Last Night, a Superhero Saved my Life

Excerpt: The Hero I Needed by Liesa Mignogna

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If you're from Gotham City, you've heard my story before. 

Batman was there for me when no one else was. 

When I was small and scared and felt so utterly alone.When just the notion that someone could protect me offered protection in itself. When all I needed, more than anything, was simply to be the one who needed. 

Most children start out believing in superheroes—in the reassuring presence of all-knowing, all-powerful adults who will always be there and always keep them safe. Who will tuck them in at night and wake them in the morning. 

But any fan of superhero stories knows there's a thin line between a hero and a villain, between those who use their gift to help others and those who use it only to help themselves. 

My parents divorced when I was eleven months old,and shortly thereafter my father moved several states away. He became a shadowy outline in my world, a man who materialized once a year for a brief visit, then disappeared again. He remained a mystery to me on almost every level—a five-foot three-inch, balding, legally blind,myopically self-centered man with one leg (following a childhood car accident) and one true love—music—who used his talent for piano playing to seduce a string of young, beautiful women into pledging their lives to him,for a series of marriages that didn't end well. 

It's my father who made me believe in supervillains. My mother—his third wife, convinced she'd be the one to save him, to change him, to help him become the hero—ended up referring to him as the Sperm Donor.She wised up, and I learned from her mistake—I had to be strong where other women had been weak, I had to resist the urge to fall for a villain. 

But as much as I felt his absence in my life as a palpable,aching presence, it wasn't the Sperm Donor who stalked my hometown. The most compelling and dangerous villains in life and literature aren't so terribly obvious—it's the ones who might try to do good, before fate deals them one too many blows. The ones who continue to believe, even in their darkest moments, that their motives are pure—that any destruction they cause to the ones they genuinely love is unavoidable. 

I was twelve years old when Tim Burton's Batman was released in theaters. The music was haunting and beautiful,the atmosphere of Batman's city—Gotham—breathtaking and chilling. I sat spellbound in the dark and watched for the very first time as young Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered right in front of him. I saw the loneliness in his eyes as he grew older, the pain and loss and fury that tied him forever to the child he once was. 

I saw Bruce channel this into the Batman. I was fascinated,charmed, entranced. Who was this man, larger than life, whispering in and out of the room? Who had an uncanny ability to be there, not always, but just when it mattered most? Who protected and sheltered others,never revealing the sacrifices he made? Who could hold his own against the perfect villain, someone unpredictable,unstable, uncontrollable, and all-consuming? 

At the time, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with my mother. We were supported by welfare while she attended graduate school, studying to be a social worker after being forced to give up her career as a concert flutist due to the degenerative disk disease slowly but surely eating away at her spine.

Welfare checks, food stamps . . . they were laughable means of support. I knew this, because she told me.She told me everything."I'm exhausted," she declared one evening. "I went downtown today to sell my plasma. There's no other way to keep food on the table—how do they expect me to feed my daughter on a hundred dollars of food stamps a month?"I shook my head, showing her my disbelief—at the government's stinginess, at her incredible sacrifice, always doing everything she could for me. She sighed.