I did not always get along with my boyfriend’s mother. Well, that’s normal; after all, I didn’t choose her as a friend. She was family, in a way, and you don’t get to choose family. I got along better with her than I do with some of my blood family, which is its own damning with faint praise. Still, I did like her, and I did deliberately seek out her company now and again.

Specifically, once a year, I tried to include her in my annual Oscarpalooza movie-watching marathons. It didn’t happen this year; her health was poor, and timing didn’t work. I’m not sure there was anything in the theatres she had any interest in seeing anyway. (I should have figured out a way to take her to see Hail, Caesar!, since I think she would have loved it.) Still, every year, I checked the list of nominations in search of one I thought she’d be interested in, and most years, I found one. Though we both hated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and she agreed with my assessment that the kid should have been in therapy before 9/11.

I saw Lincoln with her. True Grit. Philomena. Not in Oscarpalooza, but I also saw Journey to the Center of the Earth with her, the Brendan Fraser, and one of the Marvel movies, though I can’t now remember which one. Every once in a while, Graham agreed that we should take her places, though that happened less once Simon was born.

Even beyond that, though, movies—and TV, and books, served as things we could talk about. Even when I was deeply annoyed at her for criticizing my parenting or something, we could change the subject and have a merry chat about Nick and Nora Charles, Lord Peter Wimsey, William Murdoch, or other fictional detectives. She was born in 1944, and I was perfectly willing to talk as long as she liked about the movies of her childhood.

Because she babysat Simon until her health prevented it, and because she also had Netflix, we had many long conversations about the shows Simon preferred to watch. We were both accepting of his fondness for Masha and the Bear, and we had many long conversations about how the bear deserved better than the show’s one female bear. She wasn’t fond of Courage the Cowardly Dog, alas, but she was definitely with me in keeping him away from Barney.

I think this is another forgotten use for media. Some people remember just enough to be dismissive. But no matter how little you have to say to someone, you can usually find at least one movie, TV show, book, that you can agree about, even if it’s that you don’t like it. It made family gatherings much smoother over the years, I can promise you.