“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.
PREPARE TO BE AMAZED
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.
THE BEST ADVICE IS NO ADVICE
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 whi
te 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.
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.”
THIS IS WHAT I’M FUCKING TALKING ABOUT
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.
NOTE TO DUDES
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.
My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life Page 2