My Mom's Death Showed Why Selfies Matter

If you can't think of a good Mother's Day gift, here's an idea: "Get a selfie with your mom," writes Veronica Arreola at the New York Times. "It will be worth far more than any knickknack or bauble you could ever buy her or yourself." Arreola says her selfie-thing dates back to her mom's death, when the funeral home asked for a memory board with photos of her. But while her mom had stored lots of pics, she wasn't in most of them, because she'd taken them. "Maybe she treasured the photos of us more than herself," writes Arreola. "No revelation there, right?" Then Arreola noticed that her mom's mom had done the same thing. "I realized then that I was not going to repeat this pattern."

Right after Arreola's daughter was born, she began snapping selfies of them together: seeing giraffes at the zoo, going on a picnic at the park, snuggling on the couch. "These moments are rarely captured if you were to rely on a third person to take the photo," she writes. And when people slammed selfies as vain indulgences, Arreola defended them; she found other women agreeing when they noticed how few photos they had together with their children. Arreola doesn't even remember the last gift she gave her mom, and "all I really wanted was a recent photo of us together," she writes. "A selfie would have been perfect. Hmm … maybe a selfie stick is actually the perfect gift this year." Click for Arreola's full piece. (More opinion stories.)