The Wonder Woman Issue

I’m not a Wonder Woman. I wish I were, and I waste a lot of time giving myself tests of courage, like, “Introduce yourself to the guy at the bar who looks like the model in the Tommy Bahama commercial” or “Quit your job and move to France.” I always fail these mental feats of derring-do and I always have good reasons (“He’s probably dating the model from the California Closets ad,” or “ I’m a Berlitz dropout.”) And then, when I’m sitting at home watching Top Chef instead of eating escargot in Paris, I feel utterly depressed about myself. I’ve always wanted to be like Lauren Hutton and wrestle alligators and live alone in the desert and have a really great white shirt that I just wash out in my motorcycle helmet and wear to a dinner party one ranch over. I want bravery and grit and Amazon chic to be second nature, but it’s just not in my DNA. I come from a long line of women who endured rather than escaped to the Left Bank, who got up in the morning and did what had to be done to survive or feed their families or put a little money aside for tomorrow. I know they must have had bigger dreams, and maybe they allowed themselves the luxury of wondering “what if” on a summer afternoon between hanging out laundry and starting dinner, when they had just sat down to catch their breath and snap some beans. Just like my new sister in the Women to Women International sponsorship program, who has her own dreams. She can’t read or write, her hut has no electricity and she has to get water from a standing drainpipe in her village, but the Women for Women program will help her make the journey from victim to survivor to active citizen. Hundreds of thousands of women in her country have been raped or tortured, some in front of their families, during a brutal war. Despite this, Congolese women have endured, and in my eyes, my new sister is already a Wonder Woman.