The
Madwoman
in the
Volvo
MY YEAR OF RAGING HORMONES
Sandra Tsing Loh
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York · London
For my mother,
Gisela, and all the world’s other
fabulous Madwomen
CONTENTS
Prologue: Gloomings
Burning Woman
Bridges
Menopause, Old
Menopause, New
Life in the (Happiness) Projects
Gym Dandy
A Brief Discussion of Manopause
Parenting Adolescents During Perimenopause, or Medieval Times
Bench Warrant for My Father’s Arrest
Losing It
The Shit Hits the Fan
Couples Therapy Round 117
Rental Dog
House Cat
The Sudden Death of My Father
The Caregiver’s Journey
Ladies of the Lake
The Great Retreat
Dinner at Home
Dr. Valerie
The Wisdom of Menopause
The Contents of My In-box
Turning Fifty
Old Lady Running
Menopause Tips
Acknowledgments
The
Madwoman
in the
Volvo
Prologue: Gloomings
I’M HURTLING WEST ALONG the 101 Freeway to the Valley to pick my daughters up from school. I am forty-nine years old, and I have just gotten off the phone with my friend and magazine editor, Ben. We have been talking about refinancing: It’s a wonderfully mundane topic of conversation—one of those truly harmless pleasures of midlife. It helps me to recall not all, but at least some, of the staid, rational person I was not too long ago: which is to say before I, a forty-something suburban mother, became involved in a wild and ill-considered extramarital affair.
“Listen,” Ben says excitedly. “I know two years ago John Warick got you that thirty years fixed at 4.75 percent, which as we know is historically unheard of. But I’m telling you, this new guy who’s doing my next refinance, at Wells Fargo? When I ran your numbers by him, he thought you could qualify for an even lower thirty years fixed like . . . 4.275.” Ben is as much of a math nerd about this stuff as I am.
Indeed, under normal circumstances, I am the sort of OCD person for whom the number 4.275 would create a spike of excitement. It’s the same adrenaline rush I get when successfully completing a newspaper sudoku or crossword puzzle with a sharp number 2 pencil. Ben and I can get truly wound up around our small personal-finance triumphs most of the time. But today even this conversation hasn’t supplied its usual lift. I find myself feeling surprisingly flat.
Until now, not being able to feel things has never been one of my copious personal flaws. I am, for better or for worse, a person obsessively driven by passions large and small. I find my mind drifting to dinner. I remember in that moment that I promised my girls that morning that tonight’s dinner would be Make Your Own Pizza.
IN THEORY Make Your Own Pizza is one of the wonderfully creative new things my girls and I do. Now that my kids go back and forth between my ex-husband and me, I have periods of rest. As a consequence, I’ve been able to bring on an astonishing amount of high-quality parenting. Ironically, here is the artisanal attention and care I was never able to provide as a full-time mother. In our new life together in our big short-saled Victorian house, my girls and I make lemonade from scratch, bake pies, and paint Easter eggs. I’ve taught them to ride bikes, to crochet, and to paint on actual easels with watercolors. We even go bowling, and we have Make Your Own Pizza for dinner.
I find myself thinking ahead to the burned pizza stone languishing crusty and unwashed in the oven. I think of how sticky the Trader Joe’s dough is, of how I will probably need to get two kinds, the garlic-herb and the whole wheat. I think of how needlessly jam-packed the parking lot at Trader Joe’s is in midafternoon, how surprisingly uninspired their samples—lukewarm cups of bland organic rotelli, cloudy vials of unfiltered apple juice. My feeling of flatness gives way decidedly, at the thought of Make Your Own Pizza, to sudden and dramatic gloom.
I hang up on Ben, pull off the freeway, and park under a tree in front of a dirty-yellow ranch-style house to collect myself and instead instantly begin sobbing, producing heaves of seawater like Jonah’s whale. It’s not just the pizza. Suddenly an image comes to me, seemingly at random, of my daughters’ hamster. Because they are always begging for more pets, their dad had given them a toffee-blond hamster named Hammy, who stayed with me one weekend when they all went out of town. He spent the day as my little companion, happily rolling around in his blue plastic ball while I wrote at the computer. After Hammy went home I heard from the girls that he had gotten sick—“Probably from eating his own wood chips,” Sally reported—and subsequently died.
