An Introduction; Or Why I Crave the Demise of Wonder Woman

Never fear, this blog is not a call to action against the beautiful, Amazonian, superhero. I'm talking about a completely different kind of "Wonder Woman". You've met her; she's the one in all the ads we see and hear a million times a day.

She's the full-time Mom who works all day and still finds time to cook a big dinner for her family, clean her house up to hospital specifications, and work-out for at least two hours everyday. (How else is she supposed to keep that size zero figure?) She also eats "whatever she wants" but somehow doesn't gain an inch. Oh, and she's an animal in the sack; never too tired and always has perfect techniques. (She learned them from all those Cosmo tutorials.)

She's also the woman that frowns at any problems you have with your kids. After all, look at her kids - always tidy in their designer labels and always apoplectic for Kool-Aid or Ovaltine or Sunny D.

In short, this woman is perfect; a veritable wonder. She's also complete crap. She doesn't exist outside of paper and ink; she is created from cellulose and airbrushing. We all know this.

And Yet.

Yet, we search for her in the mirror on a daily basis. We want to live her life with all its ease and comfort; where a problem never lasts longer than 30 seconds and is easily solvable by a friend who just happens to be carrying around the exact product we need to fix everything.

But it is not the advertising that we need to escape. It is our compulsion for an untrue life that must end.

We need to realize that in our lives we have so much more than merely a snippet of perfection. Perfection is boring. In our imperfect lives we have love and anger, hope and fear, joy and doubt, chaos and order, silliness and sadness. These things exist in a balance and cannot exist separately.

It is not our job to be Wonder Woman. It is our job to be, simply, Woman.

So, here in this small part of an infinite cyberspace I'm going to try to remind all of us (especially me!) the importance of reality. I will share with you my day to day struggles with:

Womanhood. Motherhood. And All the Spaces in Between.