Ch 39: End of An Era
While Ron and Hugo both tried to encourage Hermione to come and stay with them that night, she insisted she really preferred to be on her own for a bit. Hugo finally just shrugged and hugged her tightly. Ron hugged her and held her close for a moment before kissing her cheek, reminding her she could change her mind and come over or call any time. She appreciated their concern, but found herself relieved by the quiet when Ron, Hugo and the stuffed unicorn he had claimed from Rose's bed left that evening.
Hermione turned and faced her empty home expecting to feel the sting of Rose's absence, but was surprised to discover that contentment was the overwhelming emotion. While she had not thought she would be sobbing while she looked through baby pictures, she had thought she would still feel a resonating sadness and emptiness in her home with Rose gone. While she tried to picture Rose in the Great Hall that evening and tried to imagine how she was doing, she knew that aside from picturing the setting, the emotions and experiences Rose was facing were not something she could pretend to imagine.
Hermione sat on her stairwell for a few minutes and listened to the quiet. She remembered when she had found this home, and Dennis and Fiona had found their home nearby the same day. The kids were so young then, and she remembered her first night here with Rose. She didn't have enough furniture to fill up the house then, which Rose thought was amazing as she just ran laps through the whole place or bounced balls against the walls. Rose had especially loved how her little voice echoed through the mostly empty house. Enjoying the acoustics, Hermione and Rose spent many an hour singing together in the sitting room when it only had one sofa in it. When Hermione really couldn't take one more silly song from Blue Peter, she had finally started introducing some of her favorite songs from various musicals. Sitting there on the stairs, she could practically still hear that little toddler version of Rose trying to sing and dance to "It's a Hard Knock Life" from Annie.
Giggling at that memory, she let herself recall the nights Fiona had been working late when Dennis would come over with an infant Hugo, exhausted and bewildered at how to manage a baby on his own. She had shown him how carrying Rose around in a sling had helped calm her down as a baby. And soon she had rigged Dennis and Hugo up in sling she had brought from Pakistan. Despite how unusual it looked, the sling had worked well for them, and Dennis carried Hugo around in that gorgeous fabric wrap for months. She really missed Dennis, and truly wished he could have known that she and Rose were witches. It would have been amazing to stand on the platform together today. Knowing how nervous she had been to let Rose go to Hogwarts, she wondered how the Creeveys ever found the nerve to let Collin go all those years ago. But Collin had always been so eager to embrace every experience, so she didn't suppose he was too scared to hop on the train and start taking pictures of his new world.
After a while, she decided she wanted to draw a warm bath and soak with a glass of wine. She lit some candles with her wand, quite pleased with her skill, and tried to remember the warming charm she had recently read. After a few tries, she finally got it, and had a warm bath in the beautiful glow of candles. As she soaked she thought back to the young woman she had been just before she left for the refugee camps. Motherhood was such an all-encompassing vortex that it took a few minutes to try to think back to remember the passions, drives and hopes that her younger self had before setting off on the journey that would unexpectedly take her to Rose. It wasn't that she didn't enjoy motherhood – it had been the most amazing experience of her life. But, especially as a single mum, there had been no time or opportunity to pursue anything on her own. Even with Fiona's demanding schedule, she and Dennis had still traded off enough for Dennis to play in a recreational football league. But as a single parent, the only time Hermione sought out child care tradeoffs had been to go to work, attend doctors' appointments or similarly non fun activities.
But now she had a chance to find some of her own self again – to reclaim those parts of her identity that weren't wrapped up in motherhood. And she wanted to be really sure she didn't leap straight from single motherhood and into Ron's arms because she didn't know what else to do. That wouldn't be fair to Ron, to her, or to the kids. And, as much as she wanted to absorb every possible ounce of magical knowledge, she didn't want to lose the things that had interested her before she ever learned of magic.
