Last spring I had coffee in New York with my former graduate advisor, my mentor, who is now 74. We had a great time and I was able to talk with her about subjects I haven’t even been comfortable broaching with my own mother, age 77—topics like sex in one’s 70s. My former teacher was then off to meet a former teacher of hers for dinner, a woman now in her 90s with whom she’s had a long friendship.

Sweet, isn’t it? Not completely sweet, though. My mentor is brilliant, complex, and witty, and has odd and unpredictable fiashes of competitiveness and aggression. Sometimes when I see her, she’s in a contentious mood, and I leave feeling slightly bruised and frustrated. I have my moments of aggression, too, and desires to show her my professional muscles and to assert my differences from her—as well as to enjoy our warmth and closeness. We have a friendship, in other words. We’re way past teacher-student politeness (we’ve known each other for over 25 years) and into enjoying— and occasionally being wary of—each other’s complexities. In my experience, that evolution from a teacher-student relationship to true friendship has been a rare occurrence, until recently.

MENTORING VS. MOTHERING
I’m 50 now and I’m a mentor. I’ve been teaching for quite a while— currently I’m an associate professor in visual and critical studies and art history at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago— and my students are in Visual and Critical Studies (VCS), art history, and visual communications (design). I’ve been mentoring quite a while too, which to me is a more intensive form of teaching that includes guiding on the teacher’s part and modeling on the student’s part. I’ve had time to get a handle on the delicate balance between encouraging students but not playing their idealized mother. But my female design graduate students in recent years have taken me to a whole new stage of mentoring: friends and colleagues.

What I’d already learned was to avoid—at least as much as possible given the dual-generational structure of teaching—a rosy kind of mothering. Why? The idealized mother-teacher who is traditionally selfless gives and gives; she has no time for her own work and life. What’s the point of that? What’s the benefit to self or productivity? And what kind of model is that for female students hoping themselves to teach in the future?

Enter the selfish mother. Perhaps still modeling myself after my own mentor, I try to present myself as supportive of my students, but primarily involved in my own work. Demanding of them and myself. My students, particularly the graduate students in design, art history, and visual criticism—many of whom have been out in the work world and then returned for their master’s— understand my need to focus on my own practice. And I expect them to do the same. My goal is to balance that parallel productivity with the inevitable parenting role that’s raised by the transference and counter-transference of performing other-generational helpful authority.

But that balance was disturbed a few years ago by my graduate students in visual communications. Then-graduate student Alyson Priestap-Beaton was giving a report in a design issues seminar I was teaching, and she cited Bruce Mau’s (as it turns out, overstated) assertion that Coca-Cola had created the popular image of Santa Claus. That ignited a bonfire discussion about how much the ways we celebrate holidays have been influenced by corporate culture, even some of our most sacred traditions. We felt there’d been too much hand-wringing about the commercialization of the holidays and not enough exploration of the traditions created and values communicated by this process. We decided that day we should do a book about it.

UNUSUAL COLLABORATION
In fall 2004, three years, 29 contributors, and 300-some full-color pages later, our book, The Business of Holidays, was published by Monacelli Press. I edited the book and coauthored it with the students and a couple of colleagues; the graduate students wrote the bulk of it; a team of five of them plus me did all the production work; and the five designed it.

Lots to say about that wonderful, fun, intense, and sometimes anxiety-producing process, but here I want to comment on my relationships with Alyson and two other female designer/writers on the production team, Melanie Archer and Amy Fidler. (There were two great guys on the production team, too, but it was the women with whom I developed the strongest mentoring relationships. Perhaps the women drew closer to me as a possible model and I to them as younger female colleagues. They also became more involved in the book’s production than the men did.) Alyson served as photography editor, senior photographer, coauthor, and co-designer; Melanie as senior writer, associate editor, and co-designer; Amy as production manager, coauthor, and co-designer.