Molly
By April Hoss
@aprilhoss
No one suspects a thing. The outside observer sees a busy housewife, an endlessly multitasking mother of six. See her there opening the oven door to check for bubbling cheese. See her there looking strangely triumphant as she loads the last possible plate into the dishwasher and presses start, nodding once to the rectangle of red light. Now she turns to the toddler and explains why the snacks have stopped coming. This is a concept they will revisit. She pulls warm laundry into a basket, curving her back to avoid the hot fabric touching her skin, and thinking of how welcome this task will be in the cold of January. Basket on her hip she sidesteps the sleeping dog. Her hand hovers now before a trio of dog treats—then without impetus, it snaps back to her side. Every part of this pre-dinner ritual has been completed with casual efficiency but now she is urgent. She dashes—truly there is no more fitting word—to her notebook and pen. She writes illegibly, her first-grade teacher’s diligent handwriting lessons and doseable humiliations all for nothing. Forgotten basket still clutched at her side, she scrawls a message to herself, that self of hers which lives in a secret world. It is a jumbled message no one else would be able to decipher.
the confession is made while folding towels! must highlight the way M folds each towel, clinical precision, she won’t look S in the eye when she finally tells him the truth.
Now the mother taps her pen to her mouth. The outside observer, still watching, would see the woman. The woman sees nothing but the two fictional characters folding towels.
The mother has entered The Trance.
The Trance, named affectionately but not without a little fear, is a consuming state of imagination. It is looking up and finding you’ve arrived home with no memory of the drive. It is stumbling upon a tiger in the jungle and discovering he only means for you to scratch behind his ears.
The mother is musing. She is debating. Should S snatch the towel from M, demand she look at him? OR should the two say nothing but instead have S put his hand over M’s hand to make the woman stop pretending the words hadn’t been spoken?
Because in The Trance the mother is writin—
“Can I help you bake?”
The Trance vanishes. Poof! Without a trace. What trance?
The mother touches the black rubber button at her temple and music stops playing. She uses the hand holding the pen. It leaves a mark at her temple that she won’t see for hours yet, not until she starts in with the serums. She smiles at her daughter, who now stands impossibly near eye level.
“What did you say, pretty lady?” The mother closes her notebook and drapes her arm over her daughter’s shoulders in one swift movement. The daughter asks if tonight’s dinner will require a baker.
Tonight’s dinner won’t require more than a stir, and what’s more is The Trance. It will no sooner return to a crowded kitchen than the preschooler will stop trying to swipe the soda cans from the counter. The preschooler and the Trance both share a certain, how do you put it, stubbornness.
Finally, the mother puts the heavy basket of towels on the floor. Her options are plain. Say no to her daughter, shoo her out of the kitchen, and hope to entice The Trance to return and be the docile house cat she knows it is capable of being; do this and hope the daughter will ask to help another day, a day when she doesn’t have the tiger by the tail. Or say yes to the daughter. Do this and hope the tiger will not forsake her.
“Dinner is set but how about muffins? Be great for breakfast this week.”
The mother feeds this tiger, so she is confident he’ll come back eventually. Getting breakfast preloaded for the week will be a relief and finally untangling the knots in the confession scene was good. She lets herself believe that with some polishing, it could even be better than good. Another brick in the wall. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that. The mother removes her headphones, puts them down like the tender amulet they are: The Trance, the tiger, it loves the headphones.
The daughter squeezes overripe banana into the mixing bowl and asks the mother what she was writing in the notebook.
“Something for you.”
What follows is what always follows. The daughter reminds the mother she was promised the cherished role of first reader: if it’s mom’s book, she gets to read it first.
The mother assures her this promise has not been forgotten. The mixer runs, the daughter reads the recipe, the mother dries a pan and hears—and now she is astonished—the telltale clacks of large claws approach. The mother, busy and tired, both strong cat repellent, cannot believe The Trance returned so soon. She stares at empty space—not unlike one seeing a lover stumble home from battle. You came back to me!
A word won’t be spoken but it will be M, she will blow everything up, first she’ll start trembling and then ripping those towels she worked so hard on into ribbons and withou—
“Do you still think I’m a Ravenclaw?”
The mother winks at the tiger but makes no move for her notebook. She is not likely to forget this scene; she can jot it down later.
