super man

when you're a child it's easy to look at your dad and think that he is definitively the coolest, strongest, bravest, most successful man alive. you watch him as he fixes the car, builds tree houses, mows the lawn, coaches everything from baseball to soccer and you pretend that he is super. your imagination equates him with the likes of superman, batman, the flash and thor, capable to do all things with the greatest of ease.

as humans we are born to worship. we have the innate desire to idolize something. we find that which is good and make it into something great. this is why we have superheroes and demigods. they have the appearance of regular people, but beneath it all they are different, set apart, super. as children we put our fathers up there with these fictional characters, because these men in our lives are the closest thing we have to "super".

but as we grow up we learn that our dads are flawed, they become less and less super and more and more ordinary. we see that life isn't a sequence of glorified successes, but a journey of daily failures and little victories. we watch them work and hurt and grow and toil and be frustrated and make mistakes; we pull the pedestal out from under them and they fall down to our level. they lose their shine and become just another man, getting by as best as they can in this mixed up world.

then something truly magical happens. we realize that our dads really are super, they have been all along, not in the way we imagined as children, but in a way that makes them worthy of truly being a hero. a real dad is the one who sits in an office for 8+ hours every single day, working for the same companies for decades at a time, who goes through promotions and firings and budget cuts and bonuses, all for the security of his family, of the ones he loves most. a real dad comes home after a long day of work only to mow the lawn and clean the pool and help with homework and answer emails and discipline his kids and fix the sink and pay the bills, and none of that is for him, but all for his wife, for his kids. what makes dads super is not that they are extraordinary but because they are ordinary. they are men who sacrifice their own glory and become selfless for the sake of their families. in one fell swoop dad goes from superman to a super man because of love, the greatest power of all; the selfless kind of love that puts others before self, that sets aside desires and lofty dreams and personal glory in order to be the best father and provider for his family.
instead of worshipping these fathers as if they are super heroes, we aspire to be them because they are normal, they are real.

so, thank you fathers for setting aside your capes everyday and working long and hard for the sake of those you love, rather than yourselves. thank you for teaching us how to love in the ordinary.

xoxo,
abbie.