Me, Mom, and Harry Potter Part 1

Wasn't she a cute little girl?

Although my mom and I are close we've never been able to find the kind of similar interests that pull most mothers and daughters together.  Often it has felt like our interests just barely slip past one another.  We are both crafty but wire jewelry and cross stitch seem like a foreign language to my mom who loves sewing clothes and making wreaths.  She was able to share a love of cooking and baking with her mother while growing up and I still remember seeing her cry when she realized that even mac and cheese is beyond my ability.  I've always been a huge book worm and movie enthusiast but in the past my mom has had a really hard time sitting down for more than a few minutes before jumping up to get something else done.  I'll admit that her attention span always seemed a bit lacking when it came to those things.  And I should probably add how much I hate to shop for clothes which is something that has always mystified my mom and sister.

No matter how much we tried to find some mother-daughter activity it always ended with one of us trying to humor the other person and neither of us really having fun.  I think that our first real turning point was when my mom watched the tv show My So Called Life about five years ago.  Oddly enough when I was first a fan of this show I hid it from my mom.  I was quite young at the time, maybe 8 or 9 and I knew that she wouldn't like some of the subject matter.  If you aren't familiar with it, it is about a teenager who is struggling to find out who she is and where she is in her life.  Since watching her three children leave the house my mom has really started to mellow out and what once would have stressed her out she was now ready for.  As soon as she saw me order in the box set of the series she asked to borrow it and instantly fell in love with it.  I think that it might have helped her understand some things about us.  Most of the TV moms that she knew and loved were all very close to their kids and fully in synch with them but the pair in this TV show didn't understand each other.  The mom wanted her daughter to remain the sweet child who wore matching outfits with her and the daughter believed that her mother was blind and inexperienced.  Both were wrong of course.

So what does this have to do with Harry Potter?  At the urging of my husband I've decided to blog a bit about the most recent interest that my mom and I have bonded over.  This first blog is to help you understand the context of what has really been achieved and also to help you understand the strange but special relationship that I have with my mom.

It is a bit late but Happy Mother's Day anyway.