Chapter 7: St. Stephen's Church
St. Stephen's Church was a large Gothic building of light gray stone surrounded by a stone wall with wrought iron gates decorated with black modern metal sculptures. Tall, thin, leafy trees cast their shadows on the walls and shrubbery, and above the trees, in the bright blue morning sky, a few tiny white clouds hung motionless. Sunlight slanted through the small-paned windows on the east side of the church, illuminating the interior of the Fireside Room (so named because of the stone fireplace on one wall) where Patricia was setting out the final items from her box of supplies. She had moved the upholstered chairs to form a supportive circle with some small tables nearby, and there was a box of biscuits and hot water for tea. In between the framed portraits of saints hanging on the walls Patricia had placed some posters, secured by special tape that wouldn't damage the walls when they were taken down again. Some brochures and leaflets about parenting skills were on a side table, along with a box of facial tissues. Patricia taped a sign that read "Parents Together" on the Fireside Room door, and another sign reading "Parents Together Today" on the outer door of the church.
Twice a month Patricia hosted a meeting of the self-help groups she had talked about at the volunteers' training session. Once a month at St. Stephen's Church on Saturday morning, and once a month at St. Alphege's on Wednesday evening in a different part of the city. It was important to make the room seem warm, friendly, and welcoming. Coming here was a big step for these parents. Patricia wanted to make it easy.
She never knew how many people would show up. Occasionally no one did. Usually there were some familiar faces, people who were returning for continuing support and who wanted to pass along some of the help they had received. There might also be a few new faces, many of whom came only once and never again.
Between 9:55 and 10:05 a.m. three women arrived. It was almost always women. Patricia knew these three from previous months. She greeted them by name, and they made themselves comfortable in the chairs and began to chat.
Then the door opened again. This time it was a man. After a moment Patricia recognized him -- it was the young black-haired policeman from the volunteers' class. She had picked up the feeling at the class, from the questions he had asked, that this policeman had had some previous encounters with the issue of child abuse, and she had assumed that it was through his professional work. But now she realized that it was personal.
"Come in," she said warmly. "It is nice to see you again. I'm glad that you came." She deliberately used the word "again" to acknowledge the tiny, brief relationship that had been established at the volunteers' class. She wanted him to feel that he was in a safe place with friends. She knew that it was an act of courage for people to come at all. They were wounded and wary.
Harry stepped tentatively into the room, closing the door behind him while keeping his eyes fixed on the group. Instinctively he took in all the details of the room -- the four faces with welcoming expressions, the unoccupied chairs, the tray of biscuits and tea, the posters, against a background of dark wood paneling and cream-colored plaster, bookshelves, and small-paned windows. He moved over to an armchair and sat down.
The previous evening, in the solitude of his drawing room, Harry had taken stock of all that he had learned in the past few days. A lot of vague, confusing impressions were becoming clearer, and random observations were beginning to fall into place. Underlying concepts were beginning to take shape. Things were making sense.
There was no doubt about it -- he had not come through the years in the Dursley household unscathed. The mildest term that he could apply to his present self was "altered" or "changed". A harsher term would be "damaged". Damaged goods.
It is so easy to get damaged in life, he thought. Idly he looked at his hands and arms, turning them back and forth. So many scars. Those physical injuries had healed up with no loss of function, and only faint lines on the skin as reminders. But there were other hurts, less visible to the naked eye, injuries of the soul, still unhealed. If he waited for them to heal by themselves, like wounds of the skin, he might be waiting forever.
People get hurt, Harry thought. George had lost an ear many years ago, during their desperate mass exodus from Privet Drive to the Burrow, and that injury could never be repaired. Now George was effectively deaf on one side, and if you forgot that fact and failed to speak to his good ear, he was likely to miss what you were saying.
But what had happened to Harry in the house on Privet Drive had been human damage, not magical damage, and there ought to be some way to make it better. I'm young, Harry had thought. .I've got my whole life to get better.
Harry had walked over to his his writing desk and picked up the pile of papers that he had collected during the past few days, riffing through them, looking for something that would tell him what he should do next, but there had been no brochure entitled "How to Recover From an Abusive Childhood in Ten Easy Steps". As he had sorted through the pile, his eye had fallen on the printed sheet describing Patricia's self-help groups, with meeting schedules.
A self-help group? he had thought, and then it had struck him that that was what he and his mates had been doing for years, solving their problems and facing their challenges with self-help. What was Dumbledore's Army if not the ultimate self-help group? It didn't matter if no one in their group had been an expert; they had built on each other's strengths, and together had accomplished more than the sum of their individual capabilities. Perhaps now he did not need an expert who had all the answers, as he had childishly believed Professor Dumbledore to be, during those first few years at Hogwarts. Maybe what he needed was people like himself, people who could talk the talk because they had walked the walk, people who knew from personal experience what really worked.
