I taught Mom to post on social media — she taught me how to see life

By the third year of teaching my mother to use a smartphone, she finally posted something.

It was a photograph: the bougainvillea she had raised on the balcony for a year, blooming everywhere at once. The caption read, "The flowers on my balcony have opened." No emoji, no location tag, one picture where there was room for nine. It did not get many likes. She had four friends at the time: me, my sister, my father, my aunt.

It is still the most careful post I have ever seen. Before she published it she sent it to me privately. "Can I post this? Is it no good?" I said, "Mom, the feed is for your own life. Post whatever you think." She fixed the typos twice. The caption went from "The flowers on my balcony have opened" to "The bougainvillea I raised for a year opened today." She deleted and retyped for half an hour before she pressed send.

Looking at it, my nose stung. My mother had lived her whole life like a candle burning without a sound. She cooked for the family and posted nothing. When I got into university she was happy, but there was no feed then. When I married, when I had a child, her joy went into phone calls and into cured sausage packed in my suitcase. Her life was all giving and no telling — until she learned to post.

From the bougainvillea on, her feed came alive.

She posted the steamed buns she made: "Left the dough to rise. Better than last time." She posted the crabapple by the community gate. She posted a group photo with her old friends. She posted a video of my sister's kid. Gradually her feed settled into a strange aesthetic: raw life, no filter, every photograph crooked, every caption one plain sentence. And every time one came up I looked at it a beat longer than I meant to. There was something in them that I, a native of the internet, had lost.

I call it the ability to see your own life.

What does my feed look like? Retouched travel photos with captions I have rewritten four times; I check whether the location tag gives away too much. I grade my sunsets into a fashionable gray. I shoot food from angles that hide the clutter. My mother is different. Her sunset is the sunset, captioned "tonight's sky." Her dinner table is the dinner table, steam from the rice cooker and all. Her pictures are ugly and true, and true in a way that moves you.

Digital mentoring was never a one-way street. We teach them how to use the phone; they teach us why we use it. We learned how to publish. They remind us why we publish — for life itself, not for publishing a life.

She has more than a hundred friends now. Her old sisters add each other, and a sunset-years photo contest rages through her circle. They are more diligent than the young. They post daily, and it is all dishes, flowers, grandchildren, sky. Once my aunt got into an argument with her in the comments and they sent each other thirty-odd voice messages. I nearly died laughing.

What she posts is not news, and it is not art. It is evidence. Every crooked photograph says the same thing: today happened, and I was in it.

Last month she posted something different: a photograph of me as a small child. "My daughter, when she was little. I was holding her at the factory gate. Today she taught me to post. Time goes so fast." The first like was my father. My sister commented: "Mom, you've finally learned to show off your kid."

I saved a screenshot. I know that one day, when she is old and cannot hold on to things, that screenshot will remind me: the year I taught her to post, we each got to see the other's life.