She turns to her daughter. They review the facts. She assures her, Ravenclaw or otherwise, this girl is not a Hufflepuff.
The mother moves her small tower of books off the kitchen table before wiping off the crumbs. TBR piles make for unparalleled Tiger bait.
The mother walks the books to another table in a different room and wonders. She doesn’t want to scare The Tiger off. He can be so skittish. But the mother is starting to think he’s coming around more, leaving less, that he too may be thinking about what it would be like for the two of them if he stuck around. The outsider couldn’t know what the mother is thinking, but he would see the ghost of her smile.
***
My children sometimes ask if back in the pioneer days, when Harry Potter was coming to us at the agonizing pace of one book at a time, how I knew which house I was in.
I answer their question and avoid telling them the whole truth. I read Harry Potter while simultaneously concerned about which Sex and the City character best described me and if my Myers Briggs results meant I was dull (intolerable horror) or the edgy romantic I’d always secretly hoped.
Long have I read the tea leaves of personality tests. Even the unofficial ones. Mostly the unofficial ones. Before Carrie or Charlotte or introverts or enneagram numbers, my personal diagnostic tool was whatever the esteemed behavioral science team at Seventeen magazine put forth. Picture it: Me, still years from age 17, sprawled on my bedroom floor, tallying up As and Bs and Cs to unlock the mystery of myself. Still, Seventeen was not the original arbiter of all things who am I. That crown, now and forever I would argue, belongs to the American Girl doll lineup circa 1996.
Do you remember the thrill of making friends with a Molly owner? She was first on the scene with a reassuring word and a back rub when you cried at school; she was going to come to your birthday party; she was going to know the homework assignment when you called her in a pinch. Remember the staggering glamour of the houses where a Samantha doll resided? This was the friend with the four-poster bed, the large family portraits—portraits, not photos—the brand-new Suburban. Or the mystery of the girls in possession of Felicity. What menagerie of pets waited for her at home; they always seemed pretty into horses.
We used to wonder about ourselves, about each other, as though it was a compulsory rite of girlhood. Who am I?
But now, what has it been? A decade? More, since someone has asked me who I am? Because who I am is obvious. I am the mom.
The verb tense altered as much as the body.
You were a Charlotte. You had a Kirsten. Seventeen confirmed your friend was a backstabber and you could decode boy talk.
But, yeah no, that thing in your hand. The baton. Yeah, that one right there. You have to pass that, ma’am.
Ma’am. You’re a ma’am now. Unironically.
When you pick up your retinol prescription just after you close the tab on another perimenopause Google journey, ask the pharmacist if she can guess if you related more to Monica or Rachel. Enjoy the horror when she pauses for a second before telling you she thinks HER MOM liked that show.
I remember the exact slant of the light on the table when I figured out that I am now Molly Weasley. My kids were gaily ignoring the homework in front of them and chatting with one another about who each one of them is from the books. Who they wanted to be, who they hoped others saw in them, who made them angry, who they’d choose for friends. And there I stood in the space between the sink and the stove, probably not with a dripping spatula in my hand but I like the visual, gob smacked to realize I am Molly now. No more shots at Hermione, or Tonks or Ginny. Not even the dark glamor of Lily.
Molly Weasley. That is me.
My kids chattered on, ignoring the psychological tsunami pummeling their mother. The parallels came at me fast.
I have a big family. Molly has a big family. I have two practical jokers. Molly has two practical jokers. I have a book club. Molly and her friends have Gilderoy Lockheart. My flowerbeds are beset with poison ivy and ticks. Molly has unruly gnomes.
I looked toward the glow of our Skylight. I gasped (I probably didn’t). What is a Skylight if not the Muggle equivalent of the Weasley clock?
Molly has children she worries about more than others. A daughter navigating puberty and first crushes. A husband with a job he loves, but an easy job by no means.
Me too.
I think about this for days. I obsess. I take what some folks call a mindin’ to. I watch the other moms around me, at karate, in stores, no longer as a fellow but as an investigator. Everywhere I look: Molly. Oh sure, sure, some have held on to the last vestiges of their Carries, their ENFPs. But let’s call a spade, a spade; a uterine prolapse, a uterine prolapse.
We are not getting any younger. The going out tops gave way to weighted vests a lot sooner than I expected but exactly as quickly as I was promised.
