Two years ago, my 11-year-old son sat me down for a talk.“Mom, it's time," he said.“Hear me out: It's time we got actual TV. And you need an iPhone.”

This funny conversation two years ago marked a shift in our relationship. Perhaps for the first time, I began to really listen to my son's opinion about our home technology. Since his reasoning was sound and his suggestions within budget, I took his advice and was pleasantly surprised with the results.

I'd known for a while that my son understands technology better than I do. On airplanes, he grabbed my phone to put it in airplane mode. He wired the speakers in our house. After something was stolen from our front yard, he picked out, set up, and now monitors our security camera. When my computer died, I took him shopping with me.

As a teenager now, he has a busy social life, with skateboarding, basketball, and online gaming with his friends. I see our time together waning and our shared interests shrinking. That's why I jumped at the chance when a friend mentioned writing technology reviews. I'm a writer, but I'd need a partner who has more tech knowledge than me. When I presented the idea to my teen, he immediately accepted.

It's changed our relationship in surprising ways. Where he used to get annoyed quickly at my technical ignorance, he's learned to be more patient and explain things to me in a way that I   can convey to an unknowing audience. The parent-child dynamic is not only changed; it's even slightly reversed(颠倒). He's leading me. I'm asking him for help and advice.

My son has risen to the occasion. He's taking it seriously, and to watch him mature in this way is an honor. As someone who's not much of a reader, he now searches instruction manuals. Without any prompting, he's even emailed and called-----yes, made an actual phone call to customer service or tech support when sample products weren't working as expected.

I never imagined being a tech reviewer, but it's proved to be a valuable way to learn from, work with, and enjoy time with my teen.

The shower, I find, is the best place to cry. The water covers the sound of my sadness, while washing away any evidence of my pain. I shower after the kids have gone to bed; it’s the only time I can be alone. I always did my best to protect my two children from my tears. If I needed to cry, I cried by myself.

Yet, I encourage my two boys to cry. My 7-year-old prides himself on never crying at school. “Oh, but you must cry,” I insist. “Crying’s good. It gets the sadness out. Never hold back your tears.” But then I did just that. What might it do to them to see their mother upset?

Then my father died, and there was no way I could schedule my grief and keep my feelings inside. The realization that my dad was actually gone hit me with an intensity that was impossible to cover up.

To my surprise, my boys didn’t seem too alarmed. They found me hiding in the bedroom one afternoon, weeping. “It’s OK, mommies get sad too,” I told them, smiling through my tears.

“Don’t be sad, Mommy. Grandad’s coming back as a baby,” my 7-year-old said, his tiny arm stretched across my shoulders. “Think about love,” he went on. “Think about all the people who love you.”

I realized that in hiding my pain, I was only denying what it means to be human. I felt as if I had led my sons to believe that “negative” emotions are only a concept, and not something they should possess. It’s one thing to tell my children it’s OK to cry. It’s another to show them how it’s done.

We owe that to our children, according to social researcher Brene Brown. During her TED talk The Power of Vulnerability, Brown said, “it’s imperative that we should let ourselves be seen – deeply seen”. “Our job is not to protect our children, to keep them perfect,” said Brown. “Our job is to look and say, ‘You’re imperfect, and you’re made for struggles, but you are worthy of love and belonging’.”

My grandfather was a rigid perfectionist. Everything had to be orderly, precise and punctual. I was frightened of him until the day he died. Growing up, my mother desperately wanted to please him. She probably thought he might leave if she didn’t.

In fact, I now think the fear of being left alone, abandoned, was a current throughout much of her life. A few years into my father suffering from Alzheimer, my mother’s voice on the phone sounded so upset that I had to tell her, “Just be with yourself for a little while.”

“No, I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that,” she said abruptly, closing the door on the subject. A while after my father died, she told me that she kept the television on all the time because it made her feel less lonely. “It makes the house seem more lived in,” she said. I had given in to my annoyance and either turned the volume down or turned it off. But after she told me that it filled in some of the loneliness, I never reached for the remote again.

We have had a long journey together, she and I. Over a half-century of memories, now that the journey has ended, I have a choice which ones to study which ones to turn over in my hands and dust off.

I choose to look at the ones that ache with a sweet truth not told often enough: there was love between us. It was just hard to find sometimes. I choose to remember her face on that winter day in Manhattan, when I came to her with a broken heart. I choose to remember walking on the shore with her in summers when we rented a beach house; somehow the sea always transformed us. And how she looked on my wedding day when she handed me a bracelet that had belonged to my grandmother. “Something old,” she said.