I just brought Paige home from the dentist where she had all four of her wisdom teeth extracted. I’ve been through this enough — with Mark and the boys and myself — to know what to expect.

Paige, always thinking, rarely speaking, has yet to say a word, but we’re communicating. That includes her throwing a hand signal to make sure I didn’t forget about the construction detour on the way home. (I almost did.)

Michael, always questioning, came out of anesthesia with a 10-second loop of memory. He looked at me and asked, “Is it over? That wasn’t too bad. How do I look?” Before I could answer the second question, he came again. “Is it over? That wasn’t too bad. How do I look?” I squeezed his arm and tried to get to that second question again when he looked up at me the same way for the third time. “Is it over? That wasn’t too bad. How do I look?”

The nurse said, “That’s pretty common. He’ll get his memory back.”

Mark had a tougher time of it. Like most of his life, everything came with complications. When I’ve been under, all I do is sleep and puke. I have to purge before I can get on with my life. But when I do, it’s a brand new day.

Sam becomes his essential self, too. When he wakes up from anesthesia, his big brown eyes turn into holes of the universe, just like when he was a baby, and if you let yourself fall in, it’s love and terror all in one.

My daughter and I have tickets to opening night of the final installment of Harry Potter Thursday. The kids have gone on opening night before; this will be a first for me. We’ll see part one and part two back to back. It seemed right to do it. Paige, my youngest, heads off to college this fall.

I don’t know how my kids would have grown up without being able to do it alongside Harry Potter. Ours is a happy house, overall, one that often looks like the Weasley’s burrow, although my clock doesn’t keep very good track of the kids and I must wash dishes myself.

But their world has become a dark and scary place more than once, and there were times it seemed only the wisdom in those pages got them through.

When love didn’t go as planned, there was Harry and Ginny, and Ron and Hermoine, to remind them that respect and friendship comes first.

After their father died suddenly — and they felt all alone knowing that no one else in their world knew what they knew — along came Luna, who reassured them that she sees the thestrals, too.

And when the mother-of-all-battles came home to burn the burrow and destroy the school, they recognized how to sort the world into the truly courageous and those who can only feign bravery.

I doubt, actually, I could have communicated to Sam what is needed to get through the next few years without those final chapters.

Thank you, J.K. Rowling, for being there for my kids when all I had left to offer was the wisdom of the best coming-of-age story ever told.