The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  I highly recommend a snack at around four in the afternoon, right during the time when blood sugar, mood, and serotonin tend to plummet.

  This totally hit home. Although the Hour of the Wolf is typically considered four o’clock in the morning, for many mothers of school-age children, how many of our inner wolves appear at afternoon carpool time?

  Even Suze Orman makes a guest appearance, in a TV greenroom (the place where all modern witches gather):

  She told me that you can see people’s ill health in their money and cash flow first because money has nowhere to hide an energy imbalance. You either have positive cash flow or you have debt. Simple. Sooner or later, if the behavior patterns and beliefs that create money problems are not addressed, they will manifest as health problems in the body.

  I couldn’t help gasping in recognition again and penciling in the margin, like Woody Allen’s “Whore of Mensa,” “Yes, very true.” You see? Wisdom is of such a multitasking, infinitely varied scope that I think few men could tolerate it, or even maintain consciousness through it. But they remain ignorant at their peril!

  All of that said, even under my inspiring leadership, it is unlikely the targeted demographic of women will ever engage in Bloomsday-like readings of Wisdom, as is done with Joyce’s Ulysses. (Groused a girlfriend to whom I was manically recommending it: “Why should I bother? Every day of menopause already feels like you’re reading a six-hundred-page book.”) So, for the bloated and tired, let me give you the CliffsNotes.

  Today women between the ages of forty-four and sixty-five are the largest demographic group. So it’s no surprise that Northrup considers menopause a major cultural event. Without going into the sometimes arduous detail other feminist texts do (the rising or falling number of women in government, the social architecture of food-sharing collectives), Northrup suggests this gigantic demographic transition will change society—somehow—for the better. All well and good, no arguments there, but now here comes the juicy core of Wisdom:

  A woman once told me that when her mother was approaching the age of menopause, her father sat the whole family down and said, “Kids, your mother may be going through some changes now, and I want you to be prepared. Your Uncle Ralph told me that when your Aunt Carol went through the change, she threw a leg of lamb right out the window!” Although this story fits beautifully into the stereotype of the “crazy” menopausal woman, it should not be overlooked that throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol’s outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of self. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time.

  Woo-woo! Duck, Uncle Ralph! Go, Aunt Carol!

  In short, never mind the wavy-graph technicalities of all those estrogen/progesterone/FSH fluctuations. Opines the doctor:

  I think it’s useful to get your hormone levels tested. But it’s far more useful to tune in to how you’re feeling than to focus on a lab test, which gives, after all, just a single snapshot of an ever-changing process.

  What the phrase wisdom of menopause stands for, in the end, is that, as the female body’s egg-producing abilities and levels of estrogen and other reproductive hormones begin to wane, so does the hormonal cloud of our nurturing instincts. During this huge biological shift, our brain, temperament, and behaviors will begin to change—as then must, alarmingly, our relationships. As one Northrup chapter title tells it, “Menopause Puts Your Life Under a Microscope,” and the message, painful as it is, is: “Grow . . . or die.”

  It’s intriguing to ponder this suggested reversal of what has traditionally been thought to be the woman’s hormonal cloud. A sudden influx of hormones is not what causes fifty-year-old Aunt Carol to throw the leg of lamb out the window. Improperly balanced hormones were probably the culprit. Fertility’s amped-up reproductive hormones helped Aunt Carol thirty years ago to begin her mysterious automatic weekly ritual of roasting lamb just so and laying out twelve settings of silverware with an OCD-like attention to detail while cheerfully washing and folding and ironing the family laundry. No normal person would do that—look at the rest of the family: they are reading the paper and lazing about like rational, sensible people. And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, nonnurturing, nonbonding type of person everyone else is. (And so what if get-well casseroles won’t get baked, PTAs will collapse, and in-laws will go for decades without being sent a single greeting card? Paging Aunt Carol! The old Aunt Carol!)

  One could further argue that all of these menopausal women, in fact, represent a major evolutionary shift. Owing to women’s greatly lengthened life span (from about forty in 1900 to eighty in 2000 in the U.S.), even the notion of what a woman’s so-called normal state is can be questioned: Northrup notes that before this time in history, most women never reached menopause—they died before it could arrive. If, in an eighty-year life span, a female is fertile for about twenty-five years (let’s call it ages fifteen to forty), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. Fertility is the Change. It is during fertility that a female loses herself and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologically speaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm—the more standard state of selfishness is.

  Which is to say, if it comes at the right time, menopause is wisdom. For Northrup—whose own passage through menopause included a traumatic divorce, a narrative she relates with regret, but little apology—this seemed to be so. Menopause’s liberating narrative dovetails elegantly with a typical baby boomer female’s biological and chronological clock. When a woman gets married in her twenties, has children in her late twenties or early thirties, and begins to detach in her forties, look where her nuclear family is by the time she reaches her menopausal wanderlust-filled fifties: her grown-up (say eighteen-year-old) children are leaving the nest; her perhaps slightly older (say sixtyish) husband is transitioning into gardening and fishing; her aged parents have conveniently died (let’s say back—and wouldn’t it be lovely?—when they slipped and injured a hip at, oh, seventy-eight).