And all these thoughts about aging and juggling a bustling household, early mornings with preschoolers, late nights with teens. It all got me thinking about writing.
Six years ago I told The Trance, The Tiger, that he could come by whenever he wants, call me anytime. But I may not be able to pick up.
Six years ago we left the state that raised us. We moved across the country in a minivan with four kids, two dogs, a snake and spider. It’s staggering, really, when you consider that two born and bred Californians can just up and move to the South without so much as an orientation video, but we wasted no time on culture shock. Instead, in six years, we bought three houses, a parcel of land, two dogs and a guinea pig. We sold four of those before finally landing. Our kids changed schools three times.
Painters needed a final color decision, my kids needed new school uniforms, and I needed a pregnancy test and then a box of emesis bags. Every one of those things has happened twice.
And saved on a laptop was a dream that needed a complete overhaul, back down to the studs. No, I assured The Tiger, it really isn’t you. This just isn’t a good time for me.
Here is the unvarnished truth: my uprooted kids needed their mother as did the two who joined us in Tennessee (one a redhead …). Creating a new normal alongside my husband meant I couldn’t create much else. So my dream trudged up the stairs and put itself to bed. Days and weeks did that thing where they turn into months and years.
But the dream upstairs never fell asleep.
I am at a stop light when I remember that Molly defeats Bellatrix LeStrange. At first glance that’s a plot hole. Or worse, deus ex machina. It’s laughable. There are a handful of more rational candidates. Wizards we see training. Witches preparing for battle. Molly though? Doesn’t she mostly just bustle around the house calling out to various children and pushing hair out of her face?
“Hey, weird question for you,” I ask my most voracious reader. “Does Molly Weasley ever practice her defense against the dark arts spells?”
She must. I’ve simply forgotten which of the books the scene is in, Molly with a wand hexing targets at The Burrow. She has to.
Because if not, how does one of the most lethal and ruthless witches in Wizarding history get defeated by … a mom?
“No.” My daughter doesn’t notice my eyes bug at this answer.
Now I am officially fixated. I can’t get past never seeing Molly practice spell casting. I am so consumed by this single element of the story that prior to the day in the kitchen I had never given a second thought. My next breakthrough comes in a mammogram waiting room, and here I need to pause.
When they say we contain multitudes do they mean that you can still vividly remember the tiny blue bow in the center of your very first bra and also be old enough to have a mammogram?
Regardless, there I am, the mammogram freshman, wishing I had one of those privacy screens on my phone because for some reason I am feeling sheepish to be typing into Google: when did Molly Weasley practice combat, dueling or defensive spell casting.
And here I really did gasp.
Because she didn’t.
She cooked.
She knitted and gardened and tracked down affordable school supplies.
Bellatrix was chasing world domination, and Molly was staying up late with kids in turmoil.
I saved some of my research. Minutes before Hoss, April was summoned to the back, this is what I read: It is explicitly mentioned that she was not part of the original Order of the Phoenix. During the first war, she was primarily focused on raising her seven children. While she isn't shown practicing duels, she is clearly a highly accomplished witch. She is one of the individuals who helps cast powerful protective enchantments over Hogwarts before the final battle, which implies she has a significant grasp of complex charms and defensive magic that isn't always at the forefront of her daily activities.
I never wanted to be Molly. I wanted to smile on the Today show with my bestseller on my lap. Is it not the dream of every writer to be plucked from obscurity? Motherhood is more often willfully plunging oneself into the very depths of obscurity while simultaneously having a small band of humans entirely fanatical about you. It would be too on the nose to say, like their life depends on it, but I am tempted.
Not long after my Molly lightbulb turned on I had one of those particularly hectic and exasperating days. I turned on an audiobook that (incorrectly, I would later learn) attributed an observation about Story to Ernest Hemingway: "There are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town."
I snorted with mirth, surrounded by laundry and Legos, still recovering from both being late to the morning’s appointments and the preschooler’s penchant for making his preferences known through something akin to caterwauling.
Check me out, Ernest. Journeys? Strangers? I am living both stories.
Reader, in August of 2011, I set out for an impossible journey and since then six strangers have come to town. I have shapeshifted like a werewolf; I have bled, cried, nearly died. One fall day in 2013, without knowing it, I shared the last kiss with the boy I loved and kissed next a new man, a father, and somehow fell harder. Without my permission, plenty of times in spite of full throated objections, my children have pulled me up a treacherous mountain path. Always promising the view from the top will be worth it.
