Recovery
So for the entirety of the book and movie franchise, it was an amazing bonding experience, and I always treasured any Harry Potter moment with him. I will never forget there was this one line that my dad used as a lesson. At the end of book four, Dumbledore tells Harry "We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy." I don't remember the exact conversation that followed, or if he mentioned it after reading that part of the book or when we say the movie, but these words have resonated with me since then because they are so true.
That is exactly why I have rewritten this several times. Completely scrapped drafts and started from the beginning. It would be so easy to sit here and detail all the times I cried and hurt like when the young family of four started sitting in front of us at Mass or found out people I had to see on a regular basis were due right around the same time I should have been. That would be easy. But especially as reactions to my first post rolled in, I remembered that I'm not just writing for me. There are people who pick up my story who were right there beside me every step of the way. There are people who had no idea how to respond or help. There are people who didn't know I went through any of this and are experiencing it for the first time as they read it. There may even be some strangers who stumble across it who don't even know me.
So both for you and for me, I'm not going to get into every single wound and tear in this post. There are certainly some areas that I'll focus on in the following posts, but if this post is about recovery, I want to focus on the things that helped me recover - not the things that made it harder. I want to have a balance of joy and grief, hope and suffering. Even if it's not the easy way to write about my experience, it's the right way to write about it
