Hermione looked up from the quilt she was making. She was expecting their first child and wanted to make something special for the new baby.
She had learned the hard way that, if she was to have a good relationship with her mother in law, it was best not to compete with her. Knitting a jumper for her husband, Muggle style, for their first Christmas together had been met with such an icy reception from Molly, that Hermione referred to the months following that faux pas as the Cold War. Maybe mentioning that she had chosen midnight blue because he hated maroon, hadn’t helped either, especially as the next parcel Ron had opened had been his mother’s traditional lumpy maroon Weasley jumper. Her husband’s sheepish grin, Percy’s tutting and Ginny and George desperately trying to stop themselves from laughing, also had not helped.
So she had taken up sewing, by hand of course, as Molly did not care for that pastime, and had gotten quite good at it.
You’d be amazed how many books there were on quilting and Hermione had read them all.
There was something both therapeutic and creative about designing a quilt, using memories of special events in your life and finding fabrics to suit and reflect these moments. For this one she was using things that she remembered from her childhood, before she got her Hogwarts letter.
It saddened her that this child would never get to meet her parents, but she could tell the child stories about when she was a kid, at least. Having to wipe her parents’ memory had been a necessity at the time, but it probably had made her own memories of their time together stronger and more precious.
~ ~~
There nearly had been no baby.
When a few months after the war ended, the Ministry issued Ministerial Decree #69 incentivising procreation to repopulate the Wizarding world after the war, Hermione had been outraged.
‘I am not an incubator,’ she had proclaimed in the same angry manner she had once shouted, at Ron and Harry, ‘I am not an owl!’
When Ron had pointed out that the Ministry was offering good money for those delivering on this decree, he was met with such outrage from both his mother and his wife that he had dropped the matter immediately.
Molly muttering that when a woman had children and how many was none of the Ministry’s business and Hermione fuming that the Ministry was an archaic patriarchal institution that should have been brought down during the war, when they had the chance.
Instead of embarking on motherhood, as the Ministry would have wanted, Hermione started campaigning for women’s rights, MPreg rights, mental health support, and sex education with the same fervour she had once campaigned for S.P.E.W., but with considerably more success.
Six months after Hermione started her campaign, which received phenomenal support from all factions within the wizarding community, Ministerial Decree #69 was amended to include assistance for families who had suffered as a result of the war, mental health provision, financial assistance for families who were trying to start a family regardless of gender or family unit type and funding for sex education in schools.
~ ~ ~
Before Ron and Hermione got married she had sat him down and told him in no uncertain terms, that she did not want a big family. Five brothers in law, one of whom was a ghost and would show up unannounced all the time, and a sister in law had cured her of any notions of big families. One or two kids would be nice, but that would be it.
Ron seemed perfectly fine with that. There were already more than enough grandchildren to keep Molly and Arthur busy all the time.
Molly and Arthur were fabulous grandparents, as came as no surprise to anyone.
Hermione would have liked her own parents to experience this stage in their lives, but the resurgence of Voldemort had put a stop to that. It had taken quite a bit of therapy to stop blaming herself for the action she had been forced to take.
Her quilting was also helping with dealing with the self-imposed loss of her parents, by weaving her memories of them into her work.
~ ~ ~
She remembered her parents taking her on a hay ride as a kid so vividly, that she could nearly feel the itchy sprigs of hay sticking out of the bails and irritating her skin as well as the gentle swaying of the cart. She could recall driving through newly harvested fields and pointing at funny scare crows and her mother telling her the story of the scarecrow who wished he had a brain. She had thought at the time that her mother was making up that story just for her and was mesmerised. When she years later found the book in the library, she had only been mildly disillusioned. She preferred her mother’s version and the happy memories of that day.
They often did road trips together, as a family, visiting historical sites, castles and monasteries, and it had always been her mother’s stories that had made those trips special. Stories she now tried to sew into the patchwork of this quilt.
Her parents made their spare time, when they were not busy in their thriving dental practice, magical for her. At Halloween they visited haunted houses and told her spooky stories about ghosts and ghouls and witches and wizards.
They borrowed skeletons from some of their doctor friends to decorate the front lawn and her father would make the best apple cider for the annual neighbourhood Halloween party. Her father even thought her how to make prank calls, she remembered fondly, much to the disapproval of her mother.
She had a very happy childhood and while she would never regret getting her Hogwarts letter, it had signalled the end of that innocent childhood.
For the first few years, her parents had tried to make the short school breaks special by doing lots of things together, but there had always been homework and, what she now referred to as, ‘Harry Drama’ and over the years she started to spend more and more time with her Hogwarts family and less time with her own. Her parents on their part started to fill their time with conferences, cruises and golfing holidays and she really hoped that they were enjoying a wonderful life in Australia.
~ ~ ~
The fabric of life is curious, Hermione mused.
So many different threads are woven into this one little existence. It would not do to try to unravel it. The choices we make are what creates the directions our lives take and ultimately determine the pattern of the patchwork of our existence, just as the fabrics and patterns she picked, determined the outcome of the quilt she was making for the little one growing inside her.
I do hope it is not twins, she thought idly, as she sewed another piece of fabric onto her quilt, unaware that, elsewhere in the house, her mother in law was thinking the exact same thing.