My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life (12 page)

Laird wrote a book called
Force of Nature
and that pretty much sums up the character of Brody, also known as the Most Strong-Willed Child God Ever Put Breath In.

Brody is a fighter. She loves a good tussle. She’s a complicated little being. We call her the Cat of the House. If you approach her for a kiss, she won’t have anything to do with you; if you’re busy doing something else, that’s when she’ll want to snuggle on your lap.

Once, she bit Reece
and hung on
, like some little pit bull. Even though she’s the older sister, and twice the size of Brody, Reece is a lover not a fighter. She won’t defend herself. I pulled Brody off her sister, spanked her, and sent her to her room. Then marched outside, where I stood by the side of the house and wept. What kind of monster was I? At that moment Laird drove up in his truck. He hurried over. What was up with me sobbing by the garbage cans? I told him what happened and he was nonplussed. I was comforted by his lack of alarm. He rubbed my back and said, “Haven’t you ever seen mother lions cuff their cubs?”

I am aware of how little say I have with Brody. Her fierceness surprises even me. In order to get her biting under control, we made a contract with her; when she misbehaves, she can choose either a spanking or a time-out for her punishment.
She stood there in her little shorts and bare feet and bright yellow banshee hair and considered this. She’s not one to simply react.

“How hard will you spank me?” she asked.

She wanted me to give her a sample of what she was in for. Because she’d much rather have the spanking than the time-out, because a spanking is over and done with, and then she can go about her business. A time-out doesn’t hurt, but it’s drudgery, and that’s the last thing she wants.

Only a few hours before writing this I pulled Brody aside and said, “Listen, you’ve been a bit rude lately, and you are not listening at all. Also, you need to stop fighting with everyone about everything. I want you to know that I’m going to start pulling on your ear a little.”

Another child might have been instantly afraid or alarmed by this, but Brody was intrigued. “What do you mean?”

“When you bite people, or are very rude, I’m going to give your ear a little yank. And I’m also going to give Katie permission to do it, too.” Katie is our babysitter.

“Really?” said Brody.

“Here, I’ll show you.” I gave her ear a tug.

“Owww,” she said. She rubbed her ear, but she was completely calm. She was still more intrigued by this new development in our interactions.

“Only it will be harder. And I want you to think about this before you bite someone, or pick a fight, or are rude to us.”

“And Katie gets permission, too?” she said.

This is what I deal with.

Part of being a good parent in these modern times is creating a childhood that positions our children to get into a top college.

Not.

Or at least not around here.

I want our kids to be kids as long as possible. My friend tells her college-age daughter to venture out and have fun and explore and experiment. Make some mistakes, and go down this path, no this one, no this one, wait! Go ahead and take a year off to live in Peru. Because, as my friend says, in this life we’re old for a really long time.

Take my four-year-old to be interviewed for a prep-school-track kindergarten?

Kill me now.

College is terrific, don’t get me wrong. My college experience was invaluable. I wouldn’t have had my volleyball career without it. But part of our job as parents is to raise contributing members of society. This isn’t the same as driving your offspring through four years of college, as if they’re cows on the range.

The truth is: college is awesome for some people but not for others. If it’s not for you, it’s lunacy to rack up six figures in debt trying to stuff your square-peg self into the round hole of higher education. And just cruising through four years of course work and partying to earn a business degree doesn’t float the boat anymore, if it ever did.

A better education is one that teaches kids to look for opportunities, to scan the world and find a space that only they can fill. Neither Laird nor I come from money or privilege. Everything we’ve achieved has been through hard work, persistence, and, yes, a lot of luck. Being able to recognize an opportunity and seize it is a key skill; we want to teach our girls that skill, and also the value of hard work. If they leave our house knowing their strengths and weaknesses, their genuine interests, and how to work hard, we have faith that they’ll succeed.

Our kids are going to grow up no matter how we parent them. Also, they’re pretty resilient. The planet wouldn’t be groaning with so many humans if we weren’t.

