by Tyra Banks
One week, the clique even rose up against me and kicked me out of the group.
What?
You’d think I woulda learned a lesson then, but as soon as they let me back in, I picked up right where I’d left off: being the queen of mean and tellin’ everybody what the heck to do.
Simone Green (name has been changed for the about-to-be-obvious reasons) was the leader of our rival clique (ooh, so cutthroat!), was just as much of a bitch in training as I was, and had about twenty pounds on my butt. So, when she wanted to play four square one afternoon, I seized the opportunity to shut her down and assert my dominance.
“I wanna play,” she said.
“No,” I snapped back. “The game is l-o-c-k locked.” In kid world, l-o-c-k locked was an unbreakable law. It instilled the fear of God in the elementary school set. To challenge it was to go against the rules of nature.
But I guess the rules of nature hadn’t met Simone.
“Lemme play,” she said again, trying to swipe that red rubber ball out of my ashy hands.
I wrapped my arms around the ball like it was made of rubies and held tight. “No. The. Game. Is. L-o-c-k locked. To. Fat. People.”
So she swung on me.
She wanted to kick my ass, and I deserved it. We fought, right there in the middle of the four-square court—pulling hair, ripping at uniform shirts, slapping, swinging, screeching, clawing, kicking. . . . One of our teachers was Bill Cosby’s brother, and he stood by, watching the whole thing.
“Mr. Cosby! Mr. Cosby! You gonna break it up?” some kids yelled at him.
“Nah,” he said. “Let those two bullies fight.”
He knew we both needed some sense knocked into our heads.Finally, another teacher came along, broke it up, and hauled my and Simone’s butts to the principal’s office. As soon as we saw that door looming at the end of the hallway, I offered Simone a deal. “Let’s just say we were friends and we were only pretend fighting.”
“OK, whatever,” she said, and we walked in to meet the principal holding hands.
Well, Principal Drayton bought it, and after a brief talking-to about the dangers of playing too rough, she dismissed us. Rather than being united by our near-detention experience, Simone’s and my truce was over as soon as we were back out that door.
“Forget you,” she said.
“Forget you,” I said.
“Forget you, forgot you. Never thought about you!”
“Gimme a piece of paper and I’ll write all about you.”
Shame.
In retrospect, I know that the reason I was a bully at school was because I had an older brother at home. Older bros are notoriously gender neutral when it comes to sibling torture, and he wasn’t gonna take it easy on me just ’cause I was a girl.
One day, my bro and I were home alone. I heard a crash in the kitchen, and then my brother started screaming. I went running into the kitchen as fast as I could (which, remember, wasn’t very fast) and saw my brother standing over the sink with blood gushing out of his mouth.
I screamed and did exactly what Mama always told us to do in these kind of situations: I grabbed the phone and dialed 911.
Next thing I knew, my brother was on me, ripping the phone out of my hand and slamming it down. And the blood pouring out his mouth smelled distinctly like . . . sweet tomatoes.
Ketchup.
Well, now I was crying, and instead of laughing it off as a practical joke, he was yelling at me that we were gonna get in trouble. Not because he had tried to trick me, but because I had called 911.
I was powerless. I couldn’t win.
So where did I get my power back?
On the playground, baby. At school, I was a queen and in control. As soon as I walked in the doors of that school, I felt powerful, and I was gonna treat people badly as fuel, because I knew I’d be powerless again at the end of the day. I was gonna get my kicks on that four-square court while I could. And I was über-satisfied about it.
So how the hell did I go from calling another girl fat to being the woman telling the world to kiss my fat ass? Well, for starters, I’d like to thank Simone for punching me and Mr. Cosby for standing by while I got my butt kicked.
