My Life With Dean, Or, How Disney Nearly Ruined My Relationship

~*~*~

I've never been accused of being a simple woman.

I've cultivated a very posh, sophisticated appearance indeed and stand by it above all else. I give my children, all of them, a lot of love, without fail. I just tend to show it privately. In the world as it is now, one's image is often the most valuable thing one has. It's important to hold that close and sacred.

I cannot abide the fawning, overly physical doting I see in the mothers around me. It seems as though they have no understanding of social graces. Not only does it not teach children the boundaries they so desperately need, but it also gives some of the deviants that are certainly lurking around town the wrong idea. If children get too used to physical affection, they're more susceptible to deceit. I had enough experience with those that try to prey on young children in my own youth and am not about to open my children up for anything I could prevent with simple precautions.

After my first husband left, the odious whispers and nasty rumours that had plagued my aloof appearance all but disappeared. In fact, they began to serve me quite well. I no longer was expected to chat up the neighbors with excruciatingly polite small talk on the pavement or in the market. People then assumed that my reserved demeanour was in part due to the abrupt manner in which he had disappeared, leaving me with a young child and a broken heart.

~*~*~

Love may not have served me well in the end, but it had been good for several years. Graham Aldridge had always shared the run of the household with me. He'd assumed that I would want that.

I'd grown up with a fierce independent streak that my grandmother never quite knew how to handle. That later helped me after she died. In my years of nearly clinical observation of others while working as a waitress, a dress shop attendant, and a secretary, I'd noticed that some of the richest women seemed to play second fiddle to their important husbands. I decided early on in my observation that it might be necessary to play that role, or at the very least, keep up that appearance. I could scheme and plan and be a puppet master with the best of them.

But, I hadn't needed to.

It still amazes me how instantly Graham and I'd clicked, how nearly effortless our transition from single to couple had been.

I tell you this not because I'm interested in sharing my story with you, as it's not really any of your business, but because it helps make sense of Dean's. Sometimes the only way to learn about someone is through their mother.

Right?

~*~*~

Dean, my son, my eldest, had filled me with such awe when he was born. I still remember being handed a wrapped bundle after six hours of labour and looking down at him: swaddled, warm, and gentle. He'd looked up at me for a long moment before closing his eyes and breathing a slow, deep sigh. I'd felt as though I'd somehow passed a very important test.

"That's a real serious one you've got there, Mr. and Mrs. Aldridge," the nurse had said, touching his dark, wet curls, "You can always tell. He's going to be something special."

My husband had beamed at the nurse, but I kept my eyes on Dean. I knew he was special. I'd seen it in his eyes.

I spent hours holding him and examining his fingers during the hours when he slept and nursed and started to watch the world around him. Dean had long, delicate, powerful fingers. He still does. I found them mesmerizing. Tiny, half-moons decorated the base of his fingernails, and I marveled at them -- each was a perfect size, a tiny replica of all of the others.

I privately entertained the idea that all of his strength and talent was compressed into those tiny spaces, that they were somehow deceiving the casual observer, but that if you really looked, you'd be overwhelmed at the strength they carried.

He used to sleep on my stomach after nursing, a tiny bundle that, with every breath, pulled the skin of my chest open until my entire heart was exposed: beating, raw, and vulnerable. I often thought that if anyone knew how deeply Dean made me feel, they'd take him away from me. It couldn't be healthy to love someone so much.

~*~*~

When Graham left so unexpectedly, I sought comfort in books and solitude, but it was Dean that helped me heal. He turned two not long after that, but it was then that I was certain Dean knew far more than I'd thought. He woke up from a nap on a blanket in the sitting room and caught me with red-rimmed eyes and said in his sleep-filled voice, "Mumma cry?" Reaching out to me, he toddled over on certain feet and took my hand, "Dean help."

That's my son.

~*~*~

Three years later I remarried -- for Dean this time. I love Roger; love him in the way you absently love an old, warm jumper. You miss it when it's cold and damp, but you rarely think on it most of your waking existence, because it's itchy and often too hot and gets in the way. I remarried so my child could have a house full of people to care for him... to protect him from the fierce love I worried every day would smother him.

In a few more years, our family numbered five and Dean had become a guardian of his younger brother and sister. He seemed to inherit or adopt my own detached demeanour when relating to his siblings, but I could tell that his feelings were strong and fierce - rivalling those of a mother cat.

I often worried about my son; he was so serious, so guardedly aloof. There were children in the neighbourhood with whom Dean would play, but it always seemed to be on their suggestion. He always seemed surprised to be invited to join them. I used to watch them out the window and marvel at how the children seemed to look to Dean to take charge, to determine what they were going to do. No matter what they said, he always seemed uncomfortable finding his role with them.

