This HAIR!

I have this hair. It is like a lion's mane only re-worked by God to have a few more human characteristics! One of the things about this hair is that it it THICK! Almost every hair stylist that I have been to, throughout my life, has given me a guilt trip when they have had to blow dry my hair. They act as if it is my fault, or like I have done this TO THEM. Their cold stares accuse me of walking in with some evil genius plan to give them the arm workout that they never wanted that day. I have always thought to myself, "I am super sorry your arm is shaking and you are breaking out in a sweat, but you do this once every couple of months and I do this EVERY DAY!". When it's shorter, it is easier to control and simpler to straighten, but when it is long (like it is now) I let it be "curly" much more often.

That leads me to another thing about this hair; it's neither curly nor straight. Mostly, it is just BIG. If I let it dry on its own, it just puffs up and is a little wavy and coarse. I know, lucky me. Some (blessed) people have bone straight hair that just hangs neatly behind them, while others have soft little curls that cradle their faces. Me? I have the ever coveted coarse, wavy puffball atop my head. Usually I will put some product of some sort in my hair when I am not committing to a full blow dry and straighten. I do that just to keep the puff at bay. I vary it up between styling gel, leave in conditioner, silicon smoothing gel, or any combination thereof. It doesn't really make things better, just less like a pile of disheveled straw. I am always self-conscious when I leave the house like this, but honestly, if I don't spend an hour on my hair in the mornings then it isn't going to look nice, and some days I just don't have an hour to spend. So, although I seldom go to work with untamed hair, it has happened a few times.

I remember the first time I went to school with wild hair this year. I left the house with my mane still a bit damp, but with gel in it to keep it from puffing. As the kids started coming to school (and my hair was getting drier and drier) they began commenting as eight and nine year old kids will do.
"Mrs. Freitas, your hair looks different today!" said the nice kids.
"Mrs. Freitas, I like your hair curly," said the SUPER nice kids.
And then, the honest kid spoke.
"You know what it looks like?" he thought out loud. "It looks like you were standing too close to an explosion."
The kid was dead serious. Not a mean, or funny bone in his body. Just matter of fact. I knew right away that the last time he saw hair like mine was in a kid's movie where explosions happen and the people standing nearby end up with crazy, smoking hair and black soot all over their face. I almost died laughing when he said it. Mostly because it was something I would have totally said to describe how my hair looks and feels on those untamed days. That's one of the things I love about teaching. The brutal honesty of kids that I get to be surrounded by at all times.

My hair? It IS thick, and coarse, and wavy, and long. It can be overwhelming and wild, and sometimes it definitely makes me look like I have been standing too close to an explosion.

But THIS HAIR absolutely ROCKS at Bon Jovi concerts, and I am grateful for every last piece. :)

Someone Call Me If There's A Hurricane Coming.

I don't want to alarm anyone, but I don't watch the news. I have friends who are news junkies, and they can't understand how I can live without knowing what's going on in the world, but I say that makes us even because I can't understand how they can get out of bed in the morning after hearing what IS going on. I am not naive. I mean, maybe I am a little naive, in general, but when it comes to the news, this is a calculated choice.

It started simply enough. We have children who are very sensitive, and we live in a big city where someone has been murdered in the general vicinity of our home pretty much every night. Every day we would hear bad news,and not far around the world, but from right here in Central Florida. Kasey Anthony, Jennifer Kesse, Trayvon Martin...need I go on? Not to mention our local grocery store being held up at gun point, or car-jackings in our mall parking lot. We had to react to the news the way we reacted to shows that may surprise us with profanity, and quickly turn it off before we had to field a million questions from scared little kids about things like, "What does fatal mean?". The thing is, the news is not good. (I'm sure this is not "news" to anyone.) Occasionally the terrible updates would be peppered with something nice, like a family leaving a 200% tip for a waitress on Christmas Eve, but mostly, just terrorizing. And here's what I decided. 95% of it I don't need to know.

I don't need to know when a little girl goes missing in Aruba, or mudslides destroy 300 homes on the West Coast. There is nothing I can do about the suffering woman who drove her van full of children into the ocean. In short, I would take it in, and bear the burden of the entire world because it was piped into my living room. Then I would stress over it, and worry about my children, and my family. It bred fear in me, and quite frankly, in a lot of ways I think watching the news has gotten (for some people) like "rubber-necking" when coming upon the scene of a car accident. They watch because its hard to look away. They watch because of the shock factor of how some of these things could ever be true. In most cases though, we can't help, and we can only pray.

