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." :)

A Letter to My Hero

I wrote a letter to my hero today. It started off most unremarkably, with a discussion about the weather. It seemed silly, because by the time he reads the letter, the weather will inevitably be different, but it seemed like the customary thing to do. Actually, if I'm being honest, by the time he gets it,the weather will not have changed at all because this is Florida and it is always hot here, and humid, with occasionally heavy afternoon showers. Even though it started off like a typical letter (is there such a thing in 2014 as a typical letter?) in my heart it felt like the most important letter I have ever written.

Why was it the most important letter that I have ever written? I think because it provided me a chance to share my heart with my grandfather, Raymond Joseph Osborn. The man that I middle-named my son after. This week, my 98 year old, amazing, inspiring grandfather moved out of his home and into a Veteran's Home. My heart has been so full of emotion thinking about this, from the other corner of the country. I have been talking to my mom,my sister,& my husband about it, but I have needed to talk to Ree Ree. And so, this letter became a huge deal to me.

There was a lot of chit-chat in my letter, for no reason other than my inclination for chit-chat. However, there was also a lot of truth, and that was the part that meant so much for me to say. I told him that I have been thinking of him more than usual this week, knowing that he and my grandmother are going through this big life change. I told him that I have always found him to be the most remarkable man-for his character, integrity, intelligence, and aptitude for so many things like puzzles, fishing, and writing. (I feel like I get my love of writing from him.) Then I told him that I find him even more remarkable now, than at any other time in my life. He is so brave. I know that leaving home and moving away from his wife of 70 years must have felt like the scariest thing, but the fact that he did it even though he didn't really want to- that is courage at its finest. I wanted him to know that. He is not a frail old man now because he is living with more assistance. He is selfless, and brave, and continues to take care of his family by going to a place where we can know that he is best taken care of, thereby giving us peace. I told him that I hope it feels like home there soon. Of course, a home of a different sort, but that I hope he makes friends, and that there are nice people on staff that grow to love the sparkle in his eye and his sense of humor. He has always been kind, and he is easy to be kind to. All he has to do is be himself!

Lastly, I told my grandfather that I love him. That we all do. He knows that distance does not diminish love. He was separated from his young bride to go and fight in WWII, and his love for her was in no way lessened. I reminded him that whether he is just separated from them by a few miles, like he is now from my parents and grandmother, or by hundreds like he is from me and my sister, that is true today like it was for him back then. I also wanted him to know he is not forgotten. He is on my mind now, more than ever. He is in my heart, and most importantly in my prayers. I am so grateful for him.

Home is where the heart is, so now, a little piece of me calls the Veteran's Home my home.

"I will be in touch soon. Don’t feel like you have to write back. It just feels good for me to talk to you. I am sending some pictures from the kids. Taryn, Trevor, and Jayme all send their love.
Love, Jen"

I Cannot Contain Myself

The Container Store is one of the most perfect man-made places on earth.

I have learned from this wonderland that there is nothing that cannot be contained. Moreover, contained precisely in a little perfectly crafted container that no one needs, but yet no one should have to live without. Yesterday was my first trip to this magical place that captivated me for hours, and tricked me into feeling like there is only good in the world.

Every inch of The Container Store made me happy. From the coordinated adorable file folders, to the little white desk that, when you open the drawer, reveals a cheerful Caribbean blue inside. They have pouches, bags, bins, liners, tags, magnets, hooks, cubbies, closets, racks, boxes, and all manner of other containers for anything you could possibly put away.

I am not well organized. I think that is why I love the place so much. They are the "After" to my "Before". The Container Store shows me what could be. I don't suppose it's normal to get so excited about a store full of containers, but if loving precision containing is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

I should maybe quit teaching and work there. I'm only half joking. :)

A Jacky Dory Story

When we were kids, our mom would tell us "Jacky Dory stories" at bedtime. They were always about a mischievous young boy who got into little bits of trouble because he didn't listen to his parents, and they were the stories I begged for at night. They didn't rhyme. This one just came out this way today. (Dr. Seuess-ette I am not). This Jacky Dory story is for you, Mom. Thanks for the memories. Hope you approve.


There once was a boy named Jacky Dory,
who lived with his parents and his sister Lori,
and a bird named Lulu and a dog named Rory,
in a big old house- it was a brown three story.

Jacky always listened, but he seldom heard.
He smiled and nodded, like he'd heard every word,
but his mom might as well just have chirped like a bird.
His actions were always just shy of absurd.

One hot summer day, Jacky climbed up a tree
while holding a button and counting to three,
as many times as he could in a row,
just climbing and counting as high as he'd go.

