Teenager's loving message to stepmom to get national airplay
By Robinson Duffy
Published May 12, 2007
Jake Hovenden, a junior at West Valley High School, has written a special Mother’s Day message for his stepmother, Janey. It’s a personal, heartfelt message that will be heard by hundreds of thousands of National Public Radio listeners across the country on Sunday.
The message, an essay Jake, 17, wrote about his stepmother’s years of effort caring for his terminally ill father, is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition as part of the “This I Believe” series.
“I was going to have it be a Mother’s Day present,” Jake Hovenden said of the essay, which he wrote for a class assignment.
In 2002, Jake’s father, John Hovenden, died after a long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative muscle disease commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Jake was in middle school at the time and had watched over the years as his father slowly lost control of his muscles, and eventually his ability to breathe on his own.
The experience changed his life. So when his English teacher this year assigned him to write an essay about something he strongly believed in, he decided he wanted to write about his dad. He had written about his father’s death before and found it was therapeutic. The task this time, however, was difficult, more difficult than he thought it would be.
“I missed the first two due dates for rough drafts because I didn’t know what to write about,” he said. “I didn’t know a strong belief I had pulled out of that situation. Then I started to think about the other people around me and that’s when Janey came to mind.”
Janey and John Hovenden were married when John was in the early stages of the incurable disease. She cared for her husband day and night as the disease progressed, Jake said, and was a pillar of strength for the family. The support and love she showed during those hard years became the inspiration for Jake’s essay about his belief in inner strength.
Jake submitted the essay to the “This I Believe” series only because it was an assignment; he never thought for a moment it would be chosen to be played on the air. But the 500-word essay caught the attention of the producers of the weekly NPR segment.
“I think there’s something really simple and honest in his writing,” Jay Allison, the series’ host and co-producer, said in a telephone interview from Cape Cod, Mass. “He’s not attempting to convince you of anything, he’s not trying to preach to you. You really get the sense he’s thinking. It’s a person wrestling with their own convictions, and when you hear that, you listen.”
The radio series, an homage to the 1950s Edward R. Murrow radio program of the same name, asks people, both famous and everyday, to submit essays about their beliefs and convictions. The current version of the program has received well more than 28,000 submissions so far, Allison said, the best of which are read on the radio by the authors.
The producers felt that Jake’s essay was perfect for Mother’s Day because of the strong relationship he and his stepmother have, Allison said.
“Stepmotherhood is an enormously difficult role in so many ways, and possibly an unsung one,” Allison said. “The most common modifier for ’stepmother’ is ‘wicked.’”
The wicked stepmothers of fairy tale fame have nothing to do with the Hovendens, Jake said.
“To me it’s just a normal mother/son relationship,” he said. “I guess it’s just normal to me.”
Janey also scoffs at the notion that her relationship with her stepson is anything less than motherly.
“We hit it off from the very beginning when he was a 4-year-old little towhead bouncing around,” Janey said. “It was a strong relationship before (John’s death). That strengthened it.”
Today, Jake and Janey spend every other weekend together as well as three weeks in the summer. They spend time at the family’s cabin and enjoy snowmachining and riding four-wheelers. Mostly though, Jake said, the two just spend time talking.
“We reminisce a lot about dad,” he said. “She shares with me a lot of stories about dad.”
Janey didn’t know anything about the essay until a few days ago. Jake kept everything about it a secret, even as he was working out the details with NPR staffers on the East Coast and when he recorded the essay at the studios of the local public radio station, KUAC-FM 89.9. The first time she’ll hear Jake’s message will be when it is broadcast Sunday morning on national radio.
Jake is looking forward to hearing his essay. Getting to hear it himself Sunday morning, he said, will help him continue his own healing process.
“I guess I’m still trying to think what I can gain from the experience myself,” he said.
Jake doesn’t mind that his personal message will be so public. He’s hoping that other listeners across the country who have gone through similar experiences will gain strength from his message at the same time he and his stepmother do.
Contact staff writer Robinson Duffy at 459-7523 or rduffy@newsminer.com.
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