Unbeknownst to many, “dad” and “father” are not synonyms. “Father” is what a man becomes when he has a child, but in order to become a dad, he must face a series of trials in the spirit of rite-of-passage proceedings, the completion of which will significantly enhance his deck-building proficiency, among other such rewards.
These trials include terrifying your child with a face full of shaving cream, keeping a lid on your temper during their third Little League game, not keeping a lid on your temper during their fourth Little League Game, and — the most important one of all — pushing the most reasonable boundaries of physics in order to prevent them from cracking their skull open. That last one needn’t be accompanied by a dexterous flourish, but someone forgot to tell that to the partner of TikTok‘s @itslliizz.
In the eight-second video captured by a camera installed in the family’s living room, Liz can be seen supervising her three small children as they frolic around the living room. Their youngest can be seen navigating a series of Tetris-coded cushions on the floor, squatting on one that looks vaguely like a staircase, and having no way of knowing exactly how beholden he is to gravity.
As a result, the tot ends up tipping backwards, his soft little noggin threatening to make contact with the floor. But, motivated by the love for his baby in equal measure as his tenacity for completing his acclimation to dadhood, the father expertly frisbees the cushion in his hands from across the room, timing it so that his baby’s falling head lands on top of the cushion as it passes beneath them.
It was at once one of the great victories of dadhood, and the occasion was marked with applause and cheers. All that’s left for this paternal champion to do now is take part in the official dadhood ceremony this evening, in which he’ll have to perform some comically poor dance moves while grilling up some hamburgers at the nearest homeowners association barbecue.
Now, the notion of dads have a sixth sense is easy to buy into given the myriad of anecdotes and video evidence of dads rescuing their children from what would otherwise be unpleasant-to-nasty falls, but parental intuition is more commonly associated with mothers, given their larger biological proximity to their children, in a manner of speaking.
According to Parents.com (citing Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book “Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species”), while not all experts agree that parents have a fully-fledged, independent sixth sense, it is widely accepted that the priorities and biases one tends to adopt in motherhood will make mothers more privy to cues and nuances that might otherwise go unnoticed, and which mothers can then subsequently act upon.
At the end of the day, humanity’s collective codex of mothers and fathers pulling off remarkable heroics is beefy enough to convince us that the parental sixth sense needn’t be biologically detectable to be real. Such is the unwavering power of love.