One of the weirder behaviors of women, I sometimes think, is that we fall for a guy who lives for playing his music, or mountain biking, or writing computer code, or making elaborate meals, and once we land him and settle in, what do we do? Bitch about him for playing his music too much. Or taking off on the weekends with his bros for an epic bike ride. Or staying up too late in front of the computer. Or cooking meals that take too much time or make too big of a mess. Or are fattening.
When the very thing we dug about them cramps our domestic style, we want them to spend less time and energy devoted to the very thing we loved about them in the first place, and usually the thing that makes them feel the best about who they are.
My theory, based on nothing other than my own experience, is that if we make an effort to support our partners and allow them to be themselves, to pursue the things that make them feel best about themselves, a lot of the other bullshit arguments will fall by the wayside. Yes, it may mean you need to do more laundry than you think is “fair,” but wouldn’t that be worth it?
Every other boyfriend I’ve had was less male than Laird, and also less male than I am. This probably comes as no surprise, given I’m six foot three, wear a size twelve shoe, and once upon a time could leg press 935 pounds. I’m totally capable of handling everything in my life and the life of my kids. Everything. I don’t need a man in my life for that. What I do need is something different, and I get that from Laird. When I get in over my head, Laird saves the day. He always does. With him, I’m no longer the most badass in the room. I get to be the girl in the picture. That’s important for me.
A funny thing happened when we moved into our house on Maui. I drew out the plans, which included where the furniture would go. We’re big people, and we sleep in the biggest bed you can buy, a California King. I had to order all the furniture, including the bed, on the mainland, to be shipped to Hawaii in a container. Months later, it finally arrived, but the big wooden bed frame with upholstered headboard wouldn’t fit through the bedroom door. We spent an hour turning it this way and that, angling it just so, trying to wrap it around the door frame, everything you can think of.
I’m seventy-five degrees and sunny. Nothing much rattles me. But I was about to lose it. All the money, all the time, and this gigantic bed frame was stuck in the doorway. When he told me it wouldn’t fit, I just gave him a look and walked away. I wasn’t even upset; it had to fit. There was no question.
I took a break and I went and stared at a bird flitting outside the kitchen window. And I tried to focus on its undeniable beauty and to concentrate on being grateful, rather than letting myself get bat-shit crazy over something that was not important but had nevertheless become a life-or-death issue.
When I went back, there was Laird inside the bedroom with the bed frame in place, just where I’d drawn it on the plans. He’d fetched his Skilsaw, removed the upholstery, cut the headboard in half, dragged the whole thing into the bedroom, screwed the headboard back to the frame and reaffixed the upholstery.
That’s Mr. Charming for you.
THE FOUNDATION IS THE FOUNDATION
None of this—knowing the traits you require in a partner, calling him on his behavior rather than stewing or sulking, behaving like you’re glad to see him, or helping him be the guy you want him to be—works if you don’t have a rock-solid foundation. The degree to which marriage is a lot of work, as people like to say, depends on the strength of your foundation. If you don’t share common goals, or you feel as if you’re not playing on the same team, it’s tough to go the extra mile. And life is full of extra miles.
So many little things can contribute to cracks and chinks in the marital foundation. Maybe you and/or your guy spend money on the sly. Or someone has a little gambling problem, or a video-game addiction. Maybe you’re getting a little too cozy with your old high school boyfriend on Facebook. It’s nothing huge, but just enough to make you feel frustrated, and like maybe making the kind of extra effort a successful long-term relationship often demands just isn’t worth it.
Laird is a great-looking guy who pretty much lives in his bathing suit. And when he’s on the beach, who is usually in his immediate field of vision? Cute girls, also in their swimsuits. I know they flirt with him, and so long as it doesn’t happen right in front of me, I don’t much care. I’ve accepted that this is part of the Being-Married-to-Laird package. I trust him. I know that if the moment ever came where he fell for some surfer chick, he’d come straight home, and we’d have it out, for the simple reason that he would despise having anything monumental like infidelity cluttering his headspace.
No, the crack in our foundation was alcohol. I don’t drink, but Laird used to enjoy a bottle of pinot noir from time to time, and his drinking pounded at our foundation.
He wasn’t out hitting the bars—a fifth grader stays up later than Laird Hamilton—but when he was drunk he behaved like someone I no longer recognized. Sober, he is conscientious, conservative in his risk taking, alert to danger. Drunk, he liked to haul ass around our property on Maui on his ATV, roaring over hills, catching air, bombing around like a lunatic. There were nights I was convinced he would flip over and kill himself. He went to a place inside that was wild and disengaged from the girls and me. When he drank, we were no longer a team, which is perhaps why he drank, as a way to recapture his lone-wolf days.
The problem, unfortunately, was that he was no longer a lone wolf. Setting aside myself for a moment, he was a father of three. Did he really want to do something stupid and deprive his daughters of a father?
I told him I didn’t like him when he was drunk. I didn’t like the part of him that revealed itself, and I didn’t like dealing with him. Once I said, “Hey, maybe you can drink until the girls are teenagers, so they can see firsthand what lunacy it is and then maybe they won’t do it. So at least we’ll get something positive out of it.”
