... but does that mean I have to read it?
Too much communication can be a dangerous thing, and my mother is well aware of that danger. She doesn't want to interfere in the lives of her children, and she was fearful that having an e-mail account might perhaps mean too much contact. We assured her that having an e-mail account wouldn't necessarily mean that she'd have to constantly use it. Instead, it would simply be one more open avenue of contact - a fast and efficient one for sure, but not one that couldn't be controlled.

At least in the first stages of her learning to use this tool her fears were somewhat justified. After all, if she sends a letter via e-mail she also wants to get a response so that she'll know that it went through. And how will she know that it went through unless we reply. So for a while we were in a sort of a bind, and our replies were along the lines of "I acknowledge that I got your leter, but I'm not responding to it because there's no reason to expect a reply to every letter". Technology may be difficult to make sense of, but it's nothing compared to sentences like that.
 

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