potentialities

Aww, thank you!

I always feel rather sorry for Petunia -- if I were her, I would have been incredibly jealous of Lily, too. So she tries to compensate by being the most normal person ever and marrying the perfectly dreadful Vernon Dursley, and she's just trying to live her normal life, when Harry gets dropped on her doorstep. I noticed when I reread PS recently that in the first chapter, Vernon seems to be very much the henpecked husband, but then in the later chapters, he has become the dominant force in the household, which is I think attributable to Harry's presence constantly undermining her position in their family where normality is prized above all. She's really gotten the short end of the stick.