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

by Gabrielle Reece

  Everyone turns fifty. (I should say, if you’re lucky you turn fifty, because I have some friends who died in their forties.) The stark fact is that you can spend all your time, energy, and money having fat removed from this place and injected into that place, having different pieces of skin tucked and sand-blasted smooth, and other parts puffed up and lightened. Mind you, I’m not for a minute saying you shouldn’t do this. I’m not whatever the plastic surgery version of a Luddite is. The day may come when I spring for an eye tuck. Still, it’s good to be sane about it, to pitch your tent in the camp of aging gracefully, and to realize that however much you have done, there will come a day when you’re going to look like a really rested forty-year-old who has had work done, but you’re never going to look twenty-two. That ship has sailed.

  Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh, it’s easy for her to say. She’s six three” (not always a stupendous and obvious advantage; try being a five-foot-tall seven-year-old) “and has worked as a model.” You’re right, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

  Being in the business of being recognized for your looks teaches one great lesson: this is not something you’ve worked to create; it’s an accident of birth. I was always more interested in the parts of my life over which I had control, and being tall and photogenic was not one of them. When I had people ogling me, I thought, “This has nothing to do with me, which means I have no use for it.”

  Discovering volleyball in eleventh grade gave me a sense of purpose. It was something I could do, and do well. And after getting my ass handed to me on the court a few times, I learned that you may be sixteen and rocking that pair of shorts, but if you’re playing badly and you keep missing the ball, you basically suck. The shorts, and how you look in them, don’t matter. The reality check is immediate and brutal.

  Once, when I was still playing volleyball at Florida State, I turned down a lucrative, weekend modeling job in New York because it conflicted with a match. How I performed in my sport was important to me, whereas having my picture taken simply didn’t. It never seemed like a real job to me. Of course I pursued opportunities I felt were worthwhile, but through it all, I always remembered that my core value wasn’t based on how I looked.

  Over the years this attitude has allowed me to keep my head on straight when, for example, people start asking whatever happened to Gabrielle Reece? Whatever happened to the once Top Most Beautiful Hot Woman in the Known Universe by a Glossy Magazine with a Huge Circulation, only not to be named, or mentioned, ever again? The subtext of these “whatever happened to” questions is abundantly clear, to you, to your friends and family, and to the world: once young and gorgeous; now, not so much. There’s no room for the luxury of self-delusion.

  Youth is a currency. Beauty is a currency. But let me tell you, it’s a currency with a limit. And if you can’t figure out a way to transcend that, it’s a slow, miserable death.

  Sure, there is a certain amount of mileage you can get out of being pissed off. But it won’t carry you that far. And it won’t make you happy.

  After my circuit training class on Wednesday there’s a no-sweat class. (This is Kaua’i; people live most of their lives here beneath a dewy sheen of perspiration, so I assume this means a gentle yoga class.) The gentle no-sweat yoga people, most of whom are in their sixties or seventies, arrive at least fifteen minutes early and stand just outside the room, scowling at us through the plate-glass windows. My class is still going strong. We’ve got our weights, and the music’s pumping, and we’re working hard, sweating our heads off. We have a full ten minutes left, but one of them always pushes in and hollers over the music that it’s time for us to wrap it up. She, for it is always a she, is furious for reasons so mysterious, I can’t help but believe it’s her habit to interact with the world in a high state of supreme grumpiness.

  It’s not always this way. Sometimes after class one of the women will come up to me, touch my arm and say, “I just wanted to tell you that you girls are amazing!” We then trade a few words about how good it is to keep moving, and we wish each other well. But much of the time the gentle yoga people radiant a discontent so scorching, I feel a need to reapply sunscreen.

  But I’m grateful for their presence, because it reminds me that the old saying about beauty being the light of the heart is not just a greeting card cliché. What makes these people “old” is their attitude, not how they look, and the reason I don’t connect with them has nothing to do with their age, but with how they behave.

  In Kaua’i, we have a neighbor down the road, Joe, a dapper man whose age could be anywhere between sixty and ninety. Every day he appears in his slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirt, his hair carefully combed. He’s got shiny eyes, like a little elf. He cares for his lawn. He paints his own house. Everything in his realm is immaculate.

  Joe allows himself a beer once a week, after he’s mowed his lawn. One day we had some good Belgian beer in the house, and I brought him a bottle and asked him how it was going.

  “Our friends have been here. For two weeks! That’s a long time, especially since my wife’s mind isn’t so good, you know.” I’d known for a while that Joe’s wife had Alzheimer’s. When I asked him how he was doing with that he said, “It teaches me over and over that acceptance is really a part of life.”

  Reece and Brody love Joe. Last year, when we returned to the neighborhood in the fall, he baked us a cake and delivered it with a big “Welcome back, Hamiltons!”

  To thank Joe, Reece and Brody baked him a big cookie, and in return he wrote them a proper thank-you note. He tells them how proud he is of them. Brody adores him. Whenever he appears in front of his house she runs down the street and into his arms. I’m intrigued by this. There are a lot of other people in the neighborhood who are much younger, much hipper, and would seem to be much more fun from a four-year-old’s point of view, and yet it’s Joe—more specifically Joe’s spirit—to which my four-year-old is drawn.