Sometimes, he returned home and drew comic strips that I would find shoved neatly under his bed, and, yes, my son is one of those odd humans that can shove something somewhere and still have it end up neatly arranged. The comic strips were not mocking the children - never mocking - but obviously trying to make sense of how to be friends with someone else; how to interact with others in a way that felt "real."

Real was a word that Dean used a lot. He'd been fascinated for all of his life with whether things were real. The books we used to check out of the library for years used to focus on trolls and unicorns and other fanciful creatures. At age four, Dean had graduated to discussions of Father Christmas and whether he could really know all of the good and bad things that Dean had done that year. Dean used to page through each book and quiz me, "Did elves exist? What about goblins? Unicorns? Why not? Had I ever seen one? So how did I know that there weren't any? Dean seemed to take the absence of tangible evidence as proof to the contrary that these creatures did, in fact, exist.

It was one of the two things about which he was quite certain. Obsessive, even. He used to draw pictures to explain the different creatures to me. I actually started to believe that if the creatures didn't exist, they might spontaneously appear simply because Dean willed them into a real existence.

~*~*~

I have to confess that when Dean received his Hogwarts letter on a visit from Professor Sinistra, I was less than surprised. In fact, I still marvel at how little the experience surprised me. It was almost as though it was another chapter in the book of ways my son was going to make his indelible mark on the world.

~*~*~

The changes and little adjustments we started making were hard to understand. None of us ever had any odd capabilities or made extraordinary things happen - so we tried to hold onto the things that felt tangible: football, books, sketchbooks. It was the only way to hold onto Dean and still feel our own way through the world.

~*~*~

The first time I went to a football game with Dean, I found myself watching my son as much as the players on the field. His eyes followed their movements as he recorded them in brief sketches in a small notebook that he always carried with him. I never once saw him look down - he just sketched different, extraordinary plays - calling out advice and his thoughts in his throaty, low voice.

And later? When Roger read the game recap out loud the next day, Dean disagreed. "That's not what happened."

"It says so here." Roger jabbed at the paper.

"It may say it. But it doesn't make it true. Everything they write isn't real."

When Roger opened his mouth to disagree, my eleven year old son opened his notebook and pointed out the sketch he'd done just before the other team had scored. "See?" he said. "They can print what they want, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make it real."

~*~*~

Dean and his step-father never quite saw things through the same lens. Football could have been the saving grace between them, but they never quite got there.

Roger had grown up a Spurs fan, and had been since their back-to-back FA cup titles in the early nineteen sixties. He'd grown up in Tottenham; he had to move in with an uncle after his parents were killed on a trip to Ireland.

Before I met Roger, I'd moved Dean to East London - it was a place we could afford, and no one bothered us there. It was nothing like where I'd lived with Graham. It has always surprised me that Dean discovered West Ham United, all on his own, when he was five. He became a fast fan. It was odd, though. It never quite made sense to me that he could be such a football enthusiast and so distinctly reserved in the other areas of his life.

One thing you could say about Roger was that he admired Dean's fierce loyalty and his knowledge about football. But something about Dean always, always threw him.

It took me a long time to understand it.

~*~*~

Dean's first holiday was a whirlwind -- only two days home and my Dean had become a talker. He told us about every bit of Hogwarts within the first few minutes and then he took my hand and pulled me into the kitchen to make tea and proceeded to quiz me on Ireland. He wanted to know if I'd ever been, why we hadn't gone, if we could catch any of the Irish football games on the telly.

It took me a while to make the connection between this sudden interest in everything Kelly-green and Dean's new best mate, but when it hit me, it hit me hard.

Dean was in love with his best mate. Or, at least, he was going to be.

It was so clear from the light shining in his eyes that there was something so perfectly basic between them. Dean seemed complete somehow... real in a way that he hadn't been before.

~*~*~

Dean left for Hogwarts again, waving me off when I tried to hand him another twenty pound note, telling me he still had the first one I'd given him and it wasn't any good to him at Hogwarts. He kissed me full on the mouth and ran down the platform, searching the huddled groups of dark robes until he pulled the arm of someone, who turned around, grinned, and punched my son in the arm with a whoop and a holler.

I stood on the platform, beaming like a schoolgirl.

Well. I should say I was beaming until I remembered my place and quickly schooled my expression and moved back into an inconspicuous place to watch the train leave.

The colours and everything in the world around me seemed to shift in that moment. The invisible plastic film through which I'd been watching, living really, was pulled off in that moment of absolute, stark truth.