Every night when I say prayers with my 6 year old, Trevor says, "God, thank you for my mommy, and my daddy, and everyone in this world, even the bad people. Please help them know you so they won't be bad anymore, and please don't let anyone get hurt tonight. In Jesus precious, precious, name. Amen." I don't know. I'm not a prayer expert, but that about covers it. No terrorizing news required. I am not sticking my head in the sand refusing to accept the world I live in. I get it. It's bad. I'm just not going to fill my house with it.

There are some things I need to know, like Red Sox scores, but I have my ways of finding those out. In regard to the rest, someone call me if there's a hurricane coming. I'm gonna need water and gas for the generator.

“I love Huey Lewis, but not the News, because the News is too depressing.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

Family

One of the life “rules” that I will try to impress upon my children will be to always live near family. I don’t live near my family. My sister is a 9 hour car ride from me, and my parents, grandmother, and brother’s family are triple that. The thing is, I need them. I have friends here that have become my family. They know me better than my own family in some cases, and they have seen me through thick and thin. That being said, nothing replaces that need to look into someone’s eyes and see the reflection of yourself from every stage in your life.

As good as friends are, with the exception of the one or two you still keep from your first neighborhood, they didn’t “know you when…”. They don’t know to make fun of you for wetting your pants when you couldn’t get out of your snowsuit in time, or to tease you for having a crush on some fruit loop who didn’t know you existed. They don’t know because they weren’t there. They can’t remind you what Mom called that recipe that you loved so much, or cry with you as you stand beside your grandfather’s grave and recall dancing on his feet, or long walks in the garden. They want to, because your friends (who are like family) are amazing people. Don’t get me wrong, you couldn’t do life without them. What I will tell my kids though is, don’t fool yourself into believing that they replace family.

I went home to Maine last week for my grandfather’s funeral. It was a big family affair because he lived a big, long, impactful, impeccable life. Beside my immediate family, my mom’s four siblings and some of my cousins were there too. For me, living so far away, it was the silver lining on an otherwise heart wrenching experience. If I’m being honest though, as excited as I was to embrace my family, I had some apprehension at seeing some of the aunts, uncles, and cousins who in some cases I hadn’t spent any real time with for 15-20 years. I felt like it would be a recipe for awkward, and I hate awkward.

As they started arriving at the house, I realized quickly that I was right. Not only was I very sad, but now I was very sad around people who I didn’t feel like being vulnerable around. These vaguely familiar faces from my past were people who were related to me, but not connected to me. I was drowning in awkward, and I had a cold, which as everyone knows makes everything worse. Truly, I felt kind of bummed. I wanted to go home and take refuge in my family, and instead I had to be polite.

Polite doesn’t last long for family, and that was true for ours as well. Do you know what happened once the polite wore off? My family quickly got about the business of being awesome. Not just my comfort zone of my immediate family, but the rest of us too. They were funny, and kind. What I had assumed was going to just be related-ness without connection turned out to be relationship. We love so many of the same people. We have memories of times spent in the same houses, walking the same streets and jumping off the same rock walls. Even more, we shared the bond of loving a man that the world would be a little darker without, and though we could tell our friends back home all about him, only our family could remember the twinkle in his eyes, and the deep voice with which he sang hymns. I think that’s what makes family so important. They share your people with you. It’s like a big heart shaped Venn Diagram, and though the parts that overlap maybe small, they connect us in a deep, meaningful way.

I wish I was surrounded by family every day. I like to think that I would appreciate it if I was. Family isn't everything, but they are a piece in the puzzle of “us”, and when that piece falls into place we see the picture completely. We can still figure out what the puzzle looks like with a piece or two missing, but how much easier it is to make out the image when all the pieces are there. I hope I see my family soon. I hope we can get to the business of being awesome, and pick right up where we left off. I hope we laugh again, and cry, and catch up on what we have been missing. I hope that once again, we find relief and comfort in how snugly the pieces fit. Some families are close in proximity, and though mine isn't, we are close at heart. In a perfect world, I could have both.

"Say it ain't so, Uncle Steve. Say it ain't so." :)