My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life (3 page)

But guess what? Being a mom can be difficult, slow, and sometimes so boring that most civilized nations would disallow it as a form of torture.

That’s just the way it is.

There’s a guy on Maui who’s a genius at acupuncture. There are many strange and wonderful healing types who live on Maui, massage therapists and acupuncturists who seem to know much more about the inner workings of human beings than your run-of-the-mill doctor or psychiatrist. His name is
Rafael and privately we call him our wizard. Once, during a session with Rafael, I was going on in what I thought was an entertaining way about the challenges of being a mom. Rafael paused, put his hand on my arm, and said, quite seriously, “Of course, women suffer more, and because they do, they are more interesting.”

I hope you’re not offended by my language. I have no real vices—don’t do drugs, don’t smoke, don’t even drink. I do drop the f-bomb when I’m feeling intense about something, and everything I’m writing about here is incredibly important to me. I am committed to being a good wife, a good mother, and a good citizen of the world, which means, to me, being modern, gnarly, and straightforward. If I’m harsh and direct, it means let’s get down to it.

It also means: hey, I’m a flawed human being with a limited amount of patience, doing the best I can—and so are you.

One thing that will make you feel better about whatever it is you’re dealing with is to say “Are you fucking kidding me?” to yourself or your partner.

Brody seems to like nothing more than a nice bowl of sliced-up apple at three a.m. I will have finally gotten back to sleep after the two a.m. glass of water request, when there she is again, standing beside my bed in the dark, asking for the apple.

“Brody, go back to bed, you’re not having an apple right now.”

We tussle a little, she marches back to her room, and I say to Laird’s dozing back, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Trust me, a little bit of cussing does wonders. The later in the day it is, or the earlier in the morning, the more important this is for your sanity, and to help you feel less like an underpaid servant and more like the sassy teenager that is still lurking somewhere inside your bill-paying, car seat–purchasing, sleep-deprived self.

If you have any doubt, consider the megapopularity of
Go the Fuck to Sleep
, described as the first bedtime book for parents who live in the real world. Which, like it or not, is where we all make our homes.

At the risk of contradicting myself, I do have some specific counsel for any guy dealing with a new mom. I know they probably don’t want my advice, but I won’t let that stop me.

The minute your chick has a baby, treat her like she’s your new girlfriend.

I mean this literally. The woman has just had her whole life turned upside down, not to mention she feels like she’s been turned inside out, then back again. She feels like the moment she stands up all her internal organs are going to drop straight out of her.

Don’t walk in the room and treat her like the little mother, by which I mean with that deadly sense of reverence and timidity we usually reserve for people who have, against all odds, survived a tornado. Even though this is what she is.

Treat her like your chick.

Go over and stroke her hair. Give her a kiss. Ask her if you can get her something to drink. Offer to take the baby so she can shower and change into something that’s not her spit-up-stained sweatshirt.

The degree to which we appreciate these gestures cannot be underestimated. It convinces us, first, that we are still the same person you at one time thought was pretty hot. Second, it reassures us that over the coming weeks and months, when we are going to be doing fucking everything (this may not be technically accurate, but every mother since Eve who was left alone to potty train Cain has hurled this accusation at one time or another), there will still be a time, perhaps after the kids are in bed, when you’ll treat us like this. Nicely. Like you adore us for the women we are, and not the beast of burden we’re sometimes worried we’ve become.

I remember being pregnant the first time and my hormones were raging in such a way that I was chasing Mr. Charming around the sofa, begging for it. The man who can stare down a skyscraper-sized wave on an average workday without blinking an eye was terrified. Who was this giant, horny pregnant woman, anyway? Three days after I had a C-section, he was sizing me up and giving me the waggly eyebrow. Having just been cut open after a day of labor (an
understatement if there ever was one) I wasn’t feeling especially kittenish. Laird was polite and respectful but persistent. The same lizard brain that had cautioned him against the imagined danger of jostling his unborn offspring had given him the okay to now chase me around the sofa (metaphorically speaking; I could barely hobble to the bathroom).