I try to parent my children in a way that’s in sync with my personality. When we don’t trust our instincts, when we act in a way we think we’re “supposed” to, when we start thinking that someone else has a better idea about how to be a parent to our children than we do, we do nothing but add to the crazy stress of family living.

As someone said to me just the other day, “Stop ‘shoulding’ on yourself.”

Laird has an interesting perspective on the whole thing: our kids are going to get older and taller and turn eighteen no matter what we do. For him, the parenting journey is for
the parents. How do you function on no sleep? How do you function when a little baby is screaming her head off for weeks on end? How do you function when you must put your child’s needs, always, endlessly, before your own?

Parenting teaches us all, finally, to grow the hell up.

Not long ago I showed up for a magazine shoot and the photographer, upon seeing me, stopped in his tracks, widened his eyes, threw open his arms, and exclaimed, “Gabrielle, I am amazed at how good you still look.” He’s a genuinely nice person in a field filled with sometimes not-so-nice people, and it’s possible he regretted that tiny word “still” the second it tumbled out of his mouth, but he went on to overcompensate, praising the state of my skin, “even though you’ve spent so much time in the sun,” and my figure, “even though you’ve had two kids.”

He meant well, and yet every sentence he uttered dead-ended in the same place: even though I can still rock a magazine spread with the help of Photoshop, I am not the hot-ta-ta
boffo babe I once was.(Please hear the sarcasm, dear reader.) I am, like everyone else in the world, getting older.

I’m forty-two as I write this; by the time it’s published, I will be forty-three, closer to forty-five than I am to forty. Some days I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror of my truck, without my sunglasses, and I’m shocked. The Hawaiian midday sun is like HDTV. I notice a new line beneath my eyes. Or I twist my forearm a certain way and see that the elasticity of my skin has decreased.

And you know what my next thought is going to be, but, sister, I’m not going there. I am not going to think it. It’s counterproductive, it doesn’t serve me, and it doesn’t make me feel good. In this regard I follow the teachings of Meryl Streep who said, “Put blinders on those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.” I don’t need to say anything to myself, ever, that involves the phrase “old bag.”

Even the way my clothes fit is beginning to change. People think that because I can walk around in my running tights, and maybe take my shirt off and there’s my sports bra or tank top, that somehow I’ve managed to cheat the determined demon known as aging, but I haven’t. My body is changing, just like everyone else’s.

Age is coming for us all. And the question is, do you want to take it on the chin and be grateful for your health and vitality,
for the ability to move your body and partake of life, or do you want to be bitter and self-conscious and spend your time, energy, and money worshipping at the altar of plastic surgery? This isn’t to say there aren’t procedures out there that can make you look better, fresher, and, yes, younger—for a while. Then, you start looking like a woman I see at my local market in Malibu from time to time, who looks not young and vital, but like a sad, panic-stricken not-young woman who has had so much work done, all she is managing to convey to the world is her fear and insecurity.

Everyone turns fifty. (I should say, if you’re lucky you turn fifty, because I have some friends who died in their forties.) The stark fact is that you can spend all your time, energy, and money having fat removed from this place and injected into that place, having different pieces of skin tucked and sand-blasted smooth, and other parts puffed up and lightened. Mind you, I’m not for a minute saying you shouldn’t do this. I’m not whatever the plastic surgery version of a Luddite is. The day may come when I spring for an eye tuck. Still, it’s good to be sane about it, to pitch your tent in the camp of aging gracefully, and to realize that however much you have done, there will come a day when you’re going to look like a really rested forty-year-old who has had work done, but you’re never going to look twenty-two. That ship has sailed.

Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh, it’s easy for her to say. She’s six three” (not always a stupendous and obvious advantage; try being a five-foot-tall seven-year-old) “and
has worked as a model.” You’re right, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

Being in the business of being recognized for your looks teaches one great lesson: this is not something you’ve worked to create; it’s an accident of birth. I was always more interested in the parts of my life over which I had control, and being tall and photogenic was not one of them. When I had people ogling me, I thought, “This has nothing to do with me, which means I have no use for it.”

