“I don’t mean to bother you, but…”

It was a cold night; I remember that vividly. My 2-year-old brother was throwing a fit about having to take a bath, and my very pregnant mother was in a high-stakes negotiation with him. So far the agreement was this: If he would let her wash his body and hair, he could have five extra minutes playing with our dog. At 6, even I knew he was hustling her.

My dad was at work. It was pre-recession but post-losing the restaurant he had run for the past two years, so he must have been doing late-night maintenance at the Marriott Hotel.

“Um, Mom, I don’t mean to bother you but…” I said, letting the sentence trail along at the end so maybe she could just infer what I meant and I wouldn’t have to ask for the fifth time. Clearly she was busy, and I should have left well enough alone, but, as I said, I was 6, and I really just wanted her to read to me, which she and my dad had both been too busy to do for the past few nights.

“Sarajane, Baby, I’m sorry, but you’re going to just have to read a smaller book by yourself tonight,” she said, clearly frustrated. “I’ll come to tuck you in and pray in a little bit.”

I took a deep breath and stormed away, angry at my own helplessness. I didn’t want to read a smaller book.

A month before, I had finally convinced my parents to let me read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” which they were worried was too big and mature for me. But my mother had the wise thought that if her first-grader wanted to read an advanced chapter book, she should probably nurture that desire.

So, we started to read together, a chapter or so a night. That way she could monitor the content, but still accommodate my desire to read.

It had been three days since we left Harry, Ron and Hermione in the third floor corridor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and they had just encountered a three-headed dog. How was I supposed to go another day without finding out if Filch had discovered them or not?

So I picked up the book from my mom’s bedside table and I read it for myself, by myself. I found that it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, what felt like five minutes later, my mom came to my room to tuck me in. It had been an hour.

Since then, I’ve read each Harry Potter book 19 times. In middle school, the local librarians knew me by name because I was at the library every day during the summer.

When I read “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” I was in awe of the way J.K. Rowling wove a story together. I wanted to be a storyteller.

My copy of “Sorcerer’s Stone” is 17 years old now. When I pick it up, its tattered, ripped cover and hastily highlighted, dog-eared pages hardly resemble the book I remember. I can still recall the weight of it in my backpack at school and the paper cuts its rigid pages occasionally gave me.

Harry had his own journey. Reading his book was mine.

If Harry could be brave, why couldn’t I?