My mother was a squib. Her mother and father, my grandparents, were decently famous people. As were my aunts. My mother however, was born the youngest and a squib. Back in the day, a squib would have been chucked out and hidden away. My mother had a pretty decent childhood. My grandmother would tell me stories of how she would home school my mother under the muggle school system but always teach her as much wandless magic as she could. My mother could create basic potions that didn't include wand movements or incantations and tend to magical plants (the less dangerous ones). But never, ever showed any signs of magic herself. Slowly, my mother became bitter. My grandparents and aunts could see this, even when my mother was a young child. They always supported her in anything she did, almost to the point of over exuberance. It hadn't mattered. Slowly, over time the feeling of inadequacy had crept in and closed its tight grip over my dear mother's heart. When she went to college she started distancing herself from the family. She moved hundreds of miles away and went to a college across the country. Her sisters, having magical powers could obviously drop by whenever they wanted, concealing themselves from muggles and finding my mother only when she was alone. My grandparents run Flourish and Blotts in Diagon Alley so they can't leave. My mother slowly started writing less and so my grandmother only ever heard about her from my aunts.
My mother married a muggle. A very small ceremony. Him, his brother and my two aunts. I came nine months later. That was the very first time I met my grandmother. In a muggle hospital, in a muggle town, surrounded by muggles. It was also the very first time I breached the International Statue of Secrecy. After lots of screaming and crying and many other things that happen when a baby is born, a nurse had put me down in my crib, wrapped in a blanket. A few minutes later when she went to go pick me up to bring me to my mother, she gasped and stood by the crib staring.
"I swear she had black hair. Even after we washed and dried her. It was jet black."
My aunts and grandparents and father all rushed over to see what the nurse was babbling about. My hair was a bright blonde. Almost white my grandmother had said. My family exchanged looks. What could this mean? Was the nurse seeing things? A trick of the light? Something more magical than any mundane explanation? A few hours later would tell the whole story.
"My mother had finally dozed off into a sleep when I started crying. My mother got up and grabbed me and put me in bed with her, so I could eat. She fell asleep and had shifted her arms slightly away from me or something because the next thing she knew I was screaming and my hair was a brilliant flaming red. A nurse had come running in when she heard me screaming, but thankfully this was a different nurse and she didn't notice the color change of my hair. After assuring the nurse that she had just fallen asleep, my mother looked in panic at her husband, who had no idea of her family's magical history. Or so she thought. Without the knowledge of my mother, one of my aunts had laid a very particular plan in place a few days before they got married. She allowed, while making it look accidental, my father to witness her preforming magic. Nothing crazy, just something simple. She never said anything to him and neither he to her. But my father had thought long and hard about what he had seen and had come to the conclusion that maybe he didn't quite know everything about the world in front of him. So, a few minutes later when I was happily eating again, and my hair turned a vibrant shade of purple, my father only calmly said.
"That's a very neat trick. Should save her lots of money at the hair salon when she's grown."
Everyone in the room stared at him for a moment and then, "Well, I guess he's REALLY part of the family now!"/p
My Aunt Matilda, who had let Andy see her preforming a levitation charm, had exclaimed before throwing her arms around my father and hugging him. Becky, my mother, shot Matti a look before glancing at her other sister Nancy. Five whole years separated Nancy from Becky. As my father chuckled and finally felt accepted by her family for the first time, my mother also felt herself slipping away from her husband. She clutched tighter at me, fearing the worst. I was going to be magical.
My mother home schooled me, like her mother had for her. I was their only child. After going through severe depression after my birth, my mother became barren and though her and my father tried many times, they couldn't have more kids. As I grew up, I witnessed first-hand my mother being jealous of magic. I would often change my appearance depending on what I would pretend play when I was young. If I was a pirate, I would shorten my hair and twist up my nose as if I had been fighting. Minus the blood of course. If I was pretending to be a fairy, my hair would be long enough to touch the floor and a bright blue or green. I would make my ears long and pointy. Every time my mother would catch me doing this she would sigh exasperatedly or say things like,
"Where did my daughter go? Who are you?" "Can you just stop that? I'd rather see the face you were born with." "What if you forget your real face?"
At first when she said this, it would scare me, and I would start to cry and change back. But then my father lost his job when I was seven and my mother went to work. He took over the job of homeschooling me. It was a huge shock at first for him when I really started gaining control over my transformation powers. He had sent me to play in our huge fenced in yard and had come to check on me when he had found a little boy with a twisted nose in his garden instead. I instantly started crying and changed back. My father had hugged me and asked me why I was crying.
"I'm afraid I'll forget my real face and never go back to it. Then you and mom will forget who I am." I sobbed into his shirt.
"He held me close and hugged me and said words I'll never forget.
"I'll always remind you what your real face looks like. I could never forget it. Half me, half your mom, all perfect little Lucy. You can be whoever you want to be. Look however you want to look. It's what's inside that really counts. How you treat other people. What you work hard for and what your goals are. What you want to achieve in life! Those are the things that matter."
"I found a new love for my powers and used them frequently. This annoyed my mother, so I stopped doing it quite as often again, except for one tiny detail. I kept my original look, my almond shaped green eyes, my soft nose and chin, my long straight hair with bangs. The only thing I changed was my hair color. I made it permanently purple. My vibrant purple of happiness. It's the color I think of when I got my Hogwarts letter at eleven years old.
My transformation wasn't the only sign of my magical abilities. I often had a knack for making plants grow extra fast and hovering things around me I didn't want to hold. Often, when I was still a toddler, my parents would hear my cup drop and turn around to pick it up for me, only to find it was already in my hand. Or the one time I decided to stand up in my highchair because I couldn't see my mother cutting my food on the counter. She had turned around to bring an apple to my highchair and gasped very loudly. This had scared me and caused me to lose my balance. While my mother dropped what she was holding and dove to catch me, I had giggled and bounced right between her arms, as if I were on the moon. I was 3.
This wasn't the first time my magic had shown through. The day I got my letter to Hogwarts was the best day of my life. It was equally my mother's worst day. She cried. I cried out of happiness and then sadness. Why couldn't she just be proud of me? It wasn't anyone's fault she was a squib. Least of all mine. Why did she always make me feel like me having magic was the reason she was a squib?
My aunt's and grandparents were over the moon with happiness. My aunts came the same day I sent our family owl (a gift my mother was reluctant to let me accept from my grandmother). They hadn't received my owl but had known that if I got a Hogwarts letter, that was the day I would have gotten it. They convinced my mother to let them stay and take me by Flu Powder to Diagon Alley for shopping the next day. I begged my mother to come with. She was trying her hardest to explain that she had too much work to do and that it would be much more fun with just me and my aunts. I knew she didn't want to watch me do what she had wished she could do for years.