Hunched over the steering wheel, I think—why now?—of that little face, those little paws, that jingling blue ball. I think of Hammy’s sunny disposition and friendly, inquisitive nose, and his essential innocence and trueness and goodness. I am a forty-nine-year-old woman sitting in her filthy Volvo parked under a tree on a Tuesday afternoon wailing about a hamster. Just how low are we setting the bar here? (And yet, why of all things did God have to take this hamster? What was the harm?)
I want to call my older sister, Kaitlin, but I shouldn’t. My sister and I are so close it’s as if we share a limb. When Kaitlin and I are getting along, we talk all the time, and she gives the greatest, most amazing sister advice (call that Pema Chödrön, after the crop-haired Tibetan-Buddhist nun whose inspirational writings we both adore). When we are fighting I can almost physically feel the phone not ring, and it feels intentionally strategic (call that . . . Margaret Thatcher). But I’ve put Kaitlin through a hell of a lot. My affair almost killed her. After all, I’m not just her middle-aged kid sister but the mother of her two favorite nieces. No, I can’t call her, because if she sensed I was going off the deep end again, Kaitlin would have to stage an intervention to treat the entire family.
Instead I find myself dialing Ann. Ann is not necessarily my closest girlfriend, but she is the most sensible and the longest happily married. (I’ve had my share of crazy girlfriends, and since my divorce it seems like everyone else’s twenty-year-long marriages are now suddenly toppling over like dominoes. All these wild-eyed women want to meet for coffee, as though I’m a sort of underground-divorce-railroad Harriet Tubman, and the vibe is unsettling.) Ann is together. Ann always has a good plumber, contractor, or electrician. Ann knows which Beverly Hills specialist to call if you have a mysterious spot or rash. Ann has a beautifully organized shoe closet.
“Hello?” Ann says after two and a half rings. Barely able to choke the words out, I tell her about my sorrow over the hamster, and about this sudden, violent stab of midafternoon midlife malaise.
She says: “Oh sweetie. I’m so sorry to hear that. Can I ask—when did you last have your period?”
“I have no idea. I can barely keep food in the fridge and my daughters in underwear.”
“But might you have missed any?”
“Oh sure.” I frown. Good God—who keeps track of periods anymore?
“I think . . . ? Maybe . . . ? Because it sounds so familiar . . . ? You may not want to hear this, but you could be entering menopause.”
“Menopause?!” I cry out in relief. “Just menopause? That would be awesome! I thought I was going mad or something!”
But now Ann goes on to describe a person
al daily routine that is about the most complicated one I have ever heard of. It is a rigorously titrated cocktail of antidepressants, bioidenticals, walks, facials, massages, dark chocolate, and practically throwing salt over the left shoulder.
“And it’s most intense at that certain time of the month. That’s when I have these bouts of progesterone depression balanced with rage—tons and tons of rage. I’m shouting on the streets, in traffic, at my husband. I almost killed someone in the parking lot at B of A. I can feel like I’m really going crazy. I throw things. For no reason. Weird things set me off. So just for those days—it’s four to five days—I have to up my Estrovel. If I remember. The hardest thing is just to remember.” She recommends her dream gynecologist, Dr. Valerie. I take the number without admitting that I’m not sure I’m ready to see a doctor, because quite frankly I can’t face being weighed.
Later I’ll go home to my laptop for a crash course in the history of the change. Wow—there’s so much I didn’t know. Menopause was first mentioned in ancient Greece by writers like Aristotle, who pegged both menstrual periods and fertility as ending at the same time for women, then around age forty. Cited in European scholarly texts in the Middle Ages, menopause took an unattractive turn in 1816 when the French physician Charles de Gardanne termed “ménopause” a nervous disorder. This no doubt contributed to medical thinking in the later 1800s that menopause was a time when a woman “ceased to exist for the species” and “resembled a dethroned queen” (these from a description of female diseases). The first complete book on menopause, with the warm and fuzzy title of The Change of Life in Health and Disease (1857), by John Edward Tilt, apparently cites 135 different menopause symptoms, including curious manifestations like pseudonarcotism, temporary deafness, uncontrollable peevishness, and “hysterical flatulence.” Yikes!