It wasn’t too long after this that my superawkward skinny phase hit, and I found myself on the other side of bullying. I became the freak, the odd girl out, and the kid other kids knew they could pick on. That happened to coincide with a time when the Ethiopian famine was one of the top stories in the news, and because kids can be cruel—and uncreative as hell—they thought it was real funny to bring this up all the time. They’d come up at lunch and form a circle around me, holding hands and singing “We Are the World.” I’d try to laugh it off, and I’d push my way out of the circle, all the while wanting to punch each and every one of them in the face. Not just for my sake but for all the children in Africa who really didn’t have enough to eat.
But am I bitter about the fact that I was bullied?
Not at all.
I am grateful. I thank God that this happened, because I got to feel firsthand what I was doing to all those other girls.
But I am not condoning bullying. Bullying is a huge problem in the world that we live in now. One in three kids in the United States has been bullied at school, and more than three out of four have been bullied online (not surprising. Have you been on that thing called the Internet? It gets real mean, real fast). Selena Gomez, my girl Miley Cyrus, Jessica Alba, and my semi-doppelgänger (and fellow fivehead sista) Rihanna (love you, boo) have all talked about how they were bullied as kids and teenagers, and antibullying days are recognized around the world.
We all know about Mean Girls, but the Regina Georges of the world don’t just vanish after high school: More than half of women have experienced bullying at work, and most of it from other women! It seems like the very sisters who should be helping you climb that ladder a couple of rungs are actually stomping on your knuckles, hoping you’ll lose your grip and fall off.
You know I am not making this stuff up.
Check this out: Women, like all minority groups, experience something called tokenism. Have you heard of that before? It’s when the power people make a feeble, fake stab at diversity and call it a day. (E.g., “We got one black dude, two women, and an Asian guy. We’re very multicultural,” says the CEO of a company with three hundred people.) When tokenism occurs, especially in high-stress work environments, rather than binding together and finding strength in numbers, we start competing and tryna pick each other off. When we are made to see each other as competition, we, well . . . we friggin’ compete. It’s human nature. And then, we all lose. When we come together, we win and we win big. Women and girls are safer together. We kick more butt, we make more dollars, we say #MeToo, we shout “Time’s up,” we make a bigger difference, and we send that patriarchy packing. We are a force to be reckoned with, and we are just getting started. Sisters before misters, shes before hes, Anns before Dans, chicks before d— . . . Lemme stop. You get it.
7
EMBRACE YOUR BEAUTY
Carolyn: When Tyra popped out of me, I took one look at her and thought, “This child is not mine.”
Why?
Well, she opened her eyes and these big gray irises stared up at me like something out of Rosemary’s Baby, or for you younger folks, Gremlins, or for you even younger folks, American Horror Story. “What kind of little alien is this?” I’d never seen eyes like that before, and had no idea where the heck they’d come from, but she’d been in my belly, so I knew that this was my martian. I mean, baby.
From the time in the delivery room when she first opened her mouth and started squawking, all anybody wanted to talk about was “those eyes.” In our community, it’s often considered a prize to have eyes that are anything other than cocoa brown, and everywhere we took that baby, people were falling all over themselves to comment on
them. “She got some pretty eyes! Oh my God, look at those eyes!”
They acted like her daddy and I had something to be celebrated for, like we’d picked those eyes out of an IKEA box and installed them in her head ourselves. I didn’t know what to say. Yes, I thought my daughter was special, but not because of those darn eyes.
Tyra: My eyes turned green as I got older, but I know exactly what Mama thought when she wanted to put sunglasses on my toddler self so that everyone would stop talking ’bout those eyes.
I’m having the same experience now with my son, who has the same big gray baby eyes that I did. And everywhere we go, that’s the first thing people say about him. “Whoa, those eyes!” they exclaim. “Oh my God, look at those eyes!” (Well, first they say he looks just like his mama, because he does!)
Yeah, I think my baby is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. He’s the most gorgeous just because he is mine. If he was born with peepers the color of warm brownies, he would be my beautiful, bouncing (a lot! That boy loves to jump and climb!) baby boy. I want him to be so much more than “that boy wit’ them pretty eyes.”
So yeah, Ma, I now know exactly what you were going through. You still got those baby sunglasses?
