I am not a big fan of so-called Hallmark holidays, whose purpose is generally to promote commerce as a proxy for connectedness, lost, perhaps, by some 20th Century socio-industrial mechanisms (or whatever). In deference to today’s holiday, however, I thought I should offer a few thoughts on motherhood since I am a parent of two pre-school-age children, whose grandmother (my mother) is more distant from my family than she ought to be.

It’s because of instruction – or at least the socially defined commodity of it.

My mother, Susie Covello, is 75 years-old, a product of having come of age in the 1950s, and having “married into marriage” in the early 1960s. She married a humanistically sound man, whose passion and intellectual capacity for conjuring great thoughts was matched only by his obdurateness to following pathways for success, and his social ineptness in exploiting his strengths for enduring financial rewards. This man was my father, Stephen G. Covello, jr., whose research and early learning pedagogical publications for piano continue to inspire me in my Instructional Design studies.

Susie has been a well-regarded and sought-after piano teacher for beginning piano students for nearly 40 years, though she has had no formal training in teaching, nor does she have any significant musical talent (her “slow motion” Boogie Woogie would surely be a viral YouTube hit, as would be her trombone solo of “God Bless America,” used as a last resort to wake up my sister as a zonked out college student on Christmas break).

What she excels in, however, is the soft science of assessing a student and the student’s environment (personality, physical, social, familial, etc.) and finding ways to make playing the piano more meaningful, beyond imparting the basic concepts of music theory and performance. Her skills are a combination of her refined sensitivity to other people’s perspectives, decades of field experience, mentorship from my father, and contributions from peers.

In 2004, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, and declined in 2007 to the point of placing him in nursing care. For those few years in between, my mother was the target of serving his escalating needs, which ultimately made her depressed, conflicted, and self-destructive. My parents divorced in 1977, though they remained friends and colleagues (and nearby neighbors) for all the years following. Neither of them dated again, in any significant way, and their dependency on each other continued nearly as it would have, had they remained married. Susie felt obligated to care for him in ways that she was not capable of providing, which was consistent with her previous behavior as his wife and friend since 1955 or so. Her entire personal life was subsumed in serving a man that could not be reached emotionally, in neither health nor sickness, and there was never any emotional mechanism at her disposal to completely separate herself from this dysfunction.

Once Steve was admitted to nursing care, however, a light bulb went on. At once, Susie decided to embark on a personal challenge that she felt she’d been denied, and that had been socialized into of her as “the kind of thing a woman only does to find a husband.” In 2007, she requested her smidgen of a 1953 college transcript from the University of Chicago and enrolled at Rockland Community College to study astrophysics. She actually opened up the iBook that I’d bought her in 2002 and went to classes at the Apple store to learn how to use it. In the three years since she began, she has discovered that she loves Mass Communication more than conquering the origins of the universe, and has been taking classes year round. (I, too, was a Communications/Radio & TV major in undergraduate studies).

Thus, she visits me and my family only once a year, briefly, and has been missing out on some exciting milestones in her (only) grandchildren’s growth and development. All things revolve around her piano teaching and college studies to maintain her independence and intellectual stimulation.

Susie and I shared an hour and a half phone call today, where, among other things, I read to her the Conclusion of my final paper on the development of my Semantic ISD Model for Distance Learning, and then talked about how Western evaluation standards impose “colonial” values and procedures on other cultures (which she brought up on her own as a topic to consider in Distance Learning development), and Hofstedes’ Power Distance Index, and other things great and small.

This story is about motherhood and personhood. Why can’t my mother be the grandmother I need her to be? Why couldn’t my father be the husband Susie needed him to be (she initiated the divorced)? Why couldn’t Susie’s parents been the parents she needed them to be? Why hadn’t I been encouraged by my parents – two great teachers and thinkers – to reach for greater intellectual challenges when it mattered to me most, rather than simply allowing me to settle, after high school, for training in a low-level trade (whose industry soon collapsed into near oblivion) despite the grades to aim much higher?

I am very proud of my mother, Susie Covello. It isn’t fair that no one – peers, mentors, family nor society – encouraged her to pursue her interests for the merit of their own validity, despite the validity of caring for others in need. Her raw intellectual power has always been there, and is only now being put to the test of higher academic study. She is now, more than ever, a peer, despite my relatively elevated position as a graduate student, and a “digitally literate” adult.

My challenge, as a son, is to learn to sacrifice my needs (and my children’s) to help Susie enjoy the freedom and dignity of the intellectual self-expression she had been entitled to all along, yet was denied for various internal and external reasons throughout her long life. This is a great gift for a son to offer, though it is offered silently, and is wearisome for me to bear. We need her as a grandma more than she realizes, but this is her time, and she raised me to be independent, strong and resilient. I also regret that it has taken the virtual death of my father for her freedom to finally come about – he no longer even recognizes me, my sister, or Susie, and has become frail enough recently that we have agreed to invoke a Do Not Resuscitate directive on his behalf.

On this day, I feel joy, pride, and great loss.