By contrast, it appears that non-European cultures have more organic, female-friendly approaches to menopause. Mayan women famously report not having any negative menopausal symptoms at all. American Indian women and their faraway Chinese sisters have long treated menopausal symptoms with such healing natural remedies as angelica (dong quai). In India a woman’s ascent into this next, nonmothering phase of life is seen as a sacred time of greater spiritual depth and exploration. Instead of “ceasing to exist for the species,” for Hindu women menopause opens the door to enlightenment, growth, and wisdom. As I’ll learn in the chapters to come, enlightenment, growth, and wisdom are only part of the package.
AS ANN and I hang up, mostly I’m relieved at her diagnosis. As though a temporary fog has been blasted away with lemon-scented Febreze, I turn the key in the ignition, pick up my girls, go to Target, and follow that with Trader Joe’s. Invigorated by this new information, I’m again rocking my chores. In the checkout line I fumble with keys, sunglasses, debit card, and change, as is increasingly common for me these days. I have this thing where if I forget my canvas bags, I feel so guilty about the harm that plastic wreaks on the planet that I stack all my groceries into my arms. Doubled over, I shuffle out to the car, leaving a trail of broken eggs, milk, cantaloupe.
“You need a hand, hon?” the female checker asks. “Oh no,” I say. With a big smile I turn to the entire line behind me and grandly announce: “Don’t mind me—I’m just forty-nine and entering menopause!”
Burning Woman
BUT THAT’S NOT WHERE the story of my midlife crisis begins.
Flashback to two years before. It’s 9:00 A.M. on a blindingly bright Monday morning. I am forty-seven years old, in T-shirt and overalls. I am weeping as I hurl paperback after paperback into a clanging metal Dumpster in front of a U-Haul storage facility in Pasadena. This is my personal library, those familiar literary classics lovingly assembled in my salad days (college, grad school, etc.). It feels like sacrilege to toss them. It’s a betrayal of the concrete blocks, then red milk crates, then black IKEA Billy bookshelves they once stood on. I am jettisoning into the trash all of art, and history, and goodness, and knowledge.
On the other hand, I appear to have no fewer than three separate copies of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a book that, to be honest, I have never read and that, I now realize, I never plan to. I cannot even remember pretending to read it, though I must have been assigned it in a course (perhaps three times?). That’s the case, too, with my moldering pile of Henry James, which I am also jettisoning.
I’m here at U-Haul on a blistering Monday morning because I’ve just been kicked out of my home of twenty years. My home, I see in retrospect, was a kind of Eden, a funky hippie enclave in a bucolic part of town, with two pools, a recording studio, and even a charmingly jerry-rigged home office overlooking a hot tub. That’s where my library of unread books had room to loll sunnily, next to unused exercise equipment and unopened boxes of life-improving (one day!) things like TurboTax.
But all this has been packed up and labeled for me in cardboard boxes—forty-three of them—by my former husband, henceforward to be referred to as Mr. X. I drove the giant shuddering U-Haul truck back home one last time to retrieve the boxes, stacked six feet high, under a blue rain tarp on the driveway. There was so much stuff it didn’t all fit into the truck: I left lamps, CDs, and wedding platters scattered along the sidewalk.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. For such a long time our union was happy and solid. Mr. X and I met two decades ago, in Los Angeles. I was twenty-six and at a crossroads. Raised by a Chinese engineer father and a German mother in 1970s suburban Southern California, I had been shuttled to constant piano and ballet lessons with the middle-class idea that these would be nice hobbies to complement a sensible future job in aerospace engineering. But after struggling to earn a degree in physics and then moonlighting for six years in English graduate school (to my father’s horror), I had veered offtrack: I wanted to be an artist. What sort of artist I had no clue—I played the piano and composed and wrote and danced and painted and did performance art. I was miserable at all of that, and miserable at being single. I had this dinosaur DNA code that if I had any intimate relations with a man, I would be on his front porch the next morning with packed suitcases, a coffeemaker, and big puppy eyes.