And I couldn't tell Roger.

Not yet.

~*~*~

I'd met Seamus before, talked to him when I brought the two boys to Diagon Alley for a couple of days when they were thirteen. He grinned at me and wondered aloud why Dean hadn't told him he had an older sister. When I opened my mouth to tease him back about stealing flattery from his parents' generation, I saw the shine of absolute honesty in his eyes and felt my cheeks heat up in that moment of understanding.

Seamus Finnigan said things and meant them. There was nothing false about him.

~*~*~

It was amazing to see the difference in my son: his glorious change of mood when he came home to see us. It was still Dean, he still drew and read and made tea better than I ever could.

He always managed to sneak his way into at least one West Ham game and come home swearing that they'd better keep their record up or they'd be dropped out of the Premiership the following year and arguing with Roger that they were better than the Spurs with their defence, and didn't he watch them drive down the center?

It was still Dean, only more so.

~*~*~

When Dean dropped that magazine, left it on the floor of Roger's old auto after we drove him to King's Cross station in the middle of his sixth year, I thought it might finally be the moment when Roger understood.

"What's this?" he asked, skeptically.

"I don't know," I said. "What is it?"

"Some bloody Wizard magazine," Roger scoffed, but stared at the cover for a long moment before handing it to me with an odd look in his eyes.

In that moment, I felt an icy shock to my heart. No one could see a picture like that, something so vivid, so real, and not know that the artist was completely, utterly, in love with the subject.

It took me four days to even open Witch Weekly to see my son as the artist credited for the cover sketch of Seamus Finnigan.

Roger scowled and stamped around the house over the next few days, muttering words like, No son of mine and Show him how to be a man. It wasn't like Roger, really. He was a wonderful, doting father, both to Sarah and Terry, but he always seemed at a loss with Dean. I didn't understand it.

When I caught him staring into Dean's bedroom one afternoon, as the setting sun highlighted him in coppery-gold, I wondered if he didn't quite understand it, either.

~*~*~

I caught them once, at the end of Dean's seventh year, when I was late to pick up Dean from the train station. I was hurrying through the station and caught sight of two young men standing too close to be friends, unaware of their naïve beauty. Stepping quickly behind a large divider, I watched my son's eyes devour the person in front of him, soften in the way that you can only do when you're looking at exactly what you want to see.

"I'll see you soon, yeah?"

"Yeah."

They touched hands briefly and I felt my own shaking with unspoken empathy.

~*~*~

In the sharp perfume of waning June flowers, Dean finally told us - both of us - what I had known for years by then.

He told us about meeting a young Irishman on the train for the first time and knowing that they had to be friends. He told us that everything felt better, felt real, when Seamus Finnigan was there to share it. He told us that he was a better person because he felt like he finally fit.

He looked up into the sky and blinked a few times before looking back at the two of us and pressing at the crease between his eyebrows with his thumb. "I just... know with him, yeah?"

My son watched me nod and crease and uncrease the handkerchief in my lap. He shifted back and forth on his feet before we both turned to look at my husband.

Roger pressed his lips together and scowled. He nodded, then shook his head, then nodded once more before standing and walking out of the room.

"Well?" Dean asked me quietly after Roger left.

"He'll get there," I said. "He will."

"I know he will," Dean said. "But what about you?"

And in that moment, the primal flood of my entire life burst forth and I pulled my son into my arms and held him like I'd wanted to since his birth. "Dean," I said, hearing my voice waver, "Don't you ever doubt for a second that I don't see what you have with him. What you have is..." And when my voice broke and I couldn't fix it, I looked at him and mouthed the word he'd been saying to me since he was a young boy, Real.

He nodded, closing his eyes for a long moment before looking at me again. "Yes," he said. "Real."

~*~*~

I never imagined that I would be the one finding a flat for them near Upton Park - not because it was close to us, but because Dean was hell bent on finding some common ground with his step-father and if anyone could help him bridge it, it was Seamus. It just made sense.

I never thought that in my self-imposed obligation to make everything right in his life, I'd neglected to let Dean see the very reality of his own mother's devotion. I never imagined that my son was a wizard or would fall in love with another man or that he'd end up teaching me more about life than I'd taught him.

He taught me that life is never about the best or worst of anything; that everything doesn't necessarily fall into a simple compartment no matter how much you may want it to. It's about letting go of categorisation and finding what feels right, what feels real. Because, for Dean, being Real has always been so important.

And Seamus Finnigan is about as Real as you can get.

~*~*~

Thank you for reading! ♥