My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life (15 page)

Laird and I serve on the board of Rain Catchers, whose mission is to provide clean water to people in every corner of the globe. We also work with Heal the Bay, a local organization dedicated to protecting and restoring our beautiful local Santa Monica Bay, and the National Resources Defense Council, devoted to protecting wildlife and the wild places of the world.

Mostly, we donate training or surfing sessions to raise money for charities we support. If it’s in the wheelhouse of nature or children, we’re in. The most fun is getting to work with a gang of kids. My friend Kelly Meyer created
Teaching Gardens, aimed at teaching kids from first grade to fifth the basics of gardening and the joy of eating what you grow. I usually parachute in for a short session on movement.

I can see your thought bubble from here: “Isn’t community service a sentence handed down by a judge?”

Think of it this way: service serves you as much as it does whomever you’re trying to help. Aside from the obvious and immediate good feeling it bestows, it offers some perspective on your issues. It helps you stand back and appreciate your life. How’s the fam? Pretty good. Hubster? Yep. Job? Could use another, but at least I have one.

It’s also a good message to send our kids who generally watch what we
do
more closely than they listen to what we
say
. Spending part of your time on a service project is inconvenient and there’s no monetary gain. You’re doing it because you want to contribute to the betterment of your world, which, by the way, conveys to your kids that they’re not the center of the known universe. Could there be a better message for them?

If we never take the time to get out of our bubble and interact with people outside our normal sphere, we risk becoming hypochondriacs of our own lives. We fall into overexamining every glance our husband throws us, the mild rash on the inside of our kid’s elbow, the new wrinkle beside our eye—wait, that is a wrinkle, isn’t it? Or do I need glasses, oh shit, I need glasses! It can be endless if you let it be endless.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And I’ve found that you can reconnect with what’s really crucial versus what’s noise-in garbage by going outside your bubble and helping others. No one said it better than Gandhi: “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Last year there was a poll asking women what they’d give up in order to have a beach-perfect body. The consensus was 67 percent would give up sex for six months. Or maybe it was 78 percent would give up sex for four months. And 83 percent said they would give up sex for two months? Really, the thing was so stupid I didn’t even finish reading the article. The takeaway is that we chicks value being admired and envied over intimacy.

Heads up, modern women: men don’t care if you have a half-inch of muffin top perched on the waistband of your jeans, or a smidge of cellulite beneath your left butt cheek. They don’t care if, when you twist around, there’s a little
wedge of fat in the lower midriff region. They don’t care if, when you raise your arm, there’s a teeny wobble beneath your triceps. Do not care.

All they want is for you, their chick, to be naked and smiling.

And if you want your partnership to last, you better plan on being naked and smiling. A lot.

Most days, the sporting event my marriage most resembles is the four-hundred-meter relay, where the only time you have any contact with your teammate is when he passes off the baton, and for about thirty feet you’re running side by side before he falls away and you zoom off.

All last week Laird was shooting something for French TV. The French are mesmerized by Laird and the way he lives and they were shooting something lifestyle-y, but I wasn’t sure what, exactly. He was gone before the sun rose and home long after the girls were put to bed. I was teaching all week and also participated in a volleyball tournament, and the girls each had their full complement of ballet, gymnastic, jujitsu, and horseback riding lessons. Someone may have had an ear infection in there, too.

We were both exhausted, and you know what happens when you’re exhausted? What is the very first thing women take a pass on?

Exactly.

Why it’s more important to make sure the four-year-old’s tiny T-shirts are folded into tiny squares and tucked into her drawer in a tidy stack than to be intimate with Mr. Charming
is an excellent question. I’m sure it has to do with the feeling of satisfaction we gain—all right,
I
gain—from checking something off my to-do list.

Laird and I can go on like this for, oh, about forty-eight hours, after which Mr. Charming’s behavior toward me starts to change. My girlfriends are convinced that, after a few days, if the guys don’t receive the right kind of attention, they start treating us like they treat everyone else in the household.

