Magic Words

Good gracious, it’s summer, and who wants to talk about vocabulary words? Nobody, but I am out of work so somebody needs to play school with me. Luckily, Hadley and Harper are willing participants. Especially, if the activities have to do with Harry Potter. We have been bitten by the Harry Potter bug big time in the Feyen household. Currently, Harper believes she is a mix between Luna and Herminone. Hadley, somewhere between Ron and Harry. I think they think Jesse is like Lupin but that freaks them out a bit. The girls haven’t given me a character yet, but we have started the sixth book and they are now disgusted that I have been saying all along that I love Snape. I cannot defend myself at the moment because it’ll ruin the entire story, but they’re not happy about my choice.

So let’s say you’re afraid of a character in a book. Let’s say you empathize a bit when other characters are so afraid of this certain character that they don’t even want to say his name. Let’s say you can’t stop thinking about that character, though. What will he do next, and how will he do it? Why is he mean? What would happen if you learned to spell his name in salt and “magic crystals?”

I had the girls go outside and find a stick while I poured salt into shallow pans (these are jellyroll pans, but you could use any glass dish). When they returned, I handed them tin foil to turn their sticks into wands, sprinkled colored sugar on the salt, then set out pieces of paper with words from the Harry Potter books on them.

 

Hadley and Harper picked up a piece of paper, read the word, then wrote it using their wands to scratch out letters. “I need more magic,” they’d say and I’d shake more sugar onto the pan. It’s delightedly strange to me how easy it is to enter a fictitious world. Those sticks were wands, and that sugar was magic crystals. Perhaps suspending what is real for a time helps us play around with what it is we are afraid of.

 

One of the words on the paper was “trepidation,” and the girls wanted to know what that meant. I asked them what it sounds like. Harper says, “Like trembling.” I said, “OK, when would you tremble?”

“When you’re scared,” she said.

“That’s exactly what trepidation feels like,” I told them. “You get the jitters, or your tummy feels funny because you’re just not sure what’s going on, or what’s coming next.”

It was quiet after that, save for whiffs of paper being turned over, and the scratch of the wands. Then Hadley said, “I feel trepidation over moving to Michigan.”

“Me, too,” Harper said.

“Me, too,” I admitted.

 

 

 

 

“Mommy, you can still walk when you have trepidation, though, right?” Harper asked, writing “Slytherin” on her tray.

“Yeah, you can still walk.”

We might walk a bit more carefully, more slowly. We might notice a bit more, too, as we step into a new reality taking what it is we imagine about it and learning what’s true.

It’s a risky, scary business, but not saying the words for how we feel doesn’t make them go away. We’ve written them down and it might not have taken away what we are afraid of, but we know we can be afraid, and we can walk. I think that’s pretty magical.