My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life (2 page)

I’m not beating up on these guys. They’ve offered a lot of
wisdom, advice, solace, and inspiration to thousands, if not millions of people. They are not, however, married to a guy who doesn’t do email.

I am.

Laird and I got back together. For another year or two, we circled each other, unsure. We were like survivors of some natural disaster, grateful to be alive, but dazed by the wreckage. The foundation was cracked, the roof had leaks, the windows were smashed out. Repairs always take longer—and cost more—than you might first imagine.

When we met, Laird was already respected in the world of surfing. As time went on, his star began to rise in the world at large. In 2004, he executive produced and starred in
Riding Giants
, and then a few years later he appeared in a big American Express campaign. He got to show the world that he wasn’t just some guy who wandered around in swim trunks and flip-flops calling everyone Dude. (Which he never does, by the way.) This cultural stamp of approval helped to even out our personal playing field. I felt more comfortable because he was no longer simply Mr. Reece, trailing around behind me, carrying my gym bag from tournament to magazine shoot and home again. It wasn’t as if the worldly success meant a lot to him personally, but it allowed us both to feel as if we were now on equal footing, careerwise. A friend once reminded me that small changes can result in making the big picture a whole lot better, and that’s what happened to us.

As I write this, we’ve been married sixteen by-and-large happy years. In celebrity years, this translates to about nine
million. It hasn’t been perfect. The degree to which it’s been imperfect would shock even those people who claim to thrive on imperfection. We had first one kid, then another. In 2007, we weathered another rough patch, and almost called it quits again. Through it all, I reminded myself of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s wisdom. At times, I’ve been on the verge of tattooing it up one leg and down the other. Instead, I just committed it to memory:

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity—in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

Partners in the same pattern. That’s a better thing to aspire to than happily ever after. In all those fairy tales, and also in a lot of Hollywood movies you wind up Netflixing, the story ends at the happily ever after. It’s pure bullshit. Nothing makes you superficially more happy than the first flushes of love, but in the ever after it’s all about dealing with your lover,
with understanding what makes him tick, surviving his crappy moods, and working together, always, to preserve what you’ve got and nurture a deeper, more profound and grounded love into the future. Happily schmappily. I don’t think so.

From a dramatic perspective, this also means there’s nothing left to tell. The good part of the tale has already been told. If we’re lucky, we’re married fifty or sixty years. Do you want to sign up for that? Half a century or more of no conflict, no drama, no restlessness, no opportunity to grow and change? You don’t want that, do you? Rather than happily ever after, we should aspire to game on—in part because that’s the reality and in part because it’s much more interesting.

When Laird and I got back together in 2001 it wasn’t like the movies. There was no single moment where we gazed at each other across his surfboard and all was forgiven. All of 2002 was difficult. We sidestepped each other, a little bruised and extra polite. He was distant, some part of him convinced that I would bolt at any minute. This wasn’t the reason I became pregnant with our first daughter, but I was well aware that nothing says, “hey, we’re in this together,” like having a baby. Now and forever, it’s the living, squealing physical manifestation of a commitment.

I’m whatever the opposite of subservient is, so I think it was always in the back of Laird’s mind that I could up and
leave at any time. Which was not incorrect. We always assume it’s the guy in the relationship who’s going to disappear one day, but in my experience as often as not the woman calls it quits.

I was never one of those girls who always knew she wanted to be a mom, but I did know that if and when I got pregnant, I would feel more tied to Laird. We already had one child, Bela, from Laird’s first marriage, but I was thirty-three and said that if we were going to have another kid, we’d better do it soon. We’d been together for eight years by then. “Soon” was interpreted by the universe as “on the first try,” and Reece Viola was born nine months later.

I’m an athlete. I stayed in good shape and ate well throughout my pregnancy. My first rude awakening of motherhood was the fact that my good health and fitness did nothing to guarantee an easy delivery. After thirteen hours of active labor I was advised by my doctor to have an epidural.

“You’ll be too tired to push when the time comes,” he said. After another seven hours of labor and two hours of pushing, he ordered a C-section. I felt like a failure, then perked up when I realized this excruciating difficulty was a mere preview of coming attractions. If my body—the faithful instrument I’d trained and pressed into service for years—had a mind of its own when it came to childbirth, what other surprises were lying in wait for me? I realized at that moment that the only thing I could count on was that I couldn’t count on anything to be the way I’d imagined it.

Before you’ve had kids, there’s nothing more off-putting than having your friends with children tell you how life will never be the same. You think they’ve lost sight of the fact that there’s a big wide world out there with people in it who are, amazingly, not them or their children. Then you have your baby and you’re like the high school graduate who’s flipped the tassel on his cap to the other side. Now you’re the obnoxious person telling other people life will never be the same.

What we mean (because I, too, have become one of those obnoxious people) is that
you
have changed. You’re you, but with the mother function switched on. You may have felt maternal toward a nephew or a kitten before this moment, but it’s nothing like this. Becoming a mother is like being bitten by the spider that turns Peter Parker into Spiderman. Life will never be the same because
you
will never be the same.

My main fantasy when I was pregnant was that my baby would be born as a three-year-old. None of those swaddled, bald, little old men in the nursery for me. I wanted an insta-child born with the language skills to tell me what she wanted, potty trained, and with the teeth required to eat a burrito.

With this in mind, I’d hired a night nurse who came highly recommended. She was locally famous for helping mothers with twins and said to possess unmatched competence and efficiency. The nurse arrived the same day I came home from
the hospital with Reece, and the first thing I did was pay her for two weeks of work and let her go. I didn’t want anyone to come between me and my baby, a squalling, damp itsy-bitsy newborn.