And you know who that is in my household? A teenager who’s never there, two little kids, and Mr. Speedy, the dog. And Mr. Charming, who, once he’s gone without for three days, starts getting grumpy. The word “withdrawal” comes to mind.

I might be traveling, might be doing the taxes, or the kids might be sick. It doesn’t really matter. Forty-eight hours passes and I better start thinking about some naked and smiling time. So doing Laird is on my to-do list.

We’re interluders, grabbing time when the kids are off somewhere in the middle of the day. We’re big on nap dates. Even if he’s cruised through the kitchen and I say, “Hey, what are you doing in half an hour,” and he’s busy, it’s good for him to know I’m thinking about him. And it.

And yes, even though he’s the one who’s got the forty-eight-hour withdrawal problem, I’m the one chasing him around the sofa. We women complain about this perceived unfairness. Why do we have to do everything (and pretty much every woman I know does
everything
, defined, for our purposes, as more than one person can possibly handle in a day, week,
month, lifetime), and then, at the end of the day, find a way to channel our inner pole dancer?

Because once women get all snuggled down into a relationship, sex just isn’t the priority it once was. I wish I could report otherwise. But the sun rises and sets; it’s the end of the day and we’re dead tired. We’re not withholding, we’re not bored with our partners (unless we are, but that’s another issue), we really are simply exhausted. And the more exhausted we are, the more days pass without sex—for some couples there’s more sexiness at a sixth grader’s slumber party, where at least the boys next door might get in on some spin the bottle action, than there is five, six, seven years into a marriage.

It’s important for Mr. Charming to know that we still think of him that way. Also, unless he has a wasting disease, Mr. Charming will pretty much drop everything and have sex whenever you let it be known that you’re up for it (down with it?), and there are few things less erotic, not to mention humiliating, than for your guy to sidle up to you and nibble on your earlobe only to have you bat him away and say, “Sorry, babe, the PTA cupcake committee is meeting in fifteen minutes, then I have to stop by and pick up some new fly strips for the garage.”

I had a boyfriend in my twenties, a sincere and generous guy whom I knew from the modeling world. He was very understanding about my time, my work schedule, my training schedule, my moods. Too understanding, as it turns out. One day we just stopped having sex altogether, and once we
stopped, I lost all interest. He was a great guy—and by the way, this was a beautiful man—but I didn’t want to sleep with him. Once it got to the point where he had to ask “Are you not attracted to me?” the relationship was over.

With Laird, it’s different. He has expectations that if he’s committed to the relationship, I’m committed to an active sex life. He lets me know on a regular basis that he’s
here
, and because he has high expectations on the sex front, I rise to meet those expectations. It’s not as if it’s difficult. It isn’t as if he’s off scratching himself and honking at me, “Okay, woman, come over here and boff my brains out.” Laird is a loving guy who pays attention to me.

So yeah, bottom line: if you want everything to run smoothly in the castle, get busy. Sex takes, what, twenty minutes? You should never
have
to fake it, but you know what? You’re not going to go to intimacy hell if once in a while you fake it. And if you have to indulge in a fantasy, do it. Sometimes I imagine Laird with another woman. I look at it from the outside, as is my habit, and I think, “Whoa! That guy’s attractive. He’s hot!” Do whatever it takes to remind you of what you have. And, presumably, what you want to keep.

And while we’re on the subject of what you might need to tell yourself from time to time to get into the spirit of the occasion, how about checking in with your guy to see if he’s still digging the way you’re stroking, sucking, or tugging? If you ask him how he likes his lamb chop, there’s no reason you shouldn’t ask him about his more intimate preferences. Time changes things for them, too. Ten years ago a little tug
of the balls might have been just the surprise that ramped up the intensity; now, it’s merely annoying. We talk a lot about being productive in the gym, why not in the bedroom as well? Also, nothing says “I care” like letting Mr. Charming know you’re thinking about sex with him.

•  •  •

If you do take the time—let’s go crazy and say forty-five minutes from kicking off your shoes to zipping up your jeans—to nourish that part of your marriage, it’s also one less thing to feel bad about.

