Our Parents Never Really Accept Who We Are

I was smoking a Christmas cigar with my dad and he said what he always has said. Don't spend all day writing. Make some money. He is referring to my teaching or some of the other things I do supplement my writing. It doesn't matter to him that I have published five novels. It doesn't matter that I have had Book of the Month Club Selections, Junior Library Guild Selections, Starred Reviews in Publishers Weekly, Hit the National Bestseller List, Published by the Largest Publishers in the World, Interviewed by NPR All Things Considered, Spread in People Magazine, New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, Chicago Tribunes, Chicago Sun Times,  Paperback Auctions, Six figure advances, Three Book Deals, Movie deals, Foreign Rights Sales, ALA Editors Choice Awards, Two books coming out Next Year.
Nope. None of it matters. To him I just don't have a real job.

And it is something parents just cant help. They see you a certain way. They are incapable of understanding that we might not be the person they think you should be. Add a career in the arts to the mix and you have a perfect storm of parent inability to really see who they spawned. My dad can understand the money but after that it is suspect. He sees me in the newspaper and asks how I did that like it was some sort of slight of hand. He sees my book in the store and it is almost incidental but it is never connected to a job.

And maybe that is very American. We really don't accept anyone who doesn't have a traditional job. Certainly not writers. They are suspect by nature and don't really compute in parental consideration of a vivable career. Add to that novelist and again you might as well be drinking in a bar and  sleeping in. It just doesn't make sense that your child should do something as nebulous as write a book.

And so really all we are left with is that parents can not really accept us as we are. To them we will always be who we didn't become. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com



 

Guilt Parenting

A lot of parenting is out of guilt. Guilt over spending too much money. Guilt over not spending enough money. Guilt over not enough vacations or any vacations. Guilt over giving them a phone or not giving them a phone. Guilt over not giving them a car or not giving them a better house, a better neighborhood. A more progressive life. A less progressive life. A better school. A better upbringing. What is there not to feel guilty about?

Work more and feel guilty about not spending enough time with your kids. Work less and feel like you should be doing more to make more money for your kids. Give them allowance and feel guilty they don't understand the value of a buck. Don't give them an allowance and feel guilty about being stingy. Send them to a great school and hit them with debt. Send them to an affordable school and feel guilty about not sending them to a great school.

Feed them what they want and feel guilty about giving them crappy food. Give them good food and feel guilty about not getting them what they want. Talk to them too much and feel like you are being a bother. Don't talk to them and feel like you are ignoring them. Take too many pictures and feel like you are putting them on the spot. Don't take enough pictures and feel like you don't care about having pictures of your kids.

So I don't know. Maybe at the end all you have is guilt. That and a lot of pictures. Or not.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American dream upside down
 

Modern Dads and the Conflict of Work and Kids

Alright. Dads are doing a lot better. In 1965 they spend 2.5 hours a week with their kids. In 2011 they spend 7.3. A three hundred percent increase, but mothers still blow them away. A whopping 13.5 hours. Twice of the dads. And here is the kicker, dads feel worse about that 7.3 than their fathers did with their 2.5. In other words dads just cant get a break while their wives feel pretty good about the time spent with their children and their own dads didn't break a sweat about their provider little kid time status.

I get it. I feel like I never spend enough time with my kids and I work at  home. Of course you can be at home and not be at home. But still I feel like I do not see my kids but  near enough and with one son getting toward college I wonder...did I do enough? Was I a good dad? Who doesn't have these thoughts right? And you have to envy those old dads who just went off to work and plowed ahead and maybe they missed their kids but I'm not so sure. If you don't open the box then maybe you never know what you are missing.

But we do. As a dad you are always rushing home to that kid function. Missed kid activities are painful and you wonder about those traveling dads. I knew a guy who traveled every week and I asked him about missing his kids. He said if he thought about it it would kill him. So there is that. But for most of us "around" dads you still feel like you are not doing enough. More activities. More bonding moments. And then they grow up anyway.

It breaks your heart.

Rocket Man...the American Dream shouldn't be this hard
 

Our Children Are the Targets Now

Right now. Right now as you read this some psychotic loner is firing up his video game and getting jazzed and feeling it his right to go out in a blaze of glory and be immortalized and is heading down to Walmart or any sporting good store and is buying an AR15 or an assault weapon and he is pulling up to a grade school and sitting in his car in his camouflage and body armor and he is  thinking about it. And now he has a model. Blast your way in past the locked door and head for the classrooms where the innocents are sitting, waiting. And there is nothing between him and our children.

