My mother just turned 50 this year. For the past 23 years, she has struggled with a debilitating neurological condition that prevents her from working in her chosen field -- journalism. The last time she actively worked as an active member of the media was in the early 1980s. Needless to say, things have changed a bit. Her rare condition, dubbed cerebellar degeneration, also somewhat limits her ability to adapt to new tenets of day-to-day living, particularly new technology. She grew to hate anything relating to computers and developed a strong resistance to society's increasingly Internet-dependent way of life. Though she'd been out of the industry for so long, she needed to write. She needed to feel that she was still able to use her talents as a reporter, which her disease couldn't take from her. And to do that, she needed to learn what email was and how it could get her words in print. After weeks of daily practice, my mother began to feel comfortable using a mouse, locating a web browser, making her way to Gmail, examining her inbox, learning the anatomy of a window, discerning between read and unread mail, and performing many other functions that most of us take for granted... Gmail is uncluttered and simple. It's doable for her, and day by day, her computer literacy increases. The process isn't easy, as her manual dexterity provides daily obstacles. However, after about two months of drilling and learning new vocabulary, she succeeded in sending two feature stories to the editor of our local paper. It was a big step for her, as it had been a while since she was last published. She sent the editor the attachments, as journalistic protocol goes these days. And only Mom and I know the struggle, the two-hour phone conversations, the three-hour private lessons, that yielded those brief, but victorious exchanges.
K, PR and Marketing Manager
New Jersey
Labels: keeping in touch