Talk about incredible – try Elastigirl

Last week I took my two younger daughters to see Pixar’s new movie, “The Incredibles.”

If you aren’t familiar with the plot, the animated movie is about the adventures of a family who has super gifts.

Mr. Incredible has superhuman strength and he uses it to stop speeding trains and catch falling bodies in midair. But, he is sued first by a man who didn’t want to be rescued, and then by other innocent victims who were hurt as a result of his heroic interventions.

More lawsuits follow against other super heroes until the government – which is forced to foot the bill to settle the lawsuits – puts an end to all super hero intervention and secretly relocates all “supers,” mainstreaming them into the world of ordinary citizens.

Mr. Incredible, now known as “Bob Parr,” goes to work as an insurance adjuster. But he can’t help intervening again, this time by pointing out to his clients the loopholes and backdoors necessary to navigate through the tangled insurance bureaucracy.

Parr works in a cramped cubicle, wears white short-sleeved shirts, puts on a lot of weight around his middle and is generally miserable.

However, Mrs. Incredible, the former “Elastigirl ” now known simply as “Helen Parr,” put aside her super ability to stretch and expand to infinity, to stay at home to raise the couple’s three children.

Oh, sure, she occasionally resorts to using “Elastigirl’s” extended reach when circumstances call for it – like stretching around the table to separate a couple of squabbling kids, but she accepts the situation for what it is. She mothers, keeps house, and lends a sympathetic ear to the miserable Mr. Incredible.

But what caught my attention was that in the couple’s run-of-the-mill suburban home, Mr. Incredible had a locked office, a shrine to the memorabilia of his glory days. Photos, magazine covers and newspaper clippings line the walls, and his “super suit” stands in a lighted display case.

Yet there isn’t such a place for Mrs. Incredible. I didn’t see a wall of photos and her suit isn’t anywhere in sight.

I did notice that when there is trouble, and it takes her super elasticity to help save Mr. Incredible and the entire family, she does it without fanfare and never forgets that she’s a mother. Even on a life-or-death rescue mission, she is still juggling kids and dealing with phone calls from a ditzy baby sitter.

At one point, in a moment many of us can relate to, she runs past a mirror and catches sight of her “mother-of-three” backside in the skintight super heroine suit. She stops, pats her hips with a sigh, and then gets right back to work.

And that’s when it hit me.

Even masquerading as Helen Par, “Elastigirl” was able to tap into her unique super ability in ways millions of real women the whole world over can envy.

Sure, she had to forsake the glory and adventure of being a super hero, but hey, she never got stretched too thin, she wasn’t worried about snapping and it didn’t matter if she found herself pulled in two directions at once. She always bounced back.

In fact, she may have pulled off her most unbelievable feat after she stopped saving the world.

Think about it. Elastigirl, aka Helen Parr, got pregnant, carried and delivered three children and even added a few extra pounds to her J-Lo regions and she did it all without a stretch mark.

Now that’s incredible.