Monday, April 23, 2018

Shatter Your Illusion (Lessons from Becky with the Good Hair...)





So…I’m going to write a blog about, of all things, my hair.

I know. This seems sort of crazy.

Number one, because I really only know how to make wavy, frizzy hair straight. That’s it. That’s all I can do. I can make a rudimentary braid and put it in a ponytail. Nothing in the least little bit special.

And number two, because that seems way out on a limb away from my normal blog posts.

I mean, really, I doubt too terrible many people care. BUT. I have had more than one person inquire about how I manage to get my frizzy hair to calm the heck down, and a couple of people have told me that they think it would make an interesting blog post. And so, I oblige.

Like everything in this world of mine, my hair revolves around my divorce. Pre-divorce, my method of dealing with my hair was basically to wash it and brush it and be sad that it didn’t look like I envisioned in my mind. An excellent question at this juncture would be-why on earth would you assume, having lived with wavy, frizzy hair since the age of 14, that suddenly said hair would simply straighten itself and turn into the style that you like? There’s no really simple answer to that other than-I didn’t know how to deal with my hair. I didn’t know a lot of things pre-divorce. I didn’t know how to deal with talking to people I didn’t know, I didn’t know how to plot out a budget and stick to it, and I didn’t know how to tame this wild mass of hair that God saw fit to put on my head.



Then I lived through my life falling all apart. My life fell to such bits that I basically had to start from the beginning and figure out who I was again. That, in all honesty, is how much to the bone I defined myself as Nick Johnson’s wife. And if I wasn’t Nick Johnson’s wife anymore, then who was I? It seems crazy, but really, so does nearly everything about my life in the past three years.

Looking back, I’m pretty sure that putting myself back together again started with my hair because it was something that I truly struggled with, something that I desperately wanted to control but felt at a loss as to what to do. My whole life might have been shattered at my feet, and everything felt beyond my control-and so I grabbed onto this hair and insisted that it bend to my will.



So, the nitty-gritty of how exactly I do this. My hair is naturally very thick and it has a wave to it. Not exactly a curl, though my hair will easily hold a curl if I want it to. The issue, of course, being that I wanted it to lay straight.

I accomplish this mostly through my flat iron. I have 2 that I use consistently. One flat iron is an Ion Keratin Smoothing Flat Iron. This iron is skinny, but it gets hot (it can go up to 450, I use it at 400). Basically, once my hair is totally dry after I wash it (I wash my hair twice a week, on Sunday and Wednesday), I use this flat iron in very small sections all around my head. The smaller the sections, the easier it is to get it to all lay flat. It takes about 15 minutes.

My other flat iron is a Remington. It is much wider and easier to use. I use it always the day after I wash my hair, to get my hair to behave itself, and then in the mornings just after I comb my hair if I think that it needs it-obviously, frizzy hair is more of a problem the more humid it is.

The only other real secrets keeping my hair straight lie in my shampoo and conditioner (I use Brazilian Keratin Therapy shampoo and conditioner) and my blow-dry spray (which is called WOW-this is a miraculous product that I would chose to take to a deserted island). I use a wide toothed comb to keep my hair from breaking. And that’s that.

The whole entire thing-from washing my hair to drying and straightening it-takes one hour tops. And much of that is just that it takes a while to dry my hair because it’s so thick.

Like I said, I’m not exactly a beauty blogger, nor do I especially know what I’m doing. I have learned things mostly by asking people whose hair I like what products they use, and by having a hair stylist that I adore.

Prior to my divorce, I defined myself as a girl who didn’t care about hair or makeup or clothes. But deep down, I really did care about those things-I just didn’t know how to go about figuring any of it out. I think that falling apart in front of truly every person I have ever met made me realize that not one single person thought I had it together. So we shattered that illusion, and it opened me up to realizing that I could, if I wanted to, just become this completely new person.

Silly as it sounds, that began with a hair straightener.

Friday, April 13, 2018

Of Surrender and Certainty...





“Were you happy?”

I hear that, said in Claire Danes’ voice, every day inside my head.

(It’s in her voice because she was Angela Chase, and she said it, choking back a cry, in one of the final episodes of My So-Called Life, when Rayanne and Angela’s friendship has all but ended and they are in a production of Our Town and it’s layered with meaning, and like all things about me, I carry that choke in her voice with me for no real reason other than it struck a chord with me when I was sixteen years old.)

There are so many parts of this new life that I truly love- falling all apart and piecing yourself back together is a fascinating process, and it makes you approach life from a different angle. From a kinder angle-kinder to other people, yes, but kinder to myself. I don’t know what I’m doing-the world can see that-and it frees me a bit of any expectation that people might think I do.

BUT.

Untangling yourself from someone is hard and messy and frankly, unfair. There are days that you just long for that person that you used to be, that person who didn’t question every little thing, who trusted easily and openly, that person who knew where on earth life was going.

There are many parts of being a single mom that are hard-I’m the only person to make all the decisions, to budget the money, to say no to things that I really, really want to say yes to.

I hate that my mom misses the old me. I hate that I can’t bring that girl back, if only for her sake, once in a while. But I can’t. It’s like something snapped inside of me. I know that it seems ridiculous-it’s a divorce, not war or death or anything-but I genuinely believe that it is a trauma that fissured my life. There is the before and there is the after.

“Were you happy?”

Yes, I was so happy in the before. I honestly thought that I had it all. I didn’t think that life could get any better than it was.

But the truth is, life is so much better in the after. It’s hard to remember sometimes, at the end of a long day, trying to make ends meet, just aiming to keep us all alive and fed for one more day. Sometimes it seems incredible to me, that once I had a human in my life who I did such monotonous things with- washing dishes, doing laundry-and I never once thought it unusual or special.

So, yes, life isn’t all roses in the after. I have to remind myself that where I am going is worth the sacrifice of where I had been. (The Israelites begged Moses to go back to Egypt. They would rather be slaves to what they knew than to keep going toward the Promised Land. Those Israelites keep me going on the days I want to give up. It is just human nature to want what we know. It is the brave thing to keep going, not knowing what lies ahead, stumbling and falling and getting hurt, blindsided even, but to keep going.)

Who knows? Maybe Brian Krakow has been here all along, and I was just too taken with Jordan Catalano to notice.