So here is what we have to do. We have to get involved. We have to be the first line because our kids cannot defend themselves. In the worst case of Sandy Hook we have to take this as the new normal. Time is what we are after. We have to get rid of the assault weapons but we more than that we have to stop the killer before he reaches the kids. I think parents have to be the final measure now. We have to put ourselves between us and the killer. This will buy the time to save countless lives.

What am I talking about? Parents at the schools. Three parents would buy time. The killer comes in and three parents face him. At the least this sends out the warning and buys time, maybe stops the killer.  Or the parents split up and come at him from different directions. People will die but better than the kids. I don't see any other way. The days of PTO are over. It will happen again. You cant fill the school with cops but you could with parents. Three people in the killers way to slow him down at the front door and give the teachers precious time to lock down and hide kids and call police.

Crazy right? But what else can we do? Better to do something than nothing. Because its going to happen again. And if we save one child with a human shield. Isn't that better? You may think this is extreme, but there is a war going on and our kids are the targets.  Better us than them.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

Summer Has Ended

Our kids are going back to school now. They have all collected at their bus stops and marched off leaving their turtles and dogs and cats and chalk and bikes and tricycles and bathing suits and goggles behind. They have left their friendly garages scrawled with stick men and names on the cool cement that smells of gas and bikes and grass. They no longer go barefoot in the yard and listen to the crickets and run after the fireflies and catch bugs in a jar. They are no longer roasting marshmallows and getting chocolate on their hands and tracking in dirt or letting the wet dog in for the hundredth time.

We are no longer lighting charcoal and eating with them on our patios or decks or on that broken picnic table. They are not inside on the hot days watching television for hours. They aren't taking that sweaty bike ride with their parents that ends up at the ice cream store. Their paper plates are no where to be found. Their cups of Kool Aide are empty. They aren't siting around a  table at the Dairy Queen on a warm summer night with ice cream dripping all over their hands. Their rooms are not perpetually a wreck with wet suits and clothes stacked up from the week. They are not coming back from summer camp with mosquito bites and warm brows. Their books and their IPODS and their computers and their dolls and their basketballs, baseballs, footballs, lacrosse sticks, mitts, all lay dormant now.

For summer has ended even though it is still August. They have lined up for their yellow buses and waved goodbye to parents who snapped pictures and waved and shouted and then tried to catch a glimpse of them as they rode away in disel exhaust for eight hours. We return to our homes, our work. It is quiet. We go through our days. We make our money and work out and run through the TO DO lists of our lives. But in the unguarded moment we are heartbroken.

Summer has ended and our children have gone away.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle The story of a one mans search for the American Dream

Holiday Stress for parents and Christmas for kids

You know that feeling. It is strange that right after Thanksgiving you should feel anything close to stress but something closes in on you when you go to get that Christmas tree. It is something dull and putrid that settles on your chest as you contemplate the titanic workload that is Christmas for any parent. There should have been some road sign, some warning that right after you had children the holidays became the workdays and that all those great times you remembered as a kid really were in the past. In fact you can't even remember them anymore.

You are Christmas now. You create the whole holiday from start to finish and you understand finally why your parents always zoned off in front of the television and had those hollow eyes and looked so damn tired at the end of the day. How could they be tired? Santa was coming! Tis the season to be excited about all those gifts coming your way on Christmas morning. Yet your parents looked like someone had driven over them over with a truck. They looked like they worked from morning to night and then stayed up very late for nights on end until everything was just perfect for Christmas morning. Now you know they did.

But every year it is a shock. For some reason you forget that the Christmas you remember from your childhood no longer exists. Yet for some odd reason you sort of believe it will come back right up to the point you sit down and figure out how many gifts everyone needs and how much it's going to cost and how much time you have to decorate the house, get up the tree, go to the in laws, wrap the gifts, buy the stocking stuffers and have it all done by December 24th that rushes up faster and faster every year.

And somewhere in the middle of it you just cant' reconcile this exhaustion with that kid who sailed through the holidays like a millionaire who just had another oil well come in. Somehow that kid still lurks around and encourages you to just hold on a little longer. Because somewhere, somehow, those golden holidays have to come back around. Maybe when the kids go to college.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January