20 instead of at 40. Family estrangement isn’t a word I grew up with as an option, and I want it to at least be a word they know exists, even if they never need it.
Where the emails stand now
Here’s the thing: the girls are reaching an age where they want to know what happened with their uncle, why he isn’t welcome in our family. But to tell them that, I’d need to tell them about the health scare too, and I’m not ready. I’d like to avoid it altogether if I can. So for now, it’s just difficult.
I wish I could end this with the tidy version and tell you I finally wrote all three girls a beautiful email today. But I didn’t. The accounts are still sitting there, untouched, exactly as quiet as they were yesterday, cursor-shaped hole and all. But I think putting this out loud, even here, even under an initial instead of my name, is the closest I’ve come in five years to actually facing the inbox again. I don’t know when I’ll write the next one. I know it exists now as a thing I’m allowed to want to do, instead of a thing I keep almost doing and then don’t.
Anyway, thank you so much for spending ten minutes here with me today. This one was hard to post, so if it resonated with you, or if you think someone in your life could use a little story-time break, I’d really love it if you shared it with them. Also, any advice is genuinely welcomed 😉
If any part of this sounds familiar — the living-with-uncertainty part, not necessarily the email part — I’ve written around it before, from different angles: Some Days Just Aren’t Good Days, and Signs From the Universe That Help, and My Body Knew I Felt Better Before I Did.
Talk to you later!
— L
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