Carolyn: Outside our house, lil adolescent TyTy continued to hear all about her damn eyes.
Every. Damn. Day.
But at home, we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t that we wanted her to feel bad about the way she looked; it was the opposite: We wanted her to know that she was so much more than how she looked. Instead of complimenting her eyes, I complimented her dance moves, her crazy jokes and crazier facial expressions, and her self-guided focus when she was doing her homework. (Mama never had to tell her to get off that damn phone and open that social studies book.) We talked about how important it is to be a hard worker and a leader, someone people respect.
When Tyra was a tot, no one would shut up about her light green eyes! Now, York has the same eyes, and people won’t stop talking about his peepers either!
Tyra: So back to this eye thing. People spend so much time talking about color—blue, green, hazel, lavender—but they fail to real-eyes it’s also about eye shape, length and thickness of eyelashes, how your eyebrows frame your eyes, and even the size of the iris. So whether you have eyes that are light-colored or are an awesome shape like Jasmine’s from Aladdin, when “You’re so pretty/so beautiful/so gorgeous/so perfect [ugh]” is the go-to compliment for little girls, then they start thinking that’s their sole worth. Whether I was getting complimented on my eyes or I was crying about how unhappy I was with my rail-thin body, my mama never made me feel like my true value was wrapped up in my outer package.
Carolyn: Even when Tyra went into an industry that was all about the physical, I tried to keep that from being my go-to compliment. Instead of saying, “Girl, you was looking good up on that catwalk!” I’d say, “I love what you did with your arms and smile at the end of the runway in that Todd Oldham show,” or I’d compliment her on how well she’d negotiated a modeling contract. I didn’t let her buy into the idea that a model is just a pretty face. “A model is a self-employed businesswoman, Ty,” I’d say. “So you better be able to sashay that runway and take care of your business all day every day.”
CREATIVE COMPLIMENTS
I often called out unusual things that proved how smart and funny Tyra was. This way, I made sure she knew that I was paying attention to the things that made her her, and not just the way she did her hair or the pretty dress she wore. Sure, I’d call her out for getting good grades, working hard, or being kind to other people, but I’d also compliment the quirky stuff. Such as:
HER HANDWRITING: Put a pen in Tyra’s hand and what you’ll see is on point. Her handwriting looks like art, but it didn’t start that way. Brandlie Garvey, a supersmart girl in Tyra’s elementary school, had the best handwriting, so perfect it looked like a font, and Tyra got jealous. Real jealous. This prompted her to take a calligraphy class in high school (high school! Brandlie haunted her for years!), and after that, I was always asking her to write anything . . . the grocery list, you name it. “Dang, you got some good, fancy, Old English-lookin’ handwriting, Tyra!” I’d tell her when she signed our Christmas cards.
HER DANCE MOVES: Tyra can move and groove and twist and drop it really well. She didn’t pick up all the new, cool dances immediately, but when she finally got them, she was a master: the Cabbage Patch, the Robocop, the Wop, the Running Man; she could bust a move. I’ll never forget the time she went to an MC Hammer concert and was dancing so hard a crowd gathered to chant her on. By the end of the song, her strapless bra was around her waist and the entire stadium witnessed it on the Jumbotron.
BEING A PARROT: Whatever accent she hears, she can repeat it exactly. When in Italy, she appears to be the chocolate girl who was born there to a Senegalese momma and Italiano pappa. France? You’d swear she was from Paris and chilled on the Champs-Élysées every damn day. Jamaica? Mon, she got that patois down. You bet g’yal from Montego Bay. It was uncanny and never failed to make me laugh. Of course, she also figured out that her talent with accents could help her underage butt sneak into clubs, but that’s a story for another day.
Tyra: Girls who only hear about how pretty they are become women who are insanely terrified of losing their looks. They’re even more scared of aging because their beauty has been presented to them as their most valuable asset. I know some women in the entertainment biz who are so pressed they’ve got their publicist going into Wikipedia to change their birth dates to make ’em a few years (or a decade) younger. Imagine this: A PR intern comes in every morning, fires up the computer, and sips his Stumptown while he rolls back the ages of their clients.