  If an older person has that spirit, and all that life experience, is there anyone more badass? They’re not running down the basketball court slam-dunking, but older people like Joe have a stillness and a wisdom and hopefully a sense of humor about life that you can only achieve by having lived that long.

  I want to be like that.

  I don’t want to be the woman who’s angry at the world because the clock keeps ticking.

  There’s a regular in my circuit training class who’s fifty-eight. Beau is lithe and has the biceps of a thirty-year-old. She works hard and has a bright smile. She’s spent a lot of time in the sun and the lines and freckles on her face reflect this. I don’t know if she frets about her skin, but her vibrancy compensates for any imperfections. Watching Beau one day, I realized that, in the end, the only one who really cares about how we look is us. Does anyone care that I’m forty-two, or that I have this wrinkle here, or that tuck of cellulite there? Anyone?

  Paradoxically, what people do tend to notice is how hard we’re trying to look young. If we look as if we care too much, and if we spend a lot of time and money on procedures and hair appointments and spa treatments and trainers, that isn’t appealing either. Most men hate it. Men tend to be intrigued by women who are happy, confident, and friendly. My very limited sampling includes Laird and some of his most accomplished pals, all of whom gravitate toward women who are self-possessed.

  And who are these guys we’re trying to look so young for? When I see a twenty-year-old, he doesn’t appeal to me. I can recognize how handsome he might be, but my basic response is “What on earth would I do with that?” If trying to attract some youngster whom I’m not really interested in in any way is my sole reason for trying to look twenty-five, why bother? A young friend I used to play volleyball with took issue with this one day, pointing out that to be young and hot is to be wanted. But what about what you want? Being desired by someone else doesn’t make us a better person, or even a more beautiful person. I learned this at a very young age, when I was living with my
aunt Norette, who was warm, fun, and hilariously straightforward.

  Once, when she’d taken me to Sears to buy some clothes, the saleswoman asked if I was her daughter. Norette is five feet tall, and at age seven, so was I. “Does she look like my daughter?” she snorted.

  But she treated me as if I were. She loved me, was interested in what I was about as a person, and I loved her more than anyone. Norette was scrappy and overweight; she carried a good extra hundred pounds on her small frame, but I couldn’t have cared less about her outward appearance.

  Norette definitely influenced my attitude about aging: rather than try to be endlessly foxy, deep into middle age and beyond, my goal is to be handsome and distinguished and in command of my life. My goal is to be beloved; in the same way I love Aunt Norette, that’s how I want the people in my life to feel about me.

  That doesn’t mean I don’t fear getting older. On a basic existential level aging is scary. Philosophers spend their lives pondering the real terror associated with dying. I’ve heard it said that some people, when they’re extremely old or extremely sick, might be ready to die. They might look at their lives and feel tired of the struggle. They might look at their middle-aged kids and think, “You know, I’ve heard that drama eight hundred more times than I really need to. I’m done.”

  But before that time, it’s incredibly scary. It’s a weakening of your body, yourself. You might feel wise and be able to seize the day better than you once did, but the bod is giving out. And the big question arises: Why is it that we live this life, we perform, we have a family, we get our kids out, and then we become so enfeebled? It’s like having a beautiful dinner and eating a small piece of shit at the end.

  The deterioration can be so humiliating. It’s not as if one day you’re bench-pressing a hundred and the next you’re peeing in your pants in a movie theater. Usually it’s gradual and devastating. Tiny terrors all along the way. Perhaps the ultimate lesson of getting older is learning to check our egos at the door. Still, when I see friends in the thrall of this process, it breaks me up. I don’t want that for anyone. Losing our dignity and our independence is the fear beneath all the other anxiety about aging. It’s not so much the lines and sunspots; it’s more what the lines and sunspots signal: that life moves in only one direction.

  Still, every day the sun rises, and each day is our own. I’m reminded of that Emerson quote, “No one suspects the days to be Gods.” The one advantage of being older is knowing that our days truly are numbered. Every day we wake up and think, “I can be an asshole, or I can be badass.”

  STOP LOOKING SO HARD

  Is there one modern American female who has not been trained to be hypercritical of her looks? Beginning at, oh, let’s say age eleven, are not all of us taught to inspect, analyze, and criticize every inch of our bodies? How’s our hair, skin, the length of our eyelashes, the shape of our butts, the size of our hips and breasts, and while we’re at it, the perkiness of those breasts? Let’s not forget our teeth or how white they are or the size of our lips. What if you have too much hair on your body? The checklist is endless.

  The older we get, the less critical we should become about our imperfections. At forty, we should be less critical than we are at thirty; when we’re fifty, less critical still. Back off on your head-to-toe inspections. Stay away from the heinous magnifying mirror you come across in hotel bathrooms.

  In the morning, or before you go out, just do a once-over.

  Do I have my moments of weakness? Absolutely. All the time. I am human. But I try to have the discipline to resist, with every ounce of will I can muster, the urge to overexamine and criticize.