In the Fireside Room, Patricia started the tray of biscuits going around the group and poured cups of tea. Pass the tea and biscuits early and often was the principle. Then she suggested first-name introductions.
"My name is Patricia. I've been involved with this group for over ten years. I came to this group because I knew I needed to get to a better space with my own family, and then I took special training from the Parents Together organization so that I could be more effective in helping other parents too."
Then the other three women introduced themselves, one by one. Their names were Nancy, Marjorie, and Ida. Nancy and Marjorie appeared to be in their thirties, and Ida looked older. They spoke briefly about their families, their husbands and children, and how long they had been members of this group, but they didn't tell their own stories at length, and Harry assumed that they had all done so in previous months. Today it's my turn, he thought.
The introduction cycle came around to him. He hesitated a moment and then reminded himself that these people didn't know him and that this group could not help him if he kept secrets. He took a deep breath and said, "My name is Harry. This is the first time I have come to a group like this. I'm married. My wife and I are expecting our first child soon." He fell silent, not knowing how to go on. Nancy, Marjorie, and Ida sat with expectant looks on their faces, watching him carefully, looking as if they really wanted to hear what he had to say. For a long minute they sat without speaking and gave him a chance to continue, and then Patricia encouraged him.
"What is it that brings you here to us today?"
The words tumbled out in a rush, as Harry sat with his knees apart, elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped between them, looking down at the carpet and not meeting anyone's eyes.
"I'm not sure what's going on with me, but something isn't right. Maybe it has something to do with how I grew up. I don't know anything for sure. But I have to do something. That's why I'm here." He lifted his head and looked hopefully into their faces, and he saw kindness and caring there.
"Tell us how you grew up," Patricia continued in a soothing voice, and Harry began to speak again.
"My parents died when I was a baby and I was sent to live with my mum's sister and her husband. They already had a boy about my age, and they didn't want me. I reminded my aunt of her sister, my mum, and there was bad feeling between them. They didn't get along. When they were just girls, my mum outshone my aunt academically, and my mum was accepted at a school for specially talented children. My aunt wasn't, and she felt overlooked while my mum was getting all the praise. They were totally estranged at the end. So you can see my aunt and uncle weren't very happy when I was dumped on their doorstep." He went on, describing in detail what his life was like with the Dursleys, and he could see that Nancy, Marjorie , and Ida were reacting to it with pained looks, pursed lips, and slow shakes of the head.
"Looking back, I can see how, what can I say, how bad my home life was. I think of it as unnatural, and then I think about how many children must be in the same boat, so maybe it wasn't so uncommon." He stopped talking and waited for their reaction.
Ida, the older woman, remarked, "But for you it was your whole reality." Harry nodded and sipped his tea.
Patricia started the biscuit tray going around again and asked, "Did you feel that your aunt and uncle were afraid of what people would think about you?"
Harry nodded and said, "I'm surprised that you guessed that. They were very concerned, all the time, about what other people thought, especially what they would think about someone like me. When visitors came to the house I was supposed to stay out of sight."
"It's an easy guess," Patricia replied. "Abusive parents are often very afraid of what other people think because they feel that they are always being judged and coming up short. So they try hard to control what their children do, in order to avoid criticism, and it degenerates into abuse."
"I think my aunt must have felt that way, that she was compared to her sister, my mum, and always came up short. But my aunt and uncle had their own son also, my cousin Dudley, and they treated him very differently. They gave him everything he wanted, overindulged him, you would say. He was a bully toward me also, but now, looking back, I think he was just imitating what he saw them do. I think, in the long run, he had to learn everything the hard way."
"That's a form of abuse too," said Marjorie softly.
Ida leaned forward and interjected, "It seems that when your mum and your aunt were girls, your mum was the winner and your aunt was the loser. Then, when your aunt was an adult, her son became the winner and your mum's son became the loser. I guess that evened things out, didn't it?"
Harry was speechless for a minute. So, apparently, were the other women, because no one spoke. Finally Harry found his tongue again and said, "I never thought about it that way before."
"I don't have a university degree," Ida replied, "but I've learned a lot just by living."
"Go on with your story, Harry," Patricia urged.
"Well," Harry resumed, "when I was eleven I went away to a boarding school, and life was so much better. I had friends, played sports, accomplished important things. I left my aunt and uncle's home forever when I was seventeen and never went back. Now I have a good job, a wife who loves me, a baby on the way. Everything should be fine. But I've been having these frightening dreams. I dream about hurting the baby, like letting it starve, or letting it fall off a cliff. I wake up in the night and can't go back to sleep. It spoils my mood for hours. Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy. The I saw this advert that said 'When you hear the words "child abuse and neglect", do you think about your own childhood or the parenting you are doing now?' and I thought Maybe this is a way out."