  Compare that timeline, however, with the clock of my own generation of late-boomer/Gen X women. Putting our careers and our Selves first, we adventured and traveled in our twenties, settled down and got married in our thirties, got pregnant (or tried to—fertility problems being the first surprising biological wall we hit) in our late thirties or even early forties . . . and now what scenario will we face when we hit menopause?

  In my case, when it arrived at forty-nine, perimenopause was terrifying, and like nothing I had ever before physically experienced. It was not just the hot flashes; it was the mood swings, although the phrase mood swings sounds far too cartoonlike and teen-girlish. I would describe it as the sudden onset of a crippling, unreasoning gloom. It is like resting one’s hand on the familiar wall of one’s day—helping kids with homework, some grocery shopping, hurtling along on a favorite freeway, listening to Miles Davis—and then feeling the hand suddenly push through the wall, through foam spongy as the flesh of a drowned corpse, into . . . nothingness.

  You experience anxiety at the notion of being face-to-face with your loved ones, because they will immediately read from your dull eyes that which you can no longer hide—that you don’t love them, never will again. (And note that I had already divorced my husband of several decades and had run off with my demon gypsy lover . . . Now I felt repulsion upon hearing the squeaky wheels of the recycling bin he was dutifully rolling out to the curb.) At one time, the sweet smell of your
baby’s head was your whole world; now you can feel the clanging chime of her ten-year-old voice, note by note, draining your will to live. Where once you coordinated seventy volunteers and thousands of dollars of fundraising with four- and fivefold Excel spreadsheets at your kids’ school, now the mere thought of trying to figure out how to pay the United Visa bill online makes you so depressed, you can’t get out of bed. Your chemistry has changed—and that is no small thing.

  Even more unsettling is how, at night, the depression and anxiety are so much stranger and more intense than the minor quotidian irritants that seem to be tipping you off into hopelessness (the overflowing laundry basket, the $530 car repair bill, the fact that the scale says you’re up—what is it?—eight pounds). The other night, I was awake at 3:24 A.M. as usual (melatonin, Tylenol PM, Ambien, forget it—I could take them all at once, paired with a bottle of wine, and still drive an eighteen-wheeler). As I lay in the darkness, all at once, the name Brian Hong surfaced in my consciousness, and I experienced not a passing wave of despair, but despair simply moving in as a cold, straight tide.

  I have no idea who Brian Hong is—I was filled with gloom simply because of the name. Perhaps there is, in fact, a lone forgotten yellow Post-it, somewhere on my rolltop desk with its gas bills and Discover-card solicitations and Blue Cross health insurance forms, that reads BRIAN HONG. Perhaps Brian Hong is the head of a small Asian nonprofit who several months ago earnestly if a bit keeningly e-mailed me, citing as a referral the name of a mutual friend, to ask if I would drive an hour down to San Pedro to give a free speech at a fundraising benefit for a flailing youth center for depressed gay minority teens at 10:00 A.M. three months from now on a cloudy Wednesday.

  On the one hand, as a longtime veteran of the nonprofit world, I can no longer afford to humor the endless requests to do everything for free, particularly because no one treats you worse than the penniless. On the other hand, though, for me to categorically say no seems like a kick in the teeth to all the kids in the world who are already down; the result of this discomfiting indecision being that I NEVER REPLIED TO BRIAN HONG AT ALL, and so now, like that forgotten spongy corpse, he has come after me in the middle of the night to gently (because that is Brian Hong’s passive-aggressive way) but persistently (because that is also Brian Hong’s passive-aggressive way) haunt me. Brian Hong! Brian Hong! Brian Hong!

  And of course, you can only expect it to get worse. I am a member of the “sandwich” generation, that group that must simultaneously care for elderly parents and support children. Never mind that I have lost the dreamlike fortyish haze I was in during nursing and babyhood and toddlerhood, when the peach fuzz of my daughters’ cheeks made for a heady narcotic, when my heart thrilled at all their colorful pieces of kinderart, when I honestly enjoyed—oh the novelty, for someone who had pursued abstract subjects in college and graduate school for ten years!—baking birthday cakes. Fiftyish now, when I squat over to pick up their little socks and snip quesadillas into little bowls and yank fine hair out of their brushes, as I have now for the thousandth time, I feel like I’m in a dream, but a very bad, very sour-scented dream. I am fast losing patience with the day job of motherhood. Worse yet, I’ll be in the full fires of menopause just when my girls are in the full fires of adolescence! (As my good friend, the family therapist Wendy Mogel, observes, in her calm Zen/Torah–like way, “What wonderful insight you’ll have into their mood swings.”)