When I went to the doctor for my one-week checkup, he asked how I was feeling, or whether I had any questions. The recommended waiting period for intercourse after a C-section is four to six weeks, but my look must have said it all. He said, “Just be sure to use a condom. Your incision hasn’t healed and your cervix is still open, so you’re vulnerable to infection.”

So sexy.

•  •  •

I was thirty-seven when I got pregnant with Brody. I was what they call in the baby-birthing business an “older mother.” I was feeling vulnerable in a way I hadn’t when I was pregnant with Reece. There’s something about having a baby on your hip and one in your belly that makes every trip to the market feel like a long exodus on foot to a foreign land.

The pregnancy went fine, but everything was just harder this time around, like doing a familiar training circuit with twenty-pound weights instead of the usual eight. Even though Laird was onboard for another baby, I was still concerned that another one might be one too many.

Where we lived on Maui, no hospital will do a VBAC, a
vaginal birth after Cesarean. In most big-city hospitals the procedure has become commonplace, but not here, where they’re simply not equipped for such a thing. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and my plan was to put on our usual big Thanksgiving spread, then fly to California and my regular doctor in Malibu, who delivered Reece and would supervise what was hopefully going to be a totally uneventful vaginal delivery.

The day before my flight to L.A. I was in our bedroom packing and from the other room I heard Laird say something loud enough to convey that it was meant for me, but not so loud that I could actually hear it.

I walked into the living room and there on the big flat-screen TV is an aerial view of our house in Malibu, encircled by flames. The flames are close enough to fry the petunias growing beside the front porch.

“ . . . house of surfer Laird Hamilton and his wife, Gabrielle Reece . . . ” the newscaster said.

Shit is burning in the driveway, flames are singeing the side of the house.

“Are my toys burning up in there?” cried Reece.

“It’s okay, Reece, we have this house. Look how lucky we are. We are here in Maui in this house, with our pictures on the walls and all of your toys. Look at everything we have.”

I stroked Reece’s hair while the baby was doing the backstroke in my belly, watching my house in flames. Hours later, after we’d turned off the TV, L.A. firefighters donned their superhero capes and saved our house, but at the moment it
looked as if it would burn to the ground. As I searched my mind to figure out where we were going to stay when we flew back to California, it became clear that we weren’t going anywhere. I would be having this baby in Hawaii. Somehow.

I was thirty-six weeks pregnant, four weeks from giving birth, give or take, and spending my days running around Maui looking for a doctor who would deliver me. It appeared that all the best OBs on the island were part of the Kaiser Permanente system, but I didn’t have Kaiser. When I offered to pay in cash, they refused because I wasn’t a regular patient. A friend who owns a fish market, and provides Kaiser to her employees, offered to hire me, but by then everyone knew that Gabrielle Reece was stalking the good doctors of Kaiser Permanente Maui, on the verge of completely losing her shit.

I found Dr. Christy Hume on a warm, cloudless day. She was young and unflappable and had just arrived from the mainland and was willing to take me on. I could tell by her handshake and the calm way she flipped through my chart that she was competent. Still, I grilled her about the number of babies she’d delivered. “Gabby,” she said, “it’s going to be okay.”

Christmas came and went. Still no baby. New Year’s Day morning I woke up with labor pains but I couldn’t believe these were contractions; who goes into labor on New Year’s Day? But we started timing them, and I called Dr. Hume and she said it sounded as if today was the day. Minutes later the phone rang again.

“Hey, Gabrielle, it’s Owen Wilson, do you remember me?”

“Hey, Owen. Yeah, I remember.” Owen lives on Maui when he’s not on a film, and he shows up to see Laird every once in a while.

“So, where’s Laird? I want to get into it.”

“He’s at Ho’okipa, Owen.”

“And what’s he doing later?”

“Well, I’m in labor right now, so I think he’s probably going to be with me, having a baby.”

“Right. Well, I’m trying to get ahold of him.”

“You can try to track him down at Ho’okipa, if you want.”

Like every woman about to have a baby, I was overwhelmed by that freakish nesting urge and decided that I needed to make some chili and corn bread for Reece and Laird, to get them through the night. Just as I pulled the corn bread out of the oven, Laird showed up, and I was beyond relieved. By then I was pretty much bent in half, and it really was time to go.

Trailing behind Laird was Owen Wilson and some friend of his—a very polite guy from Texas, who took one look at me sweating and panting and holding my belly and knew better than to say a word.

But Owen leaned against the counter and ogled the corn bread. The man had all the time in the world. “You know,” he said, “that Reece, she debates me on everything. She didn’t agree with one thing I had to say.”

“Yeah,” I said, panting, hanging on to the edge of the counter as the iron grip of another contraction seized hold of me, “that’s Reece.” To Laird I said, “I made some chili—”

“You know, I’m really starving,” said Owen. “You don’t have any sour cream to go with that chili, do ya?”

Finally Owen’s polite friend from Texas convinced him it was time to go.

•  •  •

One of the last thoughts I had before Brody was born was that Laird and I weren’t really prepared for another child. Our situation was not wholly unusual, but it was complicated. Reece was our firstborn, but Laird had another child, Bela, by his first wife, Maria Souza. I met Bela when she was four months old. Laird and Maria had joint custody, and when Bela was staying with her mom I made an effort to send Valentine’s Day cards and Easter baskets, to reassure her that her dad loved her and thought of her as much as her mother did. It was hard for me. My ego was sore, all the time. I had to deal with the reality that I wasn’t the first wife, and I wasn’t the first one to give Laird a child. It was hard to shake that feeling of being second class.

One day when she was a toddler, Laird and Bela were in the shower, laughing and goofing off. I was in the other room, and when I heard them playing, I suddenly felt so left out. Girls so often look just like their fathers (once Reece and I ran into Laird’s sixth-grade teacher on Kaua’i; she took one look at Reece and said to me, “Are you married to Laird Hamilton?”), but in one of life’s little practical jokes, Bela resembles her mother.

I don’t get jealous much. I’m aware how unproductive it
is, and it’s usually a side effect of comparing yourself to others, which I don’t do as a matter of course. But at this moment the jealousy juices were flowing. I was horrified and mortified and every other “-fied” that applies. To be jealous of this lovely little child, this innocent bystander!

I confessed this to Laird, who took it in stride. “Look, it’s natural for you to have feelings around this,” he said. For the Weatherman, feelings aren’t that scary—they come, they go. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. I felt a little relieved: at least I could be honest.

As Bela got older, and we spent more time together, our relationship grew and genuine love developed. She’s now seventeen, a thoughtful, self-possessed beauty. She gets much better grades than I ever did, but in so many ways she’s temperamentally more like me than my biological daughters are. She holds her cards close to her chest like I do. She’s often difficult to read. I never introduce her as my stepdaughter. Bela is my daughter.

I wasn’t the cause of the breakup of her parents’ marriage, but meeting me gave Laird the impetus to leave. It was a brutal time for everyone involved, and when Bela asks about it, I try to be as honest and respectful as possible. Her coming into my life was less than perfect, but the beginning doesn’t matter in light of what it brought me: I’m so grateful for how it all turned out, to have Bela in my life. And I have to give her mother credit: she never tried to turn Bela against me.

Nothing teaches selflessness like being a stepmother.
Blended families are an instant grow-up pill for every adult involved.

•  •  •

Brody Jo Hamilton arrived on January 1, 2008.

Now we were five. Laird and Mr. Speedy, the dog, were the lone males in a house full of mermaids.

The only child in me quietly freaked out, but the volleyball player rejoiced at the prospect of living in a house with all these rabble-rousing females.

Recently, Laird and I were invited to speak at a TED conference in Washington. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and is devoted to “fostering the spread of great ideas.” Thousands of the world’s top scientists and thinkers have given TED talks; they’re completely riveting and you can check them out online. Laird and I were invited to speak at TEDMED, a spin-off of the original TED that focuses on health issues. We were going to talk about real-world solutions to healthy family living (and, yes, our kids have been known to eat chocolate for breakfast), and we were stoked.