Not All Heroes Wear Capes: Unraveling the Myth of the Black Supermom

Nora and Iris West-Allen’s fraught relationship proves that even we daughters often expect superheroics from our very human Black mothers.

As a child with a personality so big it threatened to burst out of my body, I thought having a mother with a bigger one would be my villain origin story. Despite sharing a complexion, most facial features, and a few unique birthmarks on our tongues and eyes, I often couldn’t see myself when I looked at my mom. No matter what the issue—everything from my desire to travel abroad to my hair—we often found ourselves on opposite sides, with a matching determination to dig our heels in. It made for a neverending sparring match, always one wrong word away from the next big blowout (to which my dad would have to play referee). Forgiveness was an elusive concept, so resentment often lay just under my skin, ready to spring forth at the first perceived slight.

In season five of the CW’s The Flash, speedster Nora West-Allen—Barry Allen (The Flash) and Iris West-Allen’s adult daughter—arrives in 2019 from the future to help Barry stop the season’s Big Bad, Cicada. She brings her mom’s old jacket and decades worth of baggage with her, and from the moment she stepped on-screen, I could relate.

In the CW’s iteration of The Flash, Barry disappears in a multidimensional crisis during Nora’s infancy. As a result, she grows up with only her mother, portrayed in this iteration by Black actress Candice Patton. Iris, fearing losing Nora as she did Barry, suppresses her daughter’s powers with a dampening chip. Nora is often defensive, aggressive, and dismissive with her mother because of this decision, while Iris works double time to get to know her adult daughter in the first half of the season.

Maybe I didn’t know what it was like to wake up after twenty-five years and discover my mother had suppressed my inherited superpowers—but I did intimately understand the dance mothers and daughters do on the line between “protection” and “control.” I understood leaning far into a daddy’s-girl identity so that you didn’t have to look too hard at your relationship with your mother. But most of all, I understood the struggle of getting your mother to see you as yourself, and not just as her daughter.

What I didn’t understand was that for as much as Nora and I yearned for our mothers to see and accept us as the imperfect girls we are, our mothers wanted us to see them too. Though I often think about destroying the myth of the Black superwoman—a stereotype scholar Michele Wallace identified that positions Black women as infallibly strong and emotionally stoic—I never investigated the perfection I expected of my mother. I never interrogated why my mother’s humanity was not among the number of those for whom I advocated.

Black mothers rarely are afforded the courtesy of humanity.

For Nora, healing happens over the course of about half a season. For me, it was a tension that time away in college and then graduate school dampened but didn’t completely extinguish.

But for both of us, it was a strain only crises would heal.

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In a season that centers father-daughter duos in the foreground and background, watching the intricacies of Iris and Nora’s strained relationship play out on-screen was an opportunity to reinvestigate my relationship to my own mother.

While the viewer is sympathetic toward Nora, the four prior seasons of The Flash give us insight into Iris as a person. It orients us with Iris, aligns us with her perspective in addition to Nora’s, as opposed to a teen show when the viewer is often aligned with the angry, misunderstood child. In entertainment, motherhood often becomes the point when women shift out of their roles as protagonists and into supporting cast members in the eyes of the world and their children. In The Flash, however, we have two young women trying to negotiate their relationship as mother and daughter while navigating their sense of self without either ceding ground and fading into the background. And as a Black mother-daughter team in a superhero narrative, the stakes are higher.

Pop culture critic and writer Stitch has written about the harassment Black actress Candice Patton has received from comics fans for portraying Iris West-Allen. It would have put Patton further into harm’s way to lean into the nuances of Black motherhood explicitly in the show, but the hints are there for Black viewers to fill in the blanks. One of Nora’s refrains in the first half of the season is that Iris’s actions aren’t protective but controlling. While Iris may have less to fear for her child who could pass for white, she still lives with the fear that anytime Nora leaves to save lives under the guise of her superhero persona “XS,” she may forfeit her own life in the process.

Throughout the season, we see Iris make selfless decision after selfless decision to keep her family together—including shooting a hypnotized Nora with a tranquilizer to prevent her from hurting Barry; running headfirst into someone else’s memory, in which she could be trapped, to save Nora; and going into Cicada’s home on her own under the guise of following a lead on a story to investigate for the team. It’s only when Iris launches herself off the side of a building to save Barry’s life as he free-falls, bound and powerless, trusting that if she frees him, he will save them both, that Nora begins to thaw toward her.

Iris West-Allen’s devotion is unquestionable, and yet Nora’s frostiness proves that even we daughters expect superheroics from our very human Black mothers.

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Everything changed when I saw my mother as a daughter.