  Some days I tell myself that in ten years I’ll look back at how I am now and think how young and beautiful I was, and the thought of that makes me smile. None of us can escape the river of time, so let’s float down it gracefully and happily.

  As they say in Hawaii “Never mind.” Which basically means let it go.

  YOUR BODY REALLY IS A TEMPLE, EVEN IF IT’S AN OLD ONE

  Just because you’re older now than when you started reading this chapter, and just because there’s nothing you can do, ultimately, but accept this as a natural part of human life, that doesn’t mean you should resign yourself to living in nothing but elastic-waist jeans and oversized tees and prop yourself in front of the TV or computer, and order fries with that. It doesn’t mean you should give up.

  Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has the best, easiest mantra for eating. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I’d like to add: “break a sweat every day,” “don’t smoke,” and “get sleep.” You have to find the things that work for you. But the bottom line is that even if you’re celebrating your ninety-eighth birthday, you should still take care of yourself.

  Having a blueprint for self-care also ensures that you don’t fall for every nonaging trend that comes down the pike. When one day you notice that butt line forming between your eyebrows you don’t shriek and think, “It’s time for a face-lift! A brow lift! Anything the plastic surgeon to the stars tells me to lift, I’m lifting!”

  Once you reach a certain age, the big question on everyone’s minds seems to be what is your official position on getting “work” done. People ask me about it all the time, and my response is that I don’t know. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. If I’m still working I might like to freshen things up a bit one day, but I never want it to be a knee-jerk reaction.

  ENJOY THE FLOWERS

  Life is change, but one thing that never changes is that there’s always a gaggle of beauties who are younger than you, hotter than you, and gaining the attention of the world in a way that you’re unlikely to again, if you ever did in the first place. I’m not being negative; there are also people a hell of a lot older, more decrepit, and less fortunate than you.

  I have three daughters, all of whom are blossoming flowers. I don’t want to compete with them, or let their youth torture me. I want to enjoy watching them come into their own vibrant colors and celebrate all of their milestones. Here is the secret: I’m not in a race with them, or anyone for that matter. You can’t be better or worse than anyone if you are not competing or comparing yourself to them. I know the torment of trying to race with someone. Try being in fashion surrounded by girls so beautiful they take your breath away. Or play a sport where some girls are so athletic and fluid their power just oozes out of every pore.

  Bela has blossomed into a young woman, and even with Reece you can see that it’s moments away. Intuitively, I’ve felt myself move to the side. But then, I’ve never wanted to be a person who was right in the middle anyway. That wasn’t my thing. I didn’t want the attention, even though because of my size I had it anyway. But I didn’t seek it. I knew it wouldn’t make me happy. Seeking attention for the sake of attention felt like trying to lure other people into giving me something, and I knew that wouldn’t make me happy. What makes me happy? Do I feel good about the way I look? Am I comfortable in my clothes? Do I feel as if I’m representing who I really am?

  AGE LIKE A GUY

  Don Wildman founded Bally Total Fitness, but around our house he’s known for his nine Ironman competitions, his devotion to heli-snowboarding, mountain biking, and stand-up paddling. If I haven’t seen him around for a while, I assume he’s in New York running a marathon or paddling the length of the Hawaiian Islands on a surfboard. Did I mention that Don’s seventy-nine? Laird, a mere forty-eight, trains with the Wild Man from time to time—a two-hour circuit that has been known to make professional athletes throw up. The most inspirational thing about Don is that, to him, his age is irrelevant. Sure, he eats an excellent diet—low in red meat, low in fat, high in plants—and takes supplements, including glucosamine for his increasingly creaky knees, but his main concern is the next adventure. His age doesn’t keep him from doing one thing he wants to do.

  I amuse myself imagining Don Wildman refusing to go to the beach because he thought he looked bad in a bathing suit, or Don Wildman s
kipping a day of snowboarding because the sun on the mountain that day was harsh and might cause more wrinkles or Don Wildman saying no to a mountain bike trip because he didn’t want to look foolish because he wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old hottie.

  All that Don, or Laird, too, for that matter, care about is being able to do what they want to do. They don’t think about their crow’s-feet.

  In this regard, I think women should aim to age as men do. To be brave enough to say, “Yeah, I have a wrinkle or two, what of it? That’s who I am.” I find it helpful to focus on what makes me genuinely happy, which then helps me project the kind of confidence that comes from feeling good about yourself. It helps me to remember that we are not only attracted to people because they are young and/or good-looking, but also because they are comfortable in their own skin, no matter their age.

  8

  IT’S ABOUT TIME

  If there’s anything good to be said about losing a parent when you’re a child, it’s that you learn the hard lesson early that time is precious. Right in front of your eyes there is the reality: a person really can be here one day and gone the next.

  We all know this intellectually, yet we mismanage our time anyway. Some of us are superefficient, multitasking our heads off, filling our hours with chores, family demands, stuff that pops up on our screens, assuming that as long as we’re “swamped” we’re spending our time well. Then, when we do have down time, we’re too discombobulated to use it wisely. How many times have I found myself with a blissful quiet hour to myself, that I then spend cruising for shoes online that I know I’m never going to buy?