I know a desperate phone call, a sleepless night, a broken heart. I know a Thanksgiving where no one has an appetite. This journey, at points, has crushed me.
And there are all the other days.
Look, I don’t want to cut the grapes or run the bath or hear a rambling retelling of last night’s dream right at the best part of the song. None of the above are my vibe. I don’t want to go to urgent care at 4:45 p.m. because of bad trampoline decisions or clean vomit out of the carseat or cancel plans. If this is a would you rather, I would rather not A, B, or C. None of the above. I don’t need a personality quiz to tell me that I want to sleep and read at will, eat my meals while they are hot, drink my coffee the same way, watch movies in the theater, write in cafes, dress an unchanging body, and go out for dinner. I want to be left to my own devices. I am whatever type likes to stay up late then have a little lie-in. Whatever type feels energized by meandering alone with an iced coffee and smiling at strangers. And when I say I want that I mean I want it every day. I mean if I were not on this journey with these strangers, this is the way my life would look.
I mean I know what these kids have cost me.
Lattes. Preferences. Years of my life.
And it pales to what they’ve given me in exchange.
Children are one of a kind Rorschach tests. Tell me what you see when you look at Caleb, at Ridley, at Ransom, at Kajsa, at Scarlett and Joaquin. Look at this beautiful, sticky, acne prone, mosquito bitten, sunburned, maple syrup covered, glorious face. Tell me what you see.
I see the me before. A version of myself I am not very proud of. I see a crucible. I see all that terrible dross. I see some kind of ancient alchemy, these strangers both aging me and making me new.
Pop quiz: Spill or Seal: What your secret-keeping style says about you.
See, in that waiting room, I originally asked Google if Molly ever practiced combat spells, not nonviolent witchcraft. We know she used spells all the time. The Weasley house was loud and chaotic and maybe could have benefitted from a good declutter, but it was running on all cylinders because of Molly and her magic.
Weeks later I got to thinking … was that it? The magic of Lily Potter’s ultimate motherly sacrifice is woven throughout the story. But was Molly’s everyday, ordinary love magical too?
Without the time to reread all seven, I dove back into research.
Molly doesn't defeat Bellatrix because she has spent years honing her dueling technique; she defeats her because, in that moment, Molly—the one who has spent years holding the line for her family—reaches a point of absolute, righteous protection. We never see her training to be a hero. Her power is entirely tied to her fierce, protective love.
All the mundane tasks required to love her family were doing something. Living the story everyday, in the everyday, was the magical training I’d been seeking. Frizzy haired and frazzled but her aim was true.
People ask me if I still write.
The truth: not a whole lot, I hope to again in a different season.
The whole truth: Only when I walk. Only when I read. Only when I wipe peanut butter off the floor, off the dog, off the baby. Only when I fold or scrub or wash or chop or drive alone or stare off into space or get up before the kids or put on the big headphones and lift weights or feed the dogs while it’s still dark outside and force myself with all the subtlety of a drill sergeant shouting drop and give me 50! to fire off several descriptions of Tennessee trees and fireflies.
So, yeah, I write, every now and then.
For the kids.
Because of the kids.
But am I a Molly?
My husband’s voice in my head, casually attaching when you to his broader point, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. When I. As if I can do it. As if these years of motherhood have revealed to him exactly who I am.
My mind wanders … pspspsps, summoning a tiger …
Only one way to fi—
Mom! My math was right here! Someone took it!
Ready.
Mom, have you seen my swimsuit?
His finger is stuck in the bunkbed, hurry!
Can I take the blow-dryer outside?
Aim.
When can we order pizza again?
I think I am going to throw up.
Can I give you a hug?
Can I tell you a joke?
Can I play Nintendo?
Can I read your book?
MOM!
Fire.
April Hoss is a sinner saved by grace. She is one of many California transplants now calling East Tennessee home. She married her high school sweetheart, he keeps their schedule lively by practicing medicine and they are often accused by their six children of "being gross". April is a sucker for a bookstore, loves her local church, and is reluctantly becoming outdoorsy. She is also tinkering away on a fiction novel. She honestly doesn't know if she has a website anymore but she can email, Instagram and just barely Substack.
She is honored that you would spend your time with her words, and she would love to hear from you.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.