  Meanwhile, my Shanghai-born father is ninety years old, has Parkinson’s, and is in a wheelchair . . . But that doesn’t mean, with his eerily Jack LaLanne–like resting pulse of thirty-eight, he isn’t frighteningly willful and able. Every day, my dad wheels himself down to the bus, shouting at his Malibu neighbors and at passing Mexican day laborers to help him; three hours later (via a trip that involves several bus transfers and all the shouting for help that comes with), he arrives at the UCLA campus, where he crashes chemistry and neurobiology lectures, wheeling himself to the front row, asking loud questions, disrupting the class, then going to the bathroom, getting stuck in the stall, and ordering PhD students to help him. The bewildered science departments have been calling us, as well as the UCLA campus police, asking us to remove him or at least assign him a caregiver. We have to reply that we do have a full-time caregiver, but my father is impatient to get out in the mornings, won’t wait, and indeed, just as often, enjoys the sport of evading capture. I myself have chauffeured my father around, but eventually found myself unwilling, when the men’s room was five feet away, to continue to (manually) help him urinate on the street.

  In light of my father’s situation, I have to question some of the clear-seeming lines Northrup draws. As she puts it:

  Learn the difference between care and overcare. True care of others, from a place of unconditional love, enhances our health . . . That’s one reason why volunteering and community service feel good and are associated with improved health. Overcare and burnout result from not including ourselves on the list of people who require care . . . The way to tell the difference between the two is to be aware of how caring for another makes you feel. You must also be 100 percent honest about what you’re getting out of excessive care giving.

  Pretty easy for you to say! The problem is, “overcare” is the only thing that ensures functioning lives for the many people who depend on the average woman. Sure, I could give it up—but the police and neighbors call every single day of the week, every single day. Who’s going to do the caring if I don’t overcare?

  How often do I feel, midlife, as though I am in a strange Island of Doctor Moreau–like science experiment? My preteen daughters are flashing more and more midriff as they cavort to the (PG or R? If I could only make out the LYRICS!) gangsta rap of Radio Disney. My ridiculously old father is a giant baby who wheels his own crib into traffic, pees into a Starbucks cup, and still wields, intact, his own power of attorney. As I grow ever more sullen about it all, I feel I should be living alone in a perimenopausal cave.

  So, who will supply all the caregiving when a whole sandwich generation of fiftyish women checks out? Maybe it will be men: related and hired men. I think of a phalanx of us standing recently in my father’s dining room in Malibu, trying to figure out a schedule for his care—or at the very least, for his capture. (From their homes in Northern California, my brother and sister provide all the financial and emotional support to all the caregivers, which is considerable.) In the room at that moment were my Chinese stepmother (seventy-four), myself (forty-nine), Filipino Nurse No. 1 (female, sixty), Filipino Nurse No. 2 (female, fifty-nine), and Filipino Nurse No. 3 (male, forty-one). Which of us were going to take care of my dad? Since all of the women in the room knew all too well the difference between care and overcare, essentially everyone has now quit except for the forty-one-year-old male, who alone has the strength to heft my dad’s wheelchair in traffic, needs the money to support his own family of six, and is paid accordingly (which is to say well, far better than many young college graduates I know). I think also, thank heaven, of my girls’ fifty-something father, he who holds up the other end of the fifty-fifty custody balance beam. He is unfailingly calm and patient, buys them fashionable new jeans and tennies, braids their hair, punches new holes in their pink belts, takes them camping, cooks them baked beans, and butters their corn on the cob. By a natural chronology that doesn’t imprison him in this Island of Doctor Moreau–like timeline—given that he would not have dreamed of wanting to do all this as a touring musician of twenty-five—my ex, I think, became a father at just the right stage, which is to say older. At his age, my girls have such a wonderfully nurturing father, he might as well be a mother.

  I finally went for some estrogen replacement to the woman who would turn out to be my fabulous new gynecologist, Valerie—who is not in my Anthem Blue Cross PPO plan, but whom my demon lover insisted I go to anyway because that was our lesbian neighbors’ recommendation.

  With kind blue eyes and a comfortingly patterned knit cardigan, exuding an air that
you might expect from a Scandinavian maiden aunt, Valerie gently interviewed me—while continually handing me tissues—as I sat on the archetypal metal table in my own paper gown, weeping for what seemed like an hour. And I must tell you—as a middle-aged woman who labors mightily every day to wear the mask of being sane, admitting to experiencing only the narrowest spectrum of emotions, from good-humored cheer to only the lightest irritation, a mood soothed easily with a good chuckle thanks to NPR—that it is beyond delicious to ramble aloud about the infinite varieties, colors, and shades of one’s depressions and to discuss, ad nauseam, a month’s worth of various panic attacks (going heavy to light, light to heavy). Valerie, listening quietly, wrote down the dates of my periods on a tablet, lending my ravings a reassuring scientific structure, then she gave me one of the most deeply comforting speeches I have ever heard (who from central casting would you get to do it? Streep? Mirren? Lansbury?).

  “Sandra,” she said, “I have this theory. Let me see if I can describe it for you. I think some girls are paper-plate girls, and some are Chinets. Paper plates collapse even if they have nothing on them; Chinets can take a lot heaped on them and never break. Yes, right now things feel very unstable, and you’re having an emotional response to what is a purely physiological phenomenon. But I think, at heart”—and here she leaned forward—“you’re a Chinet girl. What we’d like to do now is take some of the stressors off your plate, while at the same time temporarily strengthening its foundation.” And with that, she gently smeared the tiniest dot of clear estