Education Via Harry Potter

My charge and I just finished the last 80 page of Harry Potter, book six, the saddest part of the series so far.
It led me to add item #5 - to the rough draft of this list
as well as a conversation about crying (more on that below)

What my charge has learned from reading Harry Potter with me (including during breaks or asides from me, to
add to a detail in the book, or to stop and ask him questions or giving him something to think about):
1. Girls/ladies sometimes travel in a group including to the bathroom. I asked him what he thought girls talked about in the bathroom -
he suggested they were discussing Captain America. I'd assumed they were talking about the dates/guys they were with. A poll of female
friends suggested his answer was the right one:)
2. What not to discuss on a date? He learned from Harry's mistake that discussing the weather was never a good talking point.
3. Jealousy, Crushes and being tongue tied around girls. He has experience with crushes and i've never seen him have trouble with
a topic (see Captain America topic above) but i think it was good and healthy to see Ron and Harry have similar problems, namely being
unsure what to do around girls and acting cautiously.
4. Grief, be it regarding a fictional character or a real person. I told him what i've told adults and  teenagers: There's no right way or wrong way to grieve. It affects different people in different ways and that's natural and normal.
5. As with grief it's ok to be sad when something terrible happens. And, yes, sometimes people you love do die. It's terrible and it's
hard but it happens and eventually life goes on.
6. Concepts like prophecies. I suggested it was prophesied that he would, one day, be king of a nation. He got excited. I told him it was
a nation of one, namely himself. I kid.... He was less enthused and suggested it was prophesied he would be kind of North America.
7. Learning big tough words like assiduously 

I told him i felt a bit teary-eyed about the death of such a beloved important character at the end of book six and he laughed. Sometimes he laughs when he's not sure what emotions to feel. I suspected he may have been taught, especially while in residential treatment centers with other boys for three years, that men don't cry. And sure enough, I told him it's healthy and fine and ok for men or boys to cry. "Men don't cry!" he said. Yes they do. Some guys say that but they're wrong. It's good to let out emotions with tears and it's goof for you too. He looked skeptical but i know he cares what i think so, for now, i've introduced a foreign concept into his brain. And it reminds me of a piece I wrote while struggling once to cry and writing about
this, Big Boys Don't Cry, is from 2007:
    
Maybe it's a guy thing:
"Big boys don't cry."
"Only girls cry."
"You can't be macho and cry."
There are so many stupid sayings drilled into males while still boys. The result? Tears held in. Emotions held in check. Friends, relatives, lovers, always wondering what guys are really feeling. Or maybe it's a Butki thing. Dad never really showed much emotion. No tears, no hugs. Handshakes at church, but that was just a playful way of saying "peace be with you."
Mom cried. Mom hugged. Mom even occasionally kissed me. But that was Mom. I was supposed to be like Dad, right? Right? So now here I sit, far from that home - in geography anyway - and now I want to be emotionally more like Mom and less like Dad. Sometimes now I will be watching some dumb movie and feel my heart being tugged by a plot device about love or dads and I will feel a tear duct being moved. "Come on, cry, damn it!" part of me says, the part that knows it feels better to cry than not to cry sometimes. The part of my brain that wants me to let out my emotions rather than to just have that tear duct tease me week after week. But that fricking macho brain tissue screams "No, no, no, you can't cry," and the sensation goes away.
And so it goes. I see a sad, sappy movie and feel close to tears, can see and hear women on both sides of me bawling, and I feel almost apologetic for not crying myself. Sometimes the result is a form of sympathy tears - I can cry because they are crying. A weird thing, that.


Then there are days like when I watched the television coverage of Princess Diana's funeral, feeling like crying but the tears not coming. For more than an hour I would hear something particularly sad and the tear ducts would go jerk, jerk, jerk, but nothing happened. Then a camera pans and shows Diana's boys walking, oh so silently, and with faces turned toward their feet, and the jerks of the tear ducts come still stronger. The camera goes into montage mode and shows people crying outside: a woman crying, a man singing and... wait, what's this? A man crying. And another one. And still another one. My God! Is this allowed? I feel a tear starting to come. But only one. And then they stop, like a spigot has been turned off. But for some odd reason, I'm happy. I've cried, however briefly.

Men will scoff at this, I imagine. But I feel I've accomplished something, shown I'm human. Shown I have emotions. I have shown, perhaps, that I'm not as emotionless as some men are.
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I posted the above on facebook and then added, Since i wrote that ive found that i can cry much easier in a dark theater esp when a dad (as mine did) or the story includes a son grieving his father, as i still do.