He heard me. He knows I don’t say stuff like that unless I mean it.
I would never have issued an ultimatum and told him to stop drinking, but Laird is far from stupid. He saw what it was doing to me and my willingness and ability to be one hundred percent devoted to our marriage and partnership. In 2007, he gave up his pinot noir. That helped me to feel our foundation was solid; it’s what I needed to go the distance.
4
THE SECRET TO EVERYTHING
As I was putting my husband’s clean underwear away, I tried to do the math. Living together for seventeen years, married for fifteen, laundry done once a week (usually more often, but we’ll say weekly for ease of calculation): I’ve done this chore 780 times.
On occasion, I’ve preferred this chore to working out.
Even though I’m a fitness advocate, and even though I know that everything good in my life, and I mean everything—my attitude, moods, health, ability to be a good family member who doesn’t fantasize about walking out the door and joining up with a merry band of (childless) pirates—flows from my working out and staying active, but sometimes I’d rather do anything else. Like put away Laird’s tighty-whities.
People imagine that because of how I look and what I do, I bounce out of bed every morning with a twinkle in my eye and a song in my heart: woohoo, I can’t wait to workout! I’d say my desire to train at any given moment is always about fifty-fifty. Yep, that means half the time I’d rather lie on the couch and eat a bowl of cereal.
I’m just like you.
Actually, probably not just like you. Probably a little more challenged in the movement department.
Fewer than one percent of American women are taller than five feet ten. I was six feet tall at age twelve, six three at fifteen. The popular wisdom is that my height must have made me some natural-born, badass athlete, but just the opposite is true. My arms and legs are so long, sometimes it feels as if I have twice as many moving parts as the average woman. Despite my level of fitness and my aptitude for volleyball, not a moment passes where I don’t struggle to find and maintain my center of gravity, whe
re I don’t despair about how uncoordinated I feel in my own body. In a few minutes I’ll stand up from the chair I’m sitting in as I write this, and there’s no guarantee I won’t trip over my feet between the desk and the door. It makes me anxious.
This isn’t something new. When I played volleyball at Florida State, I worshipped our coach, Dr. Cecile Reynaud. I would do anything Cecile asked of me. I was a hard worker, tough, and serious. But during water breaks at practice she would make the team walk the length of the court on their hands, on the way to the drinking fountain. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. The thought of going up on my hands felt scarier than jumping out of an airplane. My head felt so far from the ground, and I was sure my arms would collapse and I’d crack my skull open. Cecile’s solution was to stick me on the sidelines doing push-ups. It was humiliating, but I accepted it. There is no aha moment in this story. I busted out those push-ups for Cecile until I graduated.
So when I bang the drum for working out, it’s not as if I’ve had it all dialed in from day one.
• • •
Still, regular exercise is the secret to everything. There is nothing else we do about which we can make that claim. Unless you were just rolled out of the operating room, there’s hardly ever a reason not to go out for a walk. We all know that exercise is necessary for weight loss, developing muscle tone, and cardiovascular health. But the benefits just keep on coming: regular workouts prevent low back pain and varicose veins, boosts your immune system, and wards off the common cold; it gives you the glowing complexion of a chick many years younger; and gets your digestive tract on track. Exercise reduces your chance of dying young, of suffering a stroke or heart attack. It’s not only a natural cure for depression, but also deals out all those great endorphins, the world’s best high, natural or otherwise.
Even if you can convince yourself your abs are perfect the way they are, or you inherited your dad’s naturally low blood pressure, or all the women in your family lived to be a hundred and two, there is one thing that exercise fosters that everyone can use: the feeling of being glad to be alive.
Exercise makes you happier. And even if you don’t particularly want to be happier (I know a few people who groan and complain as if it’s a sport), it will make you more even-tempered, and thus make everyone around you happier, which will make everything else in life easier.
In a perfect world we’d be able to connect to all these reasons for making exercise a priority, but in the end, whether we’re aware of all the benefits or not is irrelevant. I once wrote a magazine article in which I tried to lay out all the good reasons, the smart scientific reasons, for working out and I wound up just saying, “Screw it! You need to work out because it makes you look hot.”
And still, how many of us say, I want to look hot, I’m dying to look hot . . . after I eat this cupcake.
And I’m no exception.
One morning I was minding my own business, answering my emails, and one of them said, “Sorry about the magazine.” Magazine? What magazine? This couldn’t be good. I emailed my friend back and learned that some checkout counter tabloid had done a story on the cellulite to be found in certain celebrity booties, and there was mine.(You would think that knowing strangers were out there evaluating my ass would be enough to up my desire to train to at least, say, seventy-thirty, but no.)
The worst thing was that someone had Photoshopped my backside to look fatter than it actually is. To retaliate, I took a picture of myself in my underwear, posted it on my website, and blogged about it, saying here’s the unvarnished truth. At least let’s be honest.
I’ve tried to train myself not to let this type of thing get to me, and mostly I do a pretty good job. People are going to say what they’re going to say, and now that we have the Internet, they can say it at any hour of the day or night, and if you’re really in a self-sabotaging mood, you can check it out for yourself.