I never imagined this would happen to me. I had never been around babies, and when my friends asked if I wanted to hold theirs I’d say, “Nope, I’m good.” I thought I would nurse my infant for fifteen minutes, then hand her off to someone less newborn-averse. But no. Here I was, a self-styled badass, holder of various records for number of kills (in volleyball not the Society of Secret Assassins, but still), who strides through the world in size-twelve shoes renouncing the gooey, the squishing, the sentimental, feeling completely bonded to a tiny baby.

Even after I’d delivered her, Reece never went to the nursery. I was like, “Yo, this baby just got here, she needs to be with me.” And so she was. Reece didn’t sleep through the night until she was two and a half, and even though I was sleep deprived, my patience was off the charts.

This is what amazed me: I’m not nurturing in the expected way. I don’t speak in a high, melodic voice to my kids; I don’t honey-sweetie-baby-darling them. I don’t refer to myself as “mommy.” Yet here I was, nursing like some French peasant from the Middle Ages.

Before I started nursing, I planned on tapping into my inner athlete. I knew that no matter what, I had the skills to suck it up and deal with it. I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by Reece’s little hands opening and closing with pleasure, or
her sounds of contentment. I did it for the good of the baby. I didn’t expect anything in it for me. But I was surprised by the joy of it.

I’m pretty sure this is the key to contentment: lower your expectations, accept that you’re going to be tethered to this little human night and day for a year and that your boobs might need a little help from the corner plastic surgeon when you’re through, and prepared to be amazed.

I’m no earth mother, but I nursed in public more times than I can count. I became an expert at making a little tent with my T-shirt and shoving the kid under it. It’s astounding what you become good at. Sometimes people would be talking to me for twenty minutes and they didn’t even know I was nursing.

Trends in nursing change at about the same pace as hairstyles. One year everyone’s flat-ironing their highlighted hair and opting for bottle-feeding, a few years later we’re all wavy-haired brunettes breast-feeding until it’s time to help with baby’s fourth-grade science project.

But the bottom line for me was that it’s good for kids, so I didn’t think twice about doing it. And the shock of all shocks was I wound up loving every minute of it.

Actually, that’s a lie. Not every minute. Once, when Reece was about two months old, I had a photo shoot in New York. We took the red-eye from Maui to California, where I left her with a nanny and enough bags of pumped milk to last Reece until she went to college, then grabbed a six a.m. flight and continued on to New York.

The shoot was for a fitness magazine, and there I was in some skimpy workout duds, including a sports bra. The photographer was Steven Klein, a guy I’d worked with when I was eighteen but whom I hadn’t seen in a while. He hustled over and said, “Gabrielle, what is going on with your breasts!?” Somewhere between Hawaii and New York, I’d lost the handle to the breast pump, which meant I couldn’t express any milk, and my breasts had become . . . overfilled. I focused on the shoot, with the goal of just getting through it. I grabbed a three o’clock flight back to California and spent half the time in the tiny airplane bathroom trying to express milk into the sink. When the plane landed the only thing I cared about was feeding Reece so I could get some relief. I cared about nothing else. I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours by now, but the only thing that mattered was getting that kid on the tit. I remember the dark, heavy sweater I wore. It was so drenched with milk the front swung around as I ran down the Jetway. When the nanny brought Reece to the gate, my breasts were so engorged, the baby couldn’t even latch on.

But aside from those blooper-reel moments, breast-feeding wasn’t the agony and sacrifice I thought it might be. I actually really dug it.

Mothering turned out to be easier than I’d imagined. I don’t mean it was
easy
. But I think if you let go of all expectations
(I’ll have my prebaby body back in three weeks; my baby will sleep through the night by six weeks and nurse until the perfect, socially acceptable moment; my two-year-old will be “terrible,” but in a good way that shows he has tons of character, not in a felon-in-training sort of way; my son will love soccer, reading, and saving the planet; my daughter will love pink and ballet, or conversely black and punk rock) you’ll have a better chance of landing at a place where you feel confident and good about what you’re doing.

Every generation reaches middle age and starts talking about how much better it was when they were kids, and also how much worse. But one thing that everyone can pretty much agree on is that never in the history of popping out babies has there been so much crazy-making, overanalysis of the entire experience, from the instant of conception to high school graduation and beyond.

I just googled “mothering advice” and about two and a half million hits came up—that’s two and a half million opinions on what you should be doing or not doing. But regardless of the advice the so-called experts proffer, all of their programs have one thing in common: they are guaranteed to make you feel as though whatever it is you’re doing, you should be doing something else. This is possibly the worst place from which to parent.

Forget. All. That. Shit.

It takes a lot for me to overpunctuate like this.

Listen to your intuition. You’ve got it for a reason.

People who want to learn how to surf always ask Laird for
insider tips on what kind of board to get, or how to stand, or how to execute a specific maneuver. He tells them all the same thing: get comfortable in the ocean. And not just on a nice day when the waves are gentle and the sun is shining. Learn to feel at home when you’ve just gotten hammered by a massive wave and you’re swirling around in the white water. The same is true of parenting. Everything you do stems from knowing your kids, and feeling comfortable with them, even when they’re throwing tsunami-level tantrums.

The conventional wisdom is that people crave advice because they don’t trust themselves, but it’s really because we think that if we can find another way to do it, our days will be easier. When we stay up most of the night pacing the same five yards of living room floor, bouncing the screaming baby in our arms singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” until we’re hoarse, or spend an entire day putting a diaper back on a baby who keeps taking it off, or feed rice cereal to a kid determined to fling each and every bowl to the floor, we think: there must be an easier way—a faster and better and less tedious one.