But can you blame the age adapters? Hell no. We as a society have told them that once Ms. Aging rears her head, the expiration dates are about to start poppin’ off:
The desire for women as lovers: gone.
The desire for women as entertainers: over.
The desire for women as professionals: in the past.
The perception of women as beautiful: sayonara.
The perception of women as valuable: so yesterday.
The perception of women as interesting: the end.
We tell them all the good parts of life will all go away. Just poof and disappear. So no wonder we women think of aging as the big, bad bogeyman, coming to wreck your boobs, your forehead, your butt, your eyes, your neck, your thighs, your smile, and your life.
What would happen if we celebrated getting older (and not just once a year with a cake and some candles) instead of trying to pretend it wasn’t happening?
I’m in my forties, and while I have a tendency to look younger than my years, does my ass look the same as it did when I was twenty? My face is preserved well (you know the saying, and yeah, I will admit: it don’t crack). But my body?
Hahahahahahahahahahaha—no.
Each thigh and bun has about twenty more cellulite dimples. I think I’m averaging about one new dimple a year, too. And I no longer pass the booty pencil test. (Ask a friend if you don’t know what that is.) But how many effs do I give about that? Zero. Well, maybe two. I do wish my lower body was more toned, and I go to the gym sometimes to do something about it, but not enough because I honestly don’t care enough. It’s drooping because of my age, but I ain’t trippin’ about my age.
And I know it’s cuz my mama couldn’t give a damn about hers.
Carolyn: Who wants to be young and dumb their whole life? Embracing your age means embracing your experience. It means you’ve learned from all your stupid mistakes and you aren’t gonna make ’em again. Every year that goes by, I also get to say whatever the heck I wanna say more and more. I just let it rip! (Not farts, mind you; I’m talking about honesty, although aging does make it difficult to hold those gas explosions in at will.) I used to care so much about what other people thought about me,
but I care less and less with every year that goes by. Getting older means doing and saying whatever the heck you want to do, no matter who (not even your bigmouthed daughter) tells you to stop.
Believe it or not, my mama and I are the same age in each of these photos—sixteen!
For instance, Tyra and I eat out a lot, and there is usually some type of finger food on the table—barbecue ribs, pizza, fried chicken, veggies and ranch dressing—’cause we love anything you can eat with your hands. Don’t you think it tastes better? Only problem is that even when something’s finger-lickin’ good, unlike Tyra, I’m not one to be licking my fingers. I don’t know why, really, but I just don’t do it. So I just eat and eat, and my fingers get sticky and nasty, and my hands get stickier and nastier. Then, at the end of the meal, I wash ’em in my water glass. Yep, right at the table of a three-star Michelin-rated restaurant, I just plunge my hands right down in there, and if there’s ice, even better—I’ll use it like soap. Then I’ll use my napkin to dry my hands. It’s my cleansing system.
This totally grosses out Tyra, to the point where she makes gagging noises. And to top off her disdain, I leave a glass on the table swirling with pizza grease, chicken skin, and barbecue bits (or caviar if it’s one of those fancy-shmancy places). As she puts it, it looks like “watery throw-up.” I’m sixty-nine years old—I don’t care if other people are watching me! And I don’t care if I gross out my child. If Gordon Ramsay saw me, he would curse me out, throw me out of his restaurant, and toss my “sink” water at my head. I’d just come back the next day and do it all over again, GR. Only problem is that now my two-year-old grandson thinks this looks like so much fun, so he does it, too!
Sorry, Mama TyTy (not).
Tyra: Yes, York now does this, and it grinds my nerves that he learned it from his grandmom. But I have to admit, it does beat having to get up and haul him to the ladies’ room to wash his hands. And don’t tell my mom, but when she’s not looking, I may or may not dip my greasy hands in, too.