Mom came outside to look for her boy,
She had thought of something that he would enjoy,
She wanted to take him to buy him a new toy.
But the sight of him high in the tree took her joy.

“You climbed this high when I told you you shouldn’t?
Jacky you smiled and said that you wouldn't!
I thought I could trust you, now I see that I couldn't."
He would never forget Mom’s sad face, he just wouldn’t.

And just like always, Jacky felt bad,
for not listening to Mom again like he had,
for making her face get all scrunchy and mad.
He always intended to be a good lad.

What was worse was that when he looked around,
he saw just how high he was off the ground,
and that his button was not to be found.
Scared little Jacky could not make a sound.

Jacky Dory couldn't get down on his own,
Mom called up Dad. She was mad on the phone.
Dad thought to just leave things alone,
Jacky would get down before he was grown.

Jacky tried to move high, and he tried to move low,
He wanted to move but his feet wouldn't go.
His brain said "Get going!",his legs wouldn't though.
Jacky cried and he shouted so his mom would know.

Soon came a siren, and then he saw the red truck!
Mom had called the brave fire fighter, Miss Buck,
Who was sorry to hear Jacky Dory was stuck
Oh, her truck had a ladder on it -what luck!!

Back on the ground Jacky got quite an earful,
but his Mom wasn't wrong, and his face was quite tearful.
She pointed out that his climb had made them both fearful,
and climbing is better when the ground stays more nearful.

Next time, he vowed that he would do good.
He would think and then act like a good child should.
When mom told him to listen to something he would.
That is, he worried, if he even could.

Mom helped him walk home, for his knees were still weak.
His voice was still shaky, so they just didn't speak.
He felt too sorry to look up, or even to peek,
but when he did, Mom just smiled, and kissed his wet cheek.

“Jacky Dory”, Mom said. I’ll never not love you.
I’ll never not smile at every thought of you.
Sometimes I’ll be mad. Sometimes you’ll be mad too.
If we choose love in our anger, we will always get through.

Everybody's Broken In This Life

I think the difference between amazing people who live quietly inspiring lives, and everybody else is not that they live in absence of pain, but that they have given purpose to their pain.
When we embrace our pain, as still being part of us, we can use it to make a difference. Maybe we can mentor someone facing a similar situation, and help them overcome where we failed. Or maybe we can lead someone down the path to healing who is also dealing with the same crippling circumstances we once faced. The pain doesn't define you, but it does deepen you. It makes you compassionate in a way that you could not be if you had not lived through that hurt. The pain is an opportunity to use your experience to impact the world in a way that only you can, or at least in a way that only people who have walked in your shoes can. It is often said, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger", but we all know that's wishful thinking. Sometimes what doesn't kill you may as well have. Sometimes what doesn't kill you just kills your spirit. It kills your will, and your passion, and your hope for tomorrow, and I think that is probably worse.

I'm not a psychologist, and I don't know the secret to giving purpose to your pain, but in my limited experience I think it has to do with focus and faith. Faith that everything happens for a reason, and that even when we don't understand it, or see it, that there still is one. Faith that we do not know everything, and that while we would not wish this path for ourselves, that good can come of it. And focus, not on ourselves, but on others. If we think of pouring our experience into a greater understanding of others, and maybe even reaching out to pull someone up from the pit they feel trapped in, then we can see beyond our despair. It doesn't mean the hurt stops. It doesn't mean that it sucks any less. Some things absolutely suck, and if you ask me in 50 years I will still tell you that they suck. As I see it, we can stay there, "stuck in the suck", or we can say, "This is the worst thing ever, and it's not fair, and I hate it, but I refuse to hate the rest of my life because of it."

There are hurts I haven't faced, and when I meet people or hear about people who are facing them, I feel like I would crumble under the weight of the pain. I know that the process of giving purpose to the pain might take years, or even decades. Some hurts are so deep that to even think about sharing them knocks the breath out of a person. I don't know how to get there, or who to turn to, but I know that people who are transparent about their pain, who determine to find a way to bring good out of bad, that those are the people who go on to inspire me, and the world along with me. If you are going through something painful. I am deeply, legitimately sorry. I hope it doesn't kill you, and I hope that little by little, it makes you stronger. Maybe right now burying it is the only way that you can get out of bed, but I hope that someday you can share it. Give it purpose, and use it to bring hope to our little painful planet.

"It's okay to be a little broken, everybody's broken in this life. It's okay, to feel a little broken, everybody's broken. You're alright. It's just life."
-Bon Jovi