I am very excited to be a part of Blacklisted from the PTA‘s birthday party! I first met the author, Lela Davidson, at the Missouri Writers’ Guild conference in St. Louis in April. She’s a riot, and I liked her immediately! When I read the title of her book and saw the subject matter was not your typical parenting book, then I knew I had to have it.
I read it and laughed and smiled all the way through. You see, I, myself, am not a typical parent–I’m not that into crafts (I do like to scrap book, though), I don’t bake, and I don’t like to cook. Sometimes, I let my toddler eat meals in front of the TV, watching Family Feud or Big Bang Theory, and I take her everywhere with me, including to Weight Watchers and writing conferences and critique groups. As a matter of fact, she is lying here beside me in the bed sleeping while I write this blog post because she woke up from her nap when I took a shower, screamed her head off, and when I laid down with her to calm her down, she fell back asleep. So, I grabbed my computer and started blogging. . .
Anyway, back to Lela, you will love this book. You will want to buy two copies and give one to a friend. You COULD win one if you leave a comment for Lela and me below (she is giving out e-books OR hard copies). You can tell us WHY you are the type of parent who might be blacklisted from the PTA OR why you are Mrs. Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver. You can ask a question or just leave a comment like, “Sounds like a good book.” As long as you leave it by Sunday, July 29 at 8:00 pm CST, you are entered to win. If you have a mailing address outside the United States, you may only have the choice of an e-book.
Here’s my review of Lela’s book:
Take some time to see how one real, honest mom deals with forgotten piano recitals, date nights with her husband and those pesky questions children always ask at the wrong moments. Lela Davidson shares the stories of her motherhood experience in several hysterical, true essays in the book, Blacklisted from the PTA.
Davidson states in her introduction that she didn’t plan to write this book. She wanted to write a novel: “one of those quirky romantic titles that get made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon or Kate Winslet.” She said she didn’t know how to do that, so she set out to learn. While she was learning, she wrote the essays in this book.
“All I seemed to be good at was sitting on the driveway drinking boxed Chardonnay and talking to my friends,” Davidson writes. “So that’s what I wrote—the stories that made us laugh.”
And that is exactly what these stories do—they make you laugh. They also make you realize that you’re not alone. Every mother has the idyllic dream of how she’s going to approach her babies and handle motherhood. She looks back at her own childhood and says either, “I’m going to be just like my mom,” or “I will never do that to my children.”
No matter what you’
photo credit: Briana Orr
I am happy to host Masha Hamilton on today’s Maniac Monday! She is the author of 31 Hours, an adult novel. Here is the product description from Amazon:
“A woman in New York awakens knowing, as deeply as a mother’s blood can know, that her grown son is in danger. She has not heard from him in weeks. His name is Jonas. His girlfriend, Vic, doesn’t know what she has done wrong, but Jonas won’t answer his cell phone. We soon learn that Jonas is isolated in a safe-house apartment in New York City, pondering his conversion to Islam and his experiences training in Pakistan, preparing for the violent action he has been instructed to take in 31 hours. Jonas’s absence from the lives of those who love him causes a cascade of events, and as the novel moves through the streets and subways of New York we come to know intimately the lives of its characters. We also learn to feel deeply the connections and disconnections that occur between young people and their parents not only in this country but in the Middle East as well. Carried by Hamilton’s highly-lauded prose, this story about the helplessness of those who cannot contact a beloved young man who is on a devastatingly confused path is compelling on the most human level.”
Since my blog is all about using books with children and teens, I wanted to post Masha’s essay titled, “Parenting the Nearly-Grown,” on Maniac Monday because I think many high school teachers and parents who have young adults feel the way Masha and Jonas’s mother do in 31 Hours. You may be able to relate to several themes in her book. Here’s Masha’s essay:
Parenting the Nearly-Grown
by Masha Hamilton
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” Roman philosopher and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.
Not long after the second of my three children was born, I sat at the kitchen table late one evening talking to my dad about parental responsibility. It’s a big topic and we were covering lots of philosophical ground, but what I remember most is my pronouncement that my primary job could be boiled down quite simply and starkly: I had to keep safe these beings released into my charge. I needed to keep them alive.
These were the musings of a new parent, of course. The circumstances, too, should be considered; the first child had been born in Jerusalem during the intefadeh, and the second was born as I was reporting from Moscow during the collapse of Communism. In both situations, I repeatedly came face-to-face with life’s fragility.
But even in calmer times, even after the birth of my third child, I never lost the feeling that my main duty was to pass them on into adulthood as unscathed as possible, as healthy in every way as they could be.
It sounds pretty simple, on the face of it. We perform many jobs as parents: nurturers, playmates, cheerleaders, short-order cooks, nurses, disciplinarians, detectives, spiritual leaders. Keeping them safe should not be the hardest, not with the help of baby monitors, plastic devices to cover electrical outlets, pads for sharp corners, child-proof medicine bottles, the list goes on.
And in fact, we passed through well, with just the usual rounds of stitches, one violent dog attack, a rabies scare and a few months when my youngest fell so often and got so many bumps on his forehead that my husband and I joked someone was surely going to call child services on us.
Now, though, my youngest is 14, and as they’ve grown, I recognize my job has been transformed. It is to give them trust and space so they can develop confidence in their ability to make their own lives. And yet the two oldest, at ages 19 and 20, are in a period of time that seems almost like a parentheses in their lives. They are certainly not children, but nor are they quite adults. Meanwhile, I say and think all the usual things parents have been saying and thinking since—well, perhaps ever since Cicero, whose words I keep taped to my office wall: it’s rougher out there than it was in my time. More chaotic. More violent. More dangerous.
And everyone is writing a book.
It was, in fact, into my latest novel, 31 Hours, that I channeled my fears. Among other things, the novel offered a chance to explore what it means to be the parent of someone on the cusp of adulthood but not yet there. The mother in 31 Hours, Carol, is strong and independent, free of empty nest syndrome, but her maternal intuition is strong and she’s concerned about her 21-year-old son’s growing emotional distance, the way he seems tense and depressed. Her fears are amorphous and hard to convey; nevertheless, as she lies awake in the dark, she decides to trust the hunch that something is wrong, and to spend the next day trying to track her son Jonas down and “mother him until he shrugs her off.”
There are many themes in the novel, but one question it asks—one pertinent to all parents and one I’m still trying to answer for myself—is this: after years of being vigilant and protecting our kids, what should we do—and what are we allowed to do—to keep them safe once they are nearly, but not quite, grown?
Masha is hosting a contest about parental intuition on her blog. Check it out here.
If you are interested in starting a career or part-time career in writing for children, I am offering an on-line course through WOW! Women On Writing. Find out all the details here.
Take some time to see how one real, honest mom deals with forgotten piano recitals, date nights with her husband and those pesky questions children always ask at the wrong moments. Lela Davidson shares the stories of her motherhood experience in several hysterical, true essays in the book, Blacklisted from the PTA.