DIRECTOR’S NOTE

As I raise my three young children, I often find myself dancing between the roles of daughter and mother. When my son argues with me about why he has to practice the piano, I remember my mother’s gentle patience in teaching a whiny young me to play. When my daughter begs to climb to the highest reaches of the tree in our front yard, I simultaneously remember the thrill of seeing the world from up so high and feel the fear my mother must have felt as she trusted those little legs and scratchy branches to hold me. As I send my oldest off to a week of summer camp under the care of strangers, I remember the wild independence that would swell in my chest as a kid in my cabin bunk and at the same time wonder how my mother slept every night that I was away. We swap places every day, my children, my mother and me. And in the process my mother becomes more complex, more beautiful to me. I can see her quiet grief and the millions of ways she loved me without my knowing. Freaky Friday is for the mothers, the daughters, the parents, the children who have ever had trouble seeing each other through the messy tangles of grief and love.