Her mother, my grandmother, my last living grandparent, contracted Covid-19 last December. One moment, the illness seemed manageable; the next, my grandmother had been admitted to the ICU and placed on a ventilator. At the height of the pandemic, no visitors were allowed in the hospitals, and so my mother, the eldest of her six siblings, was named the point of contact. She waited with shaking hands every day around lunchtime when the doctor or a nurse would call with an update. When the call took longer to come through than usual, she paced through the kitchen, picking up and setting down the same cups, straightening jars and containers by a half an inch, just to occupy her hands. Anxiety rolled off her body in palpable waves until the phone rang. Every day, we prayed the ringtone wouldn’t signal the worst news.

My grandma, like her late husband and all of her children, including my mother, was a fighter. After nearly two weeks in the ICU, she made a comeback. She began to speak, and the nurses held a phone up to her so my mom could FaceTime with her. A few weeks later, she was moved to a rehabilitation center. But after weeks of back-and-forth between the rehab center and a couple of hospital visits, my mom and her siblings made the decision to move her to our home to recover.

My brain moved sluggishly as I processed my mother transferring her nervous energy into cleaning out our guest bedroom to make space for my grandma.

The first few weeks were the hardest. I watched my mother fight sleep as my father and I took turns shaking her awake when my grandmother called her in the night. I peered around the corner as she meticulously gave her mother medicine. I sat nearby as she made breakfasts that her mother would only pick at. My anxious-on-a-good-day mother was hanging on by a single, frayed thread, but after the first call from the hospital, she never cried where I could see again. She only diligently sat with her mother in the reclining chair in her room, sometimes moving only to welcome in her sisters or the home health care nurses and physical therapists, taking care to fix her mask over her nose before she reached the door. Every now and then sounds of my grandmother warbling a hymn or the music from the handheld Pac-Man game my mother played when she got bored drifted from the room. And sometimes, there was no sound at all.

Progress seemed both like it was elusive and like it happened all at once. Sometimes my grandmother’s victories—like a trip down the hall and back with a walker or a fully consumed plate of toast and eggs—were overshadowed by long stretches of pain and sleepless nights. Laughter could result in violent coughing spells that often led to stomach spasms. My mother rarely asked questions; she simply did what needed to be done.

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Black mothers rarely are afforded the courtesy of humanity. Mistakes are inexcusable. Perfection is expected. But I’ve noticed for daughters of Black mothers, it often takes drastic measures for us to reevaluate how we see them.

She was also a daughter, which meant she, like me, was fallible—and figuring things out.

In The Flash, it is several episodes before Nora is able to reimagine her mother, with her own pain surrounding her husband’s disappearance and only after Barry encourages her to think about Iris’s point of view in episode five, saying: “You know, Nora, I wish you would try to understand who your mom is today, instead of seeing her as who she becomes in the future.” The time that they spend at odds is resolved by midseason, but Nora is still in her twenties and retains a lifetime of difficult memories of her mother.

In the present, Iris is not yet a mother. Her defining relationships are those of daughter, sister, friend, and wife. It is only Nora’s running back in time to see her parents in their late twenties that shifts the power dynamic and enables her to see her mother from a new perspective—not as exclusively a mother, but as someone whose life was full before her. Someone who was flawed, and whole, and doing the best she could under impossible circumstances.

While I wasn’t able to turn back the clock in the same way, my mother’s shift to primary caretaker for her dangerously ill mother rendered her younger, more afraid, more vulnerable. It rendered her more human. Mother was no longer her default title in my imagination. She was also a daughter, which meant she, like me, was fallible—and figuring things out. More importantly, it meant I could take care of her.

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When adult Nora arrived in 2019 wearing Iris’s jacket, I smiled. Iris recognized her immediately. She said it was the jacket that gave her away, along with the purple and yellow lightning her speed generates—a gift from both Iris and Barry, respectively. Though Barry initially hesitates to trust Nora, Iris needs no further convincing. And when Barry returns Nora to 2049, Iris, with no special power but her own determination, time travels to bring her home.

Again and again, Iris shows trust and dedication to her daughter, to Barry, to her family. Her love is admirable and yet it goes almost entirely without acknowledgement. That level of devotion, putting everyone else’s needs before her own, is implicitly expected of her. Iris carries weight she shouldn’t have to and is rarely given space to put it down.

It’s not fictitious. I saw it in the simple moments of care as my mom helped ease her mother down the stairs of our back porch so she could sit in the yard once she had recovered enough to walk. She didn’t want to be a superwoman, but she would do anything for her people to be well and happy. My mother did it quietly, and without fanfare, which meant I often never gave a second thought to small things, like how foods I craved appeared at the next meal and misplaced jewelry or books never stayed missing for long.

She isn’t perfect and she can be wrong, but watching Nora shift her perspective through time and space to learn to be with Iris as she is taught me to unlearn expecting superhuman feats from my mother. It taught me to value my mother because she is a person who has always been so much more than I could have ever imagined, with a personality bigger than my mind could comprehend—exactly as she is. She wasn’t extraordinary because of what she did, but because of who she was. She was never destined to be a superhero, she was only meant to be a human. No more. No less.