Superpowers

Or being enough

Photo by Noah Rosenfield on Unsplash

Joseph says my superpower is my ability to identify a song within the first few seconds. Like the Shazam app but even faster and (arguably) more obnoxious.

Over the holidays, as we drove around listening to 102.1 (North Texas’s Christmas Home for the Holidays), I suggested we play a game in which we raced to identify the Christmas song and artist within the first few seconds. Joseph said it wasn’t even a competition. Actually, the conversation went more like:

*Initial Christmasy jingle*

Me: Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, Amy Grant

Joseph: What the heck it’s been two notes

Me: *laughs smugly*

Besides astounding my husband, I have yet to find an actually useful application of this skill. But, like a real superpower, it sometimes gives me a little thrill. When I say the correct song title, I feel like I’ve won something, like (maybe) there’s some tiny part of me that really is amazing.

My sons pretend to be superheroes almost non-stop, sometimes adopting the name-brand personas, more frequently donning original characters such as “Dinosaur Man” and “Everything Man.” Their superpowers range from turning into dinosaurs to spraying fire from their hands to “having all the power in the world.”

They gather sticks to be used as gadgets and weapons and pile them in the backyard. The four-year-old cannot stop himself from picking up every stick he sees, like a treasure-hunter collecting coins. Sticks are a status-symbol, a defense-system, the precious currency of play.

When I was a little girl, I collected sticks and named them, my little pets residing in a nest behind the garden, until they rotted or found their way (on accident) into the burn pile. I still remember the heft and shape of my favorite ones, and the exasperated sorrow of my dad when I cried over a heap of ashes.

Every day when I pick the four-year-old up from school, he hands a pile of sticks to his teacher at the gate, only to gather more on our way to the car. I tell him we don’t need any more sticks and he negotiates down to one, which will ride on the dusty floor of our SUV for a week.

When I ask him, one day, why he needs so many sticks, he says, “In case there are bad guys.”

They are always thinking of bad guys. The six-year-old comes home from school one day speaking of bad guys and good guys in the government, telling us about a man named “Donald Trunk” and people dying and wild fires on “another continent, so it can’t get to us.” His understanding is so obviously informed by other children, repeating things they barely understand, that it is almost cute. And yet, disturbingly, my six-year-old’s black and white descriptions do not differ greatly from the talking points of adults on either side of the political spectrum. I want to instill in my children both conviction and nuance, virtues that perhaps can only reside in harmony when charity and empathy are the guiding superpowers. But when my children bring me complex questions or perspectives, I always feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, like I’m a traveler entering an unknown and wild frontier. I can only hope my painstakingly chosen words are enough to guide us all through.

The six-year-old looks at me one evening, as Joseph and I deal with a whiny baby and a messy kitchen and a looming bedtime. He says, “You’ve had to do this baby thing three times, right?”

By “baby thing” I think he is referring to my exhaustion, to his little brother’s neediness, to the constant work of motherhood. I feel seen. Only rarely does he seem to emerge from the fog of pre-reason to express this kind of insight. It feels like a gift, miraculous almost, that a child I formed in my womb can become a person capable of empathy. This “baby thing” feels worth it in a new way every time my older sons show me glimpses of a personhood that is multifaceted and other-centered.

Can a superpower be taught? Or does it emerge spontaneously? (Put another way: What credit do I deserve to take for the goodness in my children?)

Joseph, whose superpowers include saying the exact right thing at the right moment, says my song recognition skills are eerie, that they imply some latent musical talent I’ve yet to uncover. This is funny, coming from him, who taught himself how to play the violin. I took piano lessons for twelve years and still struggle to sight-read a piece of sheet music. If I do have some inner musicality, it’s only other “benefit” may be my uncanny ability to get a song stuck in my head after hearing just one line.

I like to think we all have superpowers. One of my best friends from childhood has a mind for dates, remembering birthdays effortlessly, and recalling the dates of random past events like a living memory-curating app. Once, she told me that every year on a specific date, something bad happens to her, which seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, except that I believe her. You don’t doubt the friend you’ve had since you were five years old, because the friendship itself is like a superpower that grows stronger with each passing year.

Many of my friends will often text me moments after I’ve been thinking of them, their names appearing on my phone screen with the words, “Miss you!” or “Thinking of you!” when I have just been missing them. I’m not sure if the superpower belongs to me or to them, but I remember the phone ringing in our house when I was a kid, my mom answering it (before caller ID) and saying, “I knew it was you! I’ve been thinking of you!”

Perhaps it is a power all women possess, this almost psychic connection to one another, passed down from our tribal days, when thinking of the other women in your tribe—where they were, what they were doing—was a necessity for survival itself. (And isn’t it still?)

There is something in all of this that I can’t quite express: The connections between memory, understanding, prediction—knowing as a kind of superpower.

My mother-in-law claims she has a terrible memory, and yet she remembers the stories of women she met over the years on her travels, a military wife bonding with other transplants across the country: women who survived abusive husbands and fathers, who lost children, who found them again. Both she and my mom possess a remarkable power of drawing other people to them, of connecting with strangers more quickly than my introverted-tendencies can comprehend.

Despite my introversion, motherhood has taught me the importance of collecting friends whose powers, super and mundane, compliment my own. I think it is only fair to tell a woman to stop worrying about trying to do it all if she is surrounded by a tribe of other women (and men) who are willing to carry those worries with her. A village that can show up at her door with dinner or a bottle of wine after a long day, a network that offers advice on how to handle a toddler meltdown and how to treat a fever, a community that sees the value of creating a beautiful home and the value of seeking fulfillment outside that home.

I suppose the skills I’m listing here do not really constitute “superpowers.” They are simpler, more common. More vital.

It is only through the friendships I have forged with other mothers, other parents, that I have gained confidence in my own motherhood. Recently, I learned that the maternal instinct is a myth. A mother does not just “know” what to do simply by nature of being a mother. I tell Joseph that I wish I had known it was a myth when, with each newborn, I struggled to nurse them, to decipher what their needy cries meant, to feel at home in my new role as mother of one, of two, of three. I thought there was something wrong with me that it did not just come naturally.

“Wow that’s so unfair,” he says, realizing anew the expectations the world made of me and not of him when we became parents (though there are other expectations that weigh on him and not on me).

For so long, I had believed I was lacking in a superpower all other mothers possessed. What a relief to realize that knowing how to mother well is not intrinsic. I have long hoped that the definition of what it means to mother well might differ from one woman to the next.

Knowing as a superpower that can be learned, cultivated, shared. I may not have real superpowers—instincts or supernatural skills to guide my motherhood or personhood—but I am still enough.

When my sons bring me a drawing or a worksheet from school, when they tell me about their games, I try to show them they do not need my praise to have a sense of validation. I try to teach them their intrinsic value, deeper than what they can do or what they can possess.

“Are you so proud of yourself?” I ask.

“Tell me about it,” I say.

“You must have worked so hard,” I say.

“Wow. That’s so amazing,” I can’t help saying, because I know it’s what they want to hear. Their faces light up as though they have won something. And it is true. That these hands that once struggled to grasp a Cheerio can scribble “Mama” on a sheet of paper or draw a many-fingered person or turn a stick into a tool to help them wield their ever-evolving superpowers is amazing. And so are they.

So are we all.

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