I ignore it all, for the most part, but for some reason this time it really got to me. I locked myself in the bathroom. Took the longest shower in human history. Why was this getting to me? I took a little inventory. I noticed that because I was extra busy I wasn’t getting the time I needed to work out. I had been on the road and was out of my routine. Had I been exercising, I wouldn’t have been so upset. So once again I was schooled: exercise is the secret to everything.
THE SECRET TO THE SECRET
There is, however, a secret to the secret: figuring out your strengths and weaknesses and arranging your life to support the strengths and make it inconvenient for the weaknesses to prevail. The gold standard of examples: if you keep Pringles in the house you’ll inhale them, if you don’t, they’re out of sight out of mind.
The only thing that separates me from you is that I’m well acquainted with my weaknesses, and rather than eradicate them, I simply try to deprive them of oxygen. I know what to do in order not to support them.
In 2003, after I had Reece, I immediately saw that I wouldn’t be able to hit the gym any old time I pleased. It was one of the first reality checks of motherhood. Suddenly, I was beholden to this tiny, helpless creature, and her needs didn’t adhere to a convenient workout schedule.
What to do? I knew my weakness—if left to my own devices I’d slack off and get my workouts in only half the time. But I also know I’m someone who, under the right circumstances, can kick her own ass harder than anyone else.
So, I created a home gym in Maui, where we were living at the time. It wasn’t fancy—I bought some weights, kettle bells, a physio ball, and a yoga mat—but creating that space was my commitment to myself. It meant that even if I had my kid sitting there in her baby seat, or even lying on the floor next me, cooing and amusing herself by waving her arms and legs in the air, I was going to be able to exercise. After the gym was equipped, I invited some people to come work out with me. At first, maybe three people showed up.
In April of that year, when we moved back to California, I was able to borrow the home gym of a friend. To make it even more fun to work out, and more likely that I wouldn’t skip a session, I put out the word that I was going to be doing some serious training on such and such a day, and about ten people showed up.
After a few months we were fifteen, and I had to start getting organized. Every morning before meeting up with my workout buddies, I sat down and wrote out a circuit, a dozen or so moves that gave us a full-body workout.
October came, and we moved back to Hawaii, this time to Kaua’i. We rented a house in Princeville, on the north shore, not far from the St. Regis hotel. The guy who ran the gym there invited me to use their facility, but since none of my workout friends would be able to join me, I said thanks but no thanks, and found I could rent out a small room at the local community center. My friends would join me, but my class would also be open to the public. Word got out, as it tends to do on the sparsely populated north shore of Kaua’i. The class was free, but there was a prerequisite: you had to commit to working hard. The class grew; on some days there were about fifty people, almost always all women, with the occasional fearless guy who would show up to check it out.
Here’s the routine: Fifteen minutes before class I load up the bed of my pickup with all of my free weights, kettle bells, Versa bands, and sound system and drive the short distance to the community center where my women stand waiting to unload the equipment. Then we press ourselves into the small room, I demonstrate the moves du jour, separate my women into smaller training groups of three, crank up the music, and start working, hard. My circuit isn’t difficult, but it is demanding.
Some of my women show up three days a week, week in, week out. Sometimes someone comes up to me after class and wants to pay me, or otherwise do something lavish to show her gratitude. I tell her, she’s already doing it, by inspiring me with her commitment. There’s nothing that I need that I don’t already have, except people to inspire me. When my women show up day in, day out, with their great attitudes and great energy, they don’t realize that that’s their gift
to me.
Showing up three times a week, being committed, is the most I can do for them, and I’m lucky to have the opportunity to do it. In a superficial way, I’m not getting anything in return. I’m not getting paid, nor am I getting PR.
What I am getting is a chance to practice the Code of Laird. In Malibu, during the summer, his off-season, Laird devotes a lot of time to his workout group, which consists of ten dudes who train six days a week; three days a week they circuit train, and three days they work out in the pool. Laird is the leader, the innovator, the instigator.
In October, when we decamp for Kaua’i, he leaves those guys behind and rejoins the Hawaii crew. Not an hour after our plane has landed and we’ve dropped our suitcases in the house, he’s found Terry Chung, Kaua’i’s stand-up board manufacturing guru, and off they go, surfing and foiling and redesigning boards along with the rest of his surfing crew, and here, too, he’s the leader, the innovator, and the instigator.
His greatest gift is the ability to be present. When he’s in front of you, he’s in front of you. It’s ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning and you’re hanging out down at the barn with Laird and you express an interest in going down a waterfall: let’s go. Want to go over to Na’Pali? Want to go stand-up paddle? He’s there, he’s your man. The flip side of that is when he’s gone, he’s gone. He’s not going to call to check in with you, but he doesn’t love you any less. You just have to wait for him to come back. And he will.
I try to live by the same code. When I’m training my women I’m there, one hundred percent. Even though five minutes after we’re done I have to race to take Brody here, or Reece there, or do a Skype meeting, I’m not there. I’m here.
My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life Page 5