Super Fathers

Being a father sometimes makes you a superhero. I've seen it myself. I've DONE it myself. I recently watched a video of a father, a rather portly individual, perform a swift and precise physical maneuver that a practiced ballerina or figure skater might have problems pulling off. The burly individual was carrying his very young baby in his arms as he walked up what turned out to be a rather slippery-wet concrete driveway. Somebody had left the hose running. The father's feet slipped out from under him and he fell forward. It was obvious in that instant that he was going to do a full-on faceplant on the concrete and the baby, his baby, would be crushed between the concrete and his barrel-chested bulk. But the father's superhero powers kicked in just in the nick of time, and in less than one second, as he was perpendicular to the ground and about twelve or fifteen inches away from SPLAT, he performed this lightning-fast, horizontal, half-pirouette, his back smacking hard against the pavement, his baby sheltered safely in his arms.

Now, as for me, I had about the most underheroic father a guy could ever have. My father was, in a sufficient number of ways to frustrate the crap out of me for life, an imbecile. And yet, I am told that my father once fell off a tall ladder while holding me, and that he somehow hit the ground entirely upon his own flank with infant me held safely aloft in one of his arms. So my father clearly had the fatherly superpowers, too. But of course, being my father, there is still the issue of Why the hell were you up on a ladder with a baby in your arms in the first place??

My own exploit of fatherly superheroism is a bit more humble than those examples of flying fathers. I didn't fall from anything. And yet I still don't know how I did it, how I pulled it off that fast. It was a thing that just came over me. Whoosh. I did it. I defied the normal speed and reaction of things, I vibrated my molecular structure like The Flash or whatever, and--

ZIP!--Did I just do that?

My wife at the time, the narcissist that I didn't yet know was a narcissist, she had just given birth to our first child. She had undergone a caesarian section. There were a couple complications with the narcissist that caused us to have to stay at the hospital for a few days, but finally, I had just brought them both home.

There is something about pregnancy, the hormones it causes to happen in the female body, that temporarily makes even a female narcissist behave more femininely. Her hair grew longer and thicker. She wasn't as ruthlessly controlling. There was actually a slight softening in her demeanor toward me; there was actually a smidgen of a window of a tiny glance at an actual woman in there. And even this tiny smidgen of a window tapped into my natural protective instinct as a father and husband. It was rare that I ever got to feel that around her.

But here we had just arrived back into the bedroom, and my narcissist-wife, holding our baby girl, walked over toward the bed, and I followed closely behind, not wanting to be at all distant from this little miracle we'd created. I wanted to be as close as possible to both of them, and it was a good thing, too.

My wife, unbeknownst to me, was still suffering from the complications of the c-section-gone-somewhat-wrong. My child's mother, my narcissist-wife, showed me the only shred of vulnerability that she would ever show to me in 13 evil years of marriage to her. She emitted this sudden sigh of distress and immediately lost consciousness in front of me. Like, IMMEDIATELY.

I had one literal second to act. One. Somehow, in that one second, my left arm darted through under her left armpit, my right arm somehow darted around her, sliding between her right forearm and our baby, cradling our daughter for a nanosecond in one arm, then I half-slung, half-slid our baby girl safely onto the bed, then my right arm darted back again and quickly through and under my wife's right armpit, and WHOOSH, all her weight collapsed into my arms--and let me tell you, she is not a small woman by any means of evaluating the sizes of women. I carefully, dexterously slid my limp wife onto the floor, and that took another second or two. I stood there in that bedroom, my baby in a bundle on the bed, my wife out cold on the floor, and I could feel the adrenaline superpowers of The Flash coarsing through my entire body. It was good.

The ambulance was called. The narc would have smacked her head badly against whatever was behind her, had I not been there to catch her. Someone flipped a switch on her body and brain and she had been still standing, but CLICK and she was OUT. Our newborn baby daughter would have been dropped on the floor.

I never did get a "thanks" from the narc for that one, nor for any other one, in all those 13 evil years. That's the thing about narcissists: They're quite consistent and quite predictable, once you figure them out.

But yeah, fathers. You rock. That means me, too.—Despite whatever slanders you've heard about me from the narc (and don't pretend you haven't; she's visited just about everybody by now; they always do).