My Mom’s Hip at 86

My eighty-six year-old mother fell and fractured her hip the other week. After hip replacement surgery, she is now recovering in a rehabilitation center (she’s doing fine). Anyone who has either recovered in a rehab center or visited one knows that patients have a lot of leisure time. To make the time more enjoyable, and because it was also my mother’s birthday, my sisters and I decided to buy my mother an iPod.

I purchased a purple iPod Nano, but then realized that my mother might not want or use it. My mother loves music, and she has seen iPods, but she is not good with technology. She doesn’t use a computer, doesn’t have CDs, and doesn’t have a DVD player. Because I had planned to load all sorts of her favorite songs on the iPod, I wanted to make sure she would use it before I spend the time and money downloading songs from iTunes.

I called her and asked if she would like a way to listen to her favorite songs whenever she wanted. I was intentionally vague because I was trying to keep the gift a surprise. When she wasn’t sure what I was talking about, I became transparent and said, “Would you like an iPod?” To my dismay, she said, “No, I wouldn’t use it.” I could have explored her reasoning long-distance, but I thought I saw a quicker way forward: I was inferring that her choice was not an informed one. I knew she had never listened to music on an iPod and I assumed that she was concerned it would be difficult for her to use. I hatched Plan B.

The next day I flew up to New Jersey and visited my mother in the rehab center. I brought my own iPod on which I had downloaded a few of her favorite songs, including “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I then made my strategy transparent. I told her that my sisters and I had already purchased an iPod for her if she decided she wanted it. I also told her that I thought the best way to decide if she liked the iPod was to listen to it. I had downloaded some of her favorite songs to my iPod so she could hear how it sounded. If she liked the sound, I would teach her how to use the iPod and then she could decide if she wanted it. I asked if she was interested. My mother thought the approach made sense.

I put the earphones in her ears and then played “Bei Mir Bist Du Schein,” a 1930s Andrews Sisters song that in Yiddish means “To me, you’re beautiful.” My mother, who loves to sing and has a beautiful voice, regularly sang this to me when I was a kid. When she heard the music, her face lit up, and she began singing along. When the song ended, she declared, “This is fantastic, it’s amazing!” I played another of her favorites and asked her if she would like to learn how to use the iPod. She did. In five minutes, she knew how to select and play songs, adjust the volume, and pause a song. When I asked her if she would like her own iPod with her own favorite songs to play, she said, “Absolutely.”

That evening when I left the rehab center, I also left my iPod with my mother, so she would have some music to listen to at night. I downloaded her favorite songs onto her iPod and the next morning presented her with her own new iPod. When I asked her what she had listened to on my iPod the previous evening, she said, “Springsteen and Bob Dylan!” With that, I decided to download more of my favorite songs onto her iPod.

By the next day my mother had begun to morph into a teenager with an iPod. At dinner in the rehab center, she sat in a wheelchair at a table with my father, my sister, and me. As we ate, she listened to the conversation with one ear, while she listened to her iPod with her other ear! When I asked her what she was listening to, she looked at the iPod screen and matter-of-factly said, “Electric Light Orchestra.” My mother told me that the iPod was the best gift she had ever received.

What does this story have to do with the Mutual Learning approach? It’s about informed choice, transparency and the limits of the approach. When you think that others are not making an informed choice, you too have a choice. You can try to convince them they are wrong, you can give up, you can do what you had planned to do anyway (just give her the iPod), or you, as I did, can jointly design a way to help the person make a more informed choice. That was my Plan B, which I made transparent to my mother. Of course, if you want to completely surprise someone with a gift, you can’t be fully transparent. And that’s OK too.

Originally published May 2009