I was lucky then to meet Mr. X, a friend of a friend. Somewhat but not crushingly older than I (eight years), Mr. X was a well-regarded and fully employed studio musician. From a musical family, he had played scales for hours a day from the time he was a boy in Minnesota, and to him making music was as natural as breathing. Mr. X was disciplined about his craft, and as we started to date and he learned of my creative aspirations, he insisted I also be. Crying was not allowed, even if I had a short story rejected sixty times. (“Do you know how many auditions I didn’t get?” he would exclaim. “Get up on your feet, girl!”) He pushed me to leave my freshman-teaching-and-dodging-my-thesis-adviser grad-school safety zone and approach art like a job. Mr. X was a good person, a grown-up, and a romantic. In summer backyards we drank wine and ate barbecue, listened to Miles Davis, smoked pot, and played Scrabble. He praised me for being—as opposed to his ex—“un-neurotic,” a trait I tried to work hard to maintain.
We soon bought a home together, thanks to his income and a loan from my family. Now on our own patch of earth, our roots grew down. On his own land Mr. X turned out to be very much a homebody—if not actually a farmer, as I used to joke. When not on the road, he roasted chickens, baked bread, and grew tomatoes. He hung laundry, hired painters, and installed showerheads. He mended fences, serviced cars, bought insurance. I dug into my writing and began publishing essays, short stories, and even books about what I called the foibles of my generation, and I started to tell coherent stories onstage instead of doing unintelligible performance-art pieces. I soon had so much to do that when Mr. X went on tour, as he often did, I missed him less and less. We both felt this was a good development, as in the early days my overattachment was unmanageable—I used to wail in alarmed grief whenever he went away.
Eventually there comes the day, a decade
in, when, returning from a several-month tour, he puts his bags down on the front porch, looks up, and the first words out of his mouth are not “How are you?” but “The roof needs retiling.” When I see him in another room folding laundry and laughing till tears come at The Daily Show, I realize I haven’t seen him laugh like that at anything I’ve said in years. When we go to dinner for “date night” and can’t fill more than forty-five minutes of conversation, I know it’s because we have become so unfamiliar with each other’s worlds.
But the loss of Mr. X is not why I am weeping at this moment, as I continue to toss out classic after classic this morning in rhythmic arcs of grief (Hemingway, Melville, Trollope—thunk, thunk, thunk). I’m weeping because we were supposed to be . . . doing this . . . together.
But by “we” I mean myself and Mr. Y. And there you go. Life’s next wrinkle.
• • •
I’D MET Mr. Y a decade before. I was in need of a manager for my theater work, and that’s when my director introduced us. Mr. Y was a funny, smart, theater gypsy like the rest of us, but he was a businessperson who calmly took care of the vexing stuff like contracts, and budgets, and 1099s. Mr. Y was fun to have around, either in the theater or on the road. An old-fashioned flaneur with a different tie, hat, or polished boot for every occasion, he had endless patience for shopping, browsing, café sitting. Of Scotch-Irish blood and WASP training, Mr. Y was a fellow always happy to duck into a pub for a nightcap, and he was also a gentleman glad to chivalrously hold open the door. At opening-night parties, when I was marooned, excitedly but rather anxiously holding court before a group of theatergoers, he’d arrive magically by my side with not one but two calming cocktails (“Irish handcuffs”). “Life in wartime!” he’d say.
THE FACT that Mr. Y and I were both in stable long-term marriages with children—he had a twenty-one-year-old son, and I had two young daughters—put us at ease together. We soon developed a platonic friendship that was as comfortable as an old shoe. As his French architect wife seemed to travel as much as Mr. X did, we increasingly kept each other company in that affable midlife beer garden of our forties. Sharing a business checking account, we were buddies in work and in life. He was the Ethel to my Lucy.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 1