There. He had said it all. To a roomful of strange women. Muggles.
They all sat in silence for a minute. Harry sipped on his tea, waiting for someone to say something. Then Patricia broke the silence by asking, "What are you most afraid of?"
Harry thought a moment. "What will I do in the future? Are there things I don't have control over?"
"And what do you want most?"
"To be a good father. To give my children the happiest childhood possible."
Marjorie, who had not said much so far, now spoke up. "You have control over a lot, including the most important things. If you are determined to have a good family life and can envision what that looks like, you can make it happen. You are really smart, Harry, you are really smart to try to deal with this before your children are born, and not after. I didn't really understand I had a problem until after my first child was born, and I used to get so angry at him. It seemed like I got angry every day, and I didn't want to be that sort of a mum. He was so little and I was so big. So I started looking for help, and I learned that he really wasn't doing things to try to hurt me. He was just being a normal, runabout baby. But I was reacting as if he was trying to make me angry, because earlier in my life there really had been people who were trying to hurt me. So immediately I stopped reacting to him as if he were one of them because I could see that he wasn't. After that it was easy to be a loving mum all the time. But I feel so guilty about what I did at first, and just hope it won't make a difference for him in the long run."
Nancy had not offered any comments yet, but now she ventured to speak.
"I can give you an example from my own life. When I was maybe eight years old, I was in a play at school. I was cast in the role of the grandmother, and I told my mother that I needed a costume, something that would make me look like a grandmother. But she wouldn't help me; she told me just to wear my regular school frock. I knew that wouldn't look right. My teacher would be disappointed. I didn't know what to do, so the next day I told my mother I had a stomach ache and I stayed home from school, so that I wouldn't have to show up with no costume. I didn't think about the trouble I caused when Grandmother didn't show up for the performance. I was just a little girl. I wasn't asking for much -- a shawl and an apron. Then, when my own daughter was about eight, she told me one night around bedtime that she was in a school pageant and needed the national costume of Sweden the next morning. I remembered a book I had that had instructions for dressing dolls in costumes of different countries, so I found it and -- praise the Lord -- Sweden was one of them. So I took my scrap basket and my chest of fabrics and started sewing. I sewed from eight o'clock at night until four in the morning, but my daughter had the national costume of Sweden. I vowed that I would treat her better than I had been treated, and I did. Every day I hugged my children and told them that I loved them and that I was the luckiest mum in the world to have them."
"It doesn't always work that way," Harry observed. "I knew a family, or rather I knew of them, where the old man was a vicious, foul-mouthed drunk, violent with everyone, including his own family. And his son was no better; he ended up in prison. But the grandson was the worst of the lot. He murdered several people before he himself died violently. None of them vowed to do better."
"In order to break the cycle of abuse, it helps to have some insight into what's going on, and to have some good role models," Patricia said. "When my children were about twelve or thirteen, I asked them if they ever believed that if they did anything wrong, people would be angry at them forever, and they said no, they never believed that, and I thought Hallelujah, I've broken the chain, because I always believed that when I was a child."
Marjorie spoke up again. "Before I realized that my childhood had affected my thinking, I believed that people liked me only for what they could get from me, not for my real self. Then I started coming to this group and my friends told me to listen to my body and think about what I really wanted. One night I was up late doing housework because I thought that was how I could make my husband love me. It was about eleven o'clock at night, and I remembered what my friends said, so I asked myself what I really wanted to do, and what I really wanted to do was to go to bed because I was so tired. So I did. That was a big step for me."
"Is that all it takes, just insight?" asked Harry. That seemed too simple.
"I think that insight is an important first step. It's hard to see how you could heal without it," explained Patricia. "But changing the thinking patterns that have become ingrained takes work. It can take a long time to modify beliefs that people like you only for what they can get from you, or that no one will help you, or that you can't ask for help, or that you are always alone, or that people will judge you harshly for your weaknesses, or that you don't deserve anything good."
Harry refilled his cup from the teapot and said, "I can relate to that, thinking that I have to solve problems alone, not asking for help. My friends have tried to tell me that I don't have to do everything alone. You can tell how desperate I was, to come here and look for help." He was feeling more and more relaxed, and talking to these women, strangers no longer, was actually getting easy. To his surprise, speaking without perpetually censoring his own thoughts was beginning to feel natural, no doubt encouraged by their own willingness to share.
