What's Your Superpower?

Long & Short Reviews asked. I don't think it's a very nice question, since any answer that's not sarcastic is going to sound like bragging, but yes, in fact, I have one. 

I am an Irish-American celiac. 

The celiac gene sometimes travels in company with even nastier genes and fails to become a superpower, but in our family, for as far back as we've gone, it is literally a flipping superpower. It works like this: 

As an undiagnosed celiac you eat wheat, which is your Kryptonite, and appear to be a very weak person in every way. (I lost two jobs literally for fainting on the job site, was warned I was likely to lose two more for showing cold symptoms badly enough to scare away customers. My own mother didn't know when I had mononucleosis, although I was in her home at the time, because my "normal" always had looked a lot like a healthy person with mononucleosis.) Everything you do feels as if you're doing it uphill, backward... 

Actually, however, the rest of your DNA is pretty solid. Your health habits are reasonably good. You have a lot of strength; you just use most of it dragging yourself through life with a chronic disease condition. So when you get the wheat out of your system, it's like Clark Kent popping out of the oldfashioned phone booth in his Superman underwear. You can lift more than your own weight. You don't think twice about doing things people don't believe anyone of your size ought to be able to do. 

During my first year of gluten-freedom Mother, who was living somewhere else, came to my house for Thanksgiving. She'd lost some weight, looked better without it, and was chuffed. I'd gained a little, but it was solid muscle. Mother still weighed twenty pounds more than I did. As we stood up to clear the table I forget which joke was being cracked, exactly, but I said "I could just pick her up and carry her around," leaned over, and did it. What I remember is being surprised how easy it was to lift Mother up by the waist, throw her over my shoulder, and carry her around the house. 

Mother then went gluten-free and had a lovely time, between ages 60 and 80, moving faster than women half her age, telling younger men who wanted to be our stepfathers that they ought to be dating my sister or me. 

Eventually the day came when I was using my superpower to lift my husband. The less I think about that time, the better I like it. Anyway. I've stayed with other patients who were bigger than he. Mother wouldn't stay with a male patient unless Dad did too. I don't discriminate, myself. People who need home nurses aren't likely to hurt us in any way except being heavy and hard to lift, breathing on us, damaging our reputations, or feeding us the special food treats their relatives bring for them. I learned in the city that a woman who really doesn't want to be harassed by men can advertise that she does home nursing or massage for "Ladies Only," but then all her clients will be lesbians. So I figure I can walk away if patients harass me, whether they are men or lesbians. Most of my patients were ladies and behaved accordingly.

Staying strong and tough for a good long time runs on both sides of the family, too. I never wanted to bring any more celiacs into the world but I think even my celiac relatives have better DNA than most of humankind. 

I still have days, after spray poisoning episodes, when it feels like all I can do to drag my weary bones outside and stand up long enough to feed the cats. Days when I'm pretty sure a cat could beat me in a fair fight. But most days I can still make people remember that three of Dad's first cousins were bigger than he was, that he was the-little-fellow-who-had-been-ill-and-stopped-growing for years, and that he could beat any of the three oversized cousins in any contest of strength they could think of. Easily. (Dad claimed that as boys they used to test their relative strength by fighting, but as men they always challenged each other on strength, speed, and precision on jobs.) The celiac gene is not found in his family but that other Irish gene that flips a weakness into a superpower is.

Even in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire, even the British armed forces knew they didn't want to mess with the Irish. We beat our own messed-up genes every day, so bleep do mere humans think they are!