She thought back to when she was fresh out of university, full of ideals and itching to take on the injustices of the world. Looking back now, Hermione chuckled at the naiveté of youth that allowed her to think that so many problems could be solved if only people would let her explain what they should do. Her energy and Oxford education had her feeling she could do anything. While her heart and ideals had been in the right place, she soon had a crash course education on how the real world worked. Those first few months where every plan hit an obstacle were hard. She had never really thought about the need to be humble or to be respectful of elders who were not respectful to you. She had always thought the right idea would eventually win out. But those first few months abroad helped her finally learn that humans are always political animals – no matter if they were the Prime Minister of England or the illiterate, impoverished clan elder who still expected to be in a position of power, even if he was living in a tent in a refugee camp. Continually butting heads with various family patriarchs or village elders forced her to understand that she had to respect others' ideas even if she didn't agree with them. And eventually she realized that the best solutions usually came from the people they impacted the most instead of from the "educated" outsiders who often didn't understand the whole situation to begin with. If plans were ever to be successfully implemented, the impacted people needed to come up with the ideas themselves. She couldn't dictate solutions, but she could help people learn frameworks and decision processes in which they could gather information, learn about options and eventually reach their own conclusions.
Once she had adopted Rose, her passion for refugees had not changed, but she had become more pragmatic about what she could do, what she could offer, and what she was willing to compromise. She felt the need to be more efficient with her efforts so that any time spent away from Rose would be at least the most effective use of time she could give. But now she was back to this space where she could reconsider how she wanted to focus her time and energy. She knew she needed to focus some on Hugo, and some on Ron. But she sensed that there were going to be a lot more options of how to spend her time and energy than she had experienced for almost a dozen years.
As the warm water soaked the worry from her muscles, she thought about what that could look like. Many women she'd worked with over the years seemed to join gyms and try to "get healthy" when they became empty nesters. But Hermione knew she would never find fulfillment in that. She let her mind wander to consider what excited her, and her heart consistently returned to magic. Eventually she realized she was grinning at the thought of having time to read those books she had been discussing with Sally Sparrow at Hogwarts. She really did want to learn the history that Oxford had left out of her training. And to learn and practice the crafts of charms and transfiguration, and maybe learn how they had evolved over time to become whatever it was today, well, just the thought of it all made her a bit giddy. She also wanted to go back and learn about the witches in America that she had read about all those years ago. There were so many holes in her education she desperately wanted to fill in.
She took another sip of her wine and thought more about her work. While learning for the sake of learning thrilled her, it felt almost too indulgent to allow. And while she wanted to make up for her missing magical education, she still felt a deep obligation to contribute to the world and to advocate for those who were not able to do so themselves. But, as she pondered that further, she wondered if there might be some opportunities to merge her current work with her magical education. Rose was obvious proof that there were magical people amidst the refugees of the world. And in many of the rural, impoverished areas she had visited around the world, there was a pervasive fear of magic and curses. She wondered if they were actually aware of the magical world and wanted it out of their communities, or if those accusations were, as she had long suspected, false. The idea of being able to help magical refugees or even magical people in the developing world who didn't have the luxury of places like Hogwarts excited her. But, she was sure she needed to grow her own knowledge base before she could even begin to understand what she didn't know, let alone help anyone else.
As her vocational excitement bubbled inside her, she thought again of Ron and Hugo, who had both been so concerned for her earlier that evening. While she was thrilled about the idea of being able to sleep in Ron's arms, and wake up to a sleepy headed Hugo, she was anxious about not living in her own home. And the idea of not being the one adult in charge of her family and home was strange. Her decision had always been final. So, the idea of trying to tiptoe around others' feelings and thoughts, not to mention all while living in what was more or less still Dennis and Fiona's guest room gave her great pause.
When she finally decided she needed to get out of the bath before she became permanently pruned, she dried off and wandered back into Rose's room. But after a moment of smiling at some of the pictures Rose had hung on her bulletin board, she headed back into her own room and crawled into bed. As she lay there, she laughed at how her dreams had changed. When she was a teenager or in her early twenties, she dreamt of her life starting - mainly figuring out how to change the world and finding the man of her dreams. When Mr. Right hadn't shown up by the time she found Rose, she dreamt of motherhood, and still fantasized about falling in love. But now Mr. Right wasn't simply a daydream, but a wonderful ginger wizard who loved her, and she had two incredible kids. Now that those earlier dreams were more or less her reality, her fantasies were evolving yet again and circling back to fueling her mind, her interests and her passions, as well as figuring out how she could use her talents to help the world around her.
She fell into a contented sleep unsure of what was to come, but surprisingly excited to find out.