"Remember the words on on our poster Act as if..., said Patricia, pointing to one of the posters she had taped to the wall earlier that morning. "It means that in order to change your thinking, you have to change your behavior first. Act as if you had a certain quality, such as trust, even though it feels phony at first, and eventually your mind will start to match your actions."
"I had a friend like that," Harry reflected. "He wasn't brave at first, but circumstances forced him to act brave, and in the end he was truly courageous. He changed and grew." He looked around the room. "What does your other poster mean, It's never too late to have a happy childhood.? How can that be?" He thought briefly of time-turners and how he and Hermione had used one for a few hours when he was thirteen years old. But a whole childhood? There could be no do-over for a whole epoch of one's life.
"What it means to me is that I can relive childhood through my own children and other children I work with. When I do things with my own children, it's almost like being a child again. I can learn things I should have learned in childhood, like trusting, letting go of worry, enjoying living in the moment, doing stuff for fun And it makes me happy when I do things that make children happy. Their joy rubs off on me." Patricia smiled while saying these words, as if she were reliving happy memories of her own.
"I have to give myself permission to play with my children's toys, like weaving a belt on my daughter's inkle loom, or reading one of her storybooks, but when I do, it's fun," Marjorie chimed in.
Harry shook his head incredulously. "You know, for the first time in my life, this is making sense." He looked around the group at all the women, one by one, and continued, "I've told you a lot about me, more than I ever told anyone else before. Now tell me about yourselves, where you started from, how you are progressing, how you are making your lives be better."
He hoped they would not consider his request to be too bold or intrusive, and apparently they did not. As he sat in his armchair drinking tea, Harry heard stories of neglect, emotional abuse, favoritism, alcoholic parents, deprivation, and chaotic family environments, but he also heard stories of hope, optimism, determination, and refusal to give up. Hearing these stories, Harry felt mingled emotions of sadness and encouragement, sadness that the effects of abuse had run so deep and lasted so long, but encouragement that these narrators were still bravely struggling toward wholeness.
Patricia leaned back in her armchair, holding her teacup in both hands, and addressed Harry in a serious tone.
"Does your wife -- what is her name?"
"Ginny."
"Does Ginny know that you came here? Have you talked with her about any of this?"
"No, I haven't. I didn't want to upset her. I didn't want to burden her with gruesome images of dead babies while she's pregnant."
"Talk to her, Harry. Tell Ginny what's happening, and what you're doing and thinking. Trust that she can handle it. Let her help you. Let go of the idea that you have to solve it alone, or that she will think less of you if she knows. That's the old Harry talking. Don't keep it a secret."
"That's what Ginny and I said before we got married -- no secrets."
"That was a good idea."
"I think I know what to say now."
"Even if it doesn't seem natural, remember -- Act as if. It takes time; building a strong whole personality from a foundation of abuse takes time, and I think it will always, in a way, be part of the definition of who you are. I'm still working on it, still learning, and I'm forty-eight years old."
"My mum was twenty years old when she had me. If she were still alive, she would be forty-four today, kind of like you." He stood up and started putting on his coat. "I can't tell you how helpful this has been for me. I'm sorry that I can't stay longer."
"Will we see you again next month?" Patricia asked.
"I don't know," Harry replied. "I'm just feeling my way. It's like I'm in the dark, feeling the terrain with my hands and feet." The thought flashed into his head that he had literally been feeling his way in the dark many times, but never quite like this.
"We're glad you came today, and you'll always be welcome back."
"Do many men come to this group?" asked Harry. "I notice I'm the only one today."
"No, not many. It's not that they couldn't benefit from it, but it takes a certain courage."
Harry exchanged parting words with Ida, Marjorie, and Nancy and went out, closing the door softly behind him. He walked through the church foyer, out into the fresh air, and along the pavement. He felt more hopeful than he had been since the dreams began. He thought about what Patricia had said about having good role models. Morfin and Merope, and probably their father Marvolo, had had no such experience; they had never known love. He, on the other hand, had known fifteen months of love from his parents at the beginning of his life. He didn't remember any of it. After all, what could a baby remember? His only mental images were from photographs and other people's memories, but he must have understood something, in his baby way, during those fifteen months. He began to review his earliest memories of his godson Teddy Lupin. What could Teddy do at the age of fifteen months? He could walk very well and say a few words, and Harry had been sure, when Teddy was fifteen months old, that Teddy could understand a lot of what was being said. So maybe he himself had learned a lot about love in his first fifteen months, enough so that he too could "break the chain" and get back to where he needed to be. Professor Dumbledore had often told him that his mother's love had protected him from Lord Voldemort. Maybe it had protected him from the Dursleys too.