On Becoming a Super - Part 7: My Jam
March 6, 2020

    Superheroes need not attend to every need around them.  It should be – and is – obvious that you can't, but sometimes I act like I can shoulder responsibility for all the needs in my orbit.  So this is my personal reminder, my note to self:  Nope.  Stop it.  That's a recipe for disaster, for failure.  It's a recipe for superhero burnout and a shortage of supers.  The world needs more supers, not less, so it's high time I get over myself and out of my own way and everyone else's.   It's high time for me to stick to the super-ing that I do best or for which I am uniquely responsible or well positioned.  I can do this while cheering on my fellow supers in the super-ing that they do best or for which they are uniquely responsible or well positioned.

    In my case, I know that the super-ing I do best usually involves language.  Words are my special superpower – always have been.  The written word, the spoken word, foreign words, big words, tiny weird words, word puzzles, word games, word clouds.  Words are my jam.  I was the girl who read the dictionary for fun as a teenager, remember?  During Bible study.  Think about that:  here I was, busy perusing all the pretty words while my friends were poring over the Word of God.  I like words.  I dig words.  Words are my jam.  (Actually, by the time I started reading the dictionary during Bible study, I had already come to understand that the Bible was not the "Word of God" because the Bible itself says the Word of God – the Logos, in the original Greek – is a person, Jesus, and that the function of the words of the Bible is simply to point, however imperfectly, toward the Word incarnated in Jesus, toward the fundamental logic and order of the universe made manifest in human form.  But I digress.  Or do I?)

    So it makes sense that much of my super-ing involves the use of words.  In my work as an attorney, it's  all words all the time.  I read, I write, I speak.  I research, analyze, and explain.  I report, I summarize, I negotiate.  I consult, confer, give counsel – and sometimes even comfort.  I conduct meetings, file briefs to the court, and write and respond to demand letters.  All through words.  Words are my jam.

    But words are not my only tools for super-ing.  They might not even be my most important super-ing tools.  My most important tools might be those I bring to bear in loving and raising my kids, and in trying to make a life for and with them that will enable their own superpowers to come into full force and effect in the world.  No one else can wield these tools in quite the same way as I can, because no one else is the mother of my kids.  I am uniquely responsible for my kids, even though I am not exclusively responsible for them (a point to which I will return later).  And this unique responsiblity means that I am also particularly well positioned to shape the future they will inherit and inhabit.  So the way I go about this – and the fact that I go about it at all – this, too, is super-ing.  My kids are my jam.

    What – or who – is yours?