Super Powers
I love that it has slipped into everyday conversation.
‘Ah yes. That’s my superpower.’
I wish I had had that phrase in my childhood.
When you are little it is sometimes quite overwhelming to be beginning to learn something when grown ups are so good at so many things.
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I would watch the scrolling loops of gorgeous hand writing appearing in trails left by the pens of my mother and father and try to copy the actions and the magic of making marks that held secret messages, coded swirls, spells that could be translated into insights or acts by other grown ups. I tried to capture the magic with a blue biro on the back of an envelope. There was no magic in my random wriggles and scrawls at all which was dispiriting. Nobody told me that the fact that I could read easily with very little teaching was a superpower. I could have done with hearing that.
I know a little boy who was chubby in his primary school years. He didn’t over eat or eat badly. With hindsight I see that he was a sausage of pastry, needing to be plump so he could stretch out long and thin in his teens. But boy needed to get his head round careful eating and control of his body image, so he invented ‘Super Fat’ his own alter ego super hero. He made models of Super Fat and drew him and made him the lumbering champion of many stories in which only he could save the day. Super Fat was a very positive force for good in the world, and simultaneously, boy began to feel happier with his body, modified his appetite (not easy for an active 8 year old) and began to grow tall and thin.
Another lad, a peaceful gentle, empathetic soul, had been troubled for years because suddenly he would fly into rages and feel like hitting and breaking things. Even after he got a diagnosis and medication to support him in handling these episodes, he described himself as The Hulk, all sweetness and light for most of the time but given to random explosions of muscle and anger. Once he had appropriated this image to help his brain, he no longer felt he was going mad, or was an evil person. He just saw this as a part of him which he was gaining control of.
And just now, with uncertainty of pandemic proportions, with fear and lockdowns and sickness and the awareness that everybody else’s body is covered in germs – and so is yours – now perhaps playing with super powers is something we all need.
As adults we can rationalise the need to take control of whatever we can, we know we need to master new skills and ways of thinking, we need to have new ways of doing the most ordinary things is life and new ways of having fun.
If we see our children playing with Super Powers, perhaps that is their way of understanding and making achievements and creating fantastical narratives out of things around them that don’t really make much sense at all, even to the grown ups.