Discovering volleyball in eleventh grade gave me a sense of purpose. It was something I could do, and do well. And after getting my ass handed to me on the court a few times, I learned that you may be sixteen and rocking that pair of shorts, but if you’re playing badly and you keep missing the ball, you basically suck. The shorts, and how you look in them, don’t matter. The reality check is immediate and brutal.

Once, when I was still playing volleyball at Florida State, I turned down a lucrative, weekend modeling job in New York because it conflicted with a match. How I performed in my sport was important to me, whereas having my picture taken simply didn’t. It never seemed like a real job to me. Of course I pursued opportunities I felt were worthwhile, but through it all, I always remembered that my core value wasn’t based on how I looked.

Over the years this attitude has allowed me to keep my head on straight when, for example, people start asking whatever happened to Gabrielle Reece? Whatever happened to
the once Top Most Beautiful Hot Woman in the Known Universe by a Glossy Magazine with a Huge Circulation, only not to be named, or mentioned, ever again? The subtext of these “whatever happened to” questions is abundantly clear, to you, to your friends and family, and to the world: once young and gorgeous; now, not so much. There’s no room for the luxury of self-delusion.

Youth is a currency. Beauty is a currency. But let me tell you, it’s a currency with a limit. And if you can’t figure out a way to transcend that, it’s a slow, miserable death.

Sure, there is a certain amount of mileage you can get out of being pissed off. But it won’t carry you that far. And it won’t make you happy.

After my circuit training class on Wednesday there’s a no-sweat class. (This is Kaua’i; people live most of their lives here beneath a dewy sheen of perspiration, so I assume this means a gentle yoga class.) The gentle no-sweat yoga people, most of whom are in their sixties or seventies, arrive at least fifteen minutes early and stand just outside the room, scowling at us through the plate-glass windows. My class is still going strong. We’ve got our weights, and the music’s pumping, and we’re working hard, sweating our heads off. We have a full ten minutes left, but one of them always pushes in and hollers over the music that it’s time for us to wrap it up. She, for it is always a she, is furious for reasons so mysterious, I can’t help but believe it’s her habit to interact with the world in a high state of supreme grumpiness.

It’s not always this way. Sometimes after class one of the
women will come up to me, touch my arm and say, “I just wanted to tell you that you girls are amazing!” We then trade a few words about how good it is to keep moving, and we wish each other well. But much of the time the gentle yoga people radiant a discontent so scorching, I feel a need to reapply sunscreen.

But I’m grateful for their presence, because it reminds me that the old saying about beauty being the light of the heart is not just a greeting card cliché. What makes these people “old” is their attitude, not how they look, and the reason I don’t connect with them has nothing to do with their age, but with how they behave.

In Kaua’i, we have a neighbor down the road, Joe, a dapper man whose age could be anywhere between sixty and ninety. Every day he appears in his slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirt, his hair carefully combed. He’s got shiny eyes, like a little elf. He cares for his lawn. He paints his own house. Everything in his realm is immaculate.

Joe allows himself a beer once a week, after he’s mowed his lawn. One day we had some good Belgian beer in the house, and I brought him a bottle and asked him how it was going.

“Our friends have been here. For two weeks! That’s a long time, especially since my wife’s mind isn’t so good, you know.” I’d known for a while that Joe’s wife had Alzheimer’s. When I asked him how he was doing with that he said, “It teaches me over and over that acceptance is really a part of life.”

Reece and Brody love Joe. Last year, when we returned to the neighborhood in the fall, he baked us a cake and delivered it with a big “Welcome back, Hamiltons!”

To thank Joe, Reece and Brody baked him a big cookie, and in return he wrote them a proper thank-you note. He tells them how proud he is of them. Brody adores him. Whenever he appears in front of his house she runs down the street and into his arms. I’m intrigued by this. There are a lot of other people in the neighborhood who are much younger, much hipper, and would seem to be much more fun from a four-year-old’s point of view, and yet it’s Joe—more specifically Joe’s spirit—to which my four-year-old is drawn.