Harry Potter

I had a conversation with my best friend's mom some time ago and it just came to mind, so I thought I would include it here. It is important to know that I am a HUGE Harry Potter fan. I own all of the books, have seen all of the movies and own the ones that are available on DVD. I have a Hogwarts watch and a replica of the necklace Hermione wore ot travel through time. I even wore it to dress up as Hermione to hand out candy this Halloween. One of our wedding gifts was book six, which came out on our wedding day. We nearly had duplicate copies because multiple guests were going to buy it for us. My love of Harry Potter is no secret.

That said, my friend's mom does not share this adoration of Harry Potter. As she told me, she started reading the first book and it just wasn't there for her. She did not connect to the book in the way I did. She thought perhaps I was drawn to the magic and wizardry in a way that she was not. It really was not that for me at all, so a discussion ensued, where I basically stated the following.

*Harry Potter is a foster kid like I was.

*He was placed in kinship care after his parents died. I entered kinship care after my primary care taker, my grandma, died. They were all three (his parents and my grandma) taken in very sudden and horrific ways.

*Kinship care ended and he moved on to a place that better allowed him to be himself and pursue his talents. This was also true for me. Entering foster care allowed me more of an opportunity to be a kid, do extra-curriculars and make friends.

*Harry witnessed some terrible things in this new place. I witnessed some terrible things in foster care. I witnessed other kids being abused and was powerless to stop it. The people inflicting this were demented. He faced Dementors.

*He came through things that other people were amazed he was able to handle at such a young age. The same was true for me. No one expected me to bounce back so well.

*We both came through relatively intact, but with some definite scars from our experience.

As I sat here writing, I came up with the following additional parallels:

Though I have the above in common with Harry, I lived in families the size of Ron Weasly's (and want one in the future), had a disposition similar to Hermione Granger's in school (complete with getting on people's nerves with my academic focus) and still have Neville Longbottom's hand-eye coordination. I see a lot of myself in a number of the characters.

In addition, Hagrid reminds me of my foster uncles, if you cross Professor Dumbledore and Sirius Black, you get my husband and my foster mom is a transfiguration spell shy of being Professor McConagall. I have a foster aunt who reminds me of Professor Trelawny as well as a high school friend who is Neville through and through.

As far as the evil characters go, my Voldemort is death and separation from the ones you love. I have always had a hard time dealing with both and he deals them continuously. Draco Malfoy is every kid who ever gave me a hard time in school because I was new. When Hermione punched him in the face in book three, it was like she punched every bully on the bus for me. It was a beautiful moment. Lucius Malfoy is the adults who did not understand foster care and who acted weird toward me as a result. Snape represents for me all of my foster parents who should not have been licensed and appeared so transparent to me, while the authorities were completely oblivious to their B.S.

I had a foster family that punished one of my foster sisters by making her sit on the stairs to the basement for weeks on end, from the moment she woke up until she went to bed. No one was to speak to her or give her any attention of any type. The whole set up of the basement staircase and her isolation from everyone else in the house was what I thought of when I first read about Harry sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs.

So, I may be a bit obsessed with the books. I really connected with them. I would be interested to see if other foster children and former foster children feel the same way.