Once, a friend pointed out that sometimes we take a pass on sex not because we’re exhausted or not interested in our partners, but because we’re not feeling sexy ourselves. We’ve had a crap day and we’re bloated and broken out; whatever our private version of hot is, we’re the opposite.

But guess what? Men see only what we project.

In the same way the basket of unfolded laundry in the middle of the living room is completely invisible to them when they’re watching the play-offs, so, too, do they fail to see any of your flaws when you’re giving them the hungry-for-love look. At that moment, they are completely oblivious to your need to exfoliate, trust me.

But if you beg off sex saying that it’s because you feel fat or your knees are too scaly or your forearm skin is too crepey or you have a zit on your chin, you’ve basically created a big red neon arrow that points to something he would have never even noticed.

Here’s an experiment: the next time you’re feeling too bad about your body to initiate sex, do it anyway. Grab your guy and be like, “Hey, I’m so hot right now and you’re going to get lucky.” If he says, “Um, no, sorry, your thighs look a little big today, not interested,” it will be such as astonishing example of human male behavior, you should write your own book. More likely, you’re going to make his week. He’s thinking, “Wow, my chick’s in a great mood. She’s happy and she wants me.”

The person in your head analyzing every inch of your physical being is not a man, but a woman. She’s evaluating how you walk, what your backside looks like, how smooth your skin is, and whether anyone can tell how cheap your handbag is. And if the woman in your head is keeping you from the happily in the ever after, you’ve got to shut her up.

•  •  •

I’ve spent most of my life around male athletes. Regardless of their sport, they all have this in common: they’re all walking, talking testosterone factories traveling the world, where women offer themselves up any time they stop for more than ninety seconds. And it’s not just the jocks; corporate guys are often on the road two hundred fifty days a year, meeting a variety of interesting, dynamic women. Available women. Even the guy who lives a relatively quiet life nevertheless comes into contact with hot baristas every day, or the new intern at the office.

I’m not trying to make you paranoid; I just want to point
out that there’s opportunity for men pretty much everywhere, and if they’re not committed to their partners or their relationships, which is more liable to happen if they’re being neglected, the more likely they are to succumb to their hardwiring, which is to cast the net wide.

So often a guy meets someone else and the woman sings this sad song: “I was left for a younger woman, woe is me.” But that’s not why she was left. In a lot of instances, she was left because she stopped paying attention.

If we’re only mothers, if we’re only dutiful wives, if the man to whom we were once head-over-heels attracted gets sidelined, then ignored, that’s a problem.

People need praise. Just think how good it makes you feel when your guy compliments you on, oh, pick anything: your new dress, jambalaya recipe, masterful downward-facing dog, ability to solve for
x
. However good that makes you feel, multiply that by ten and you have the degree to how happy your guy feels when you compliment him.

Men need praise, and they need it from women. From the time they’re learning to ride their first bike and saying “Look, Ma, no hands!” (notice: the old saying isn’t “Look, Dad, no hands), for men, the world is a better place when they are getting their egos stroked a little by the women in their lives. They’re fragile beings, men. Fragile, but also powerful. Sometimes
I think of them as racehorses, huge and majestic, but also capable of breaking down in an instant. Even the most successful man, surrounded by people in his professional life telling him he’s so smart or so talented, still needs his partner to tell him I love you, I appreciate you, I desire you—and he needs to hear it on a regular basis.

I wonder if, reading this, you’re rolling your eyes, thinking, “Wait, I work fifty hours a week, do the laundry, shopping, cooking, and pick his dirty boxers up off the bathroom floor every morning,
and
I’m supposed to praise him for the masterful way in which he changed the oil in the car, or made pancakes last Sunday morning, or can pick out ‘Hotel California’ on the guitar?”

Yep.

It helps to have some basic human empathy. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” was the advice Plato gave to his buddies, and it’s just as true today. For example, do we women know what it’s like for a guy to feel as if he’s not a young buck anymore? We’re so quick to say, “Oh, he’s having a midlife crisis” when he goes out and buys that little red sports car, but what does that really mean? How is it that we women are allowed to talk (read: obsess) about our fears of aging and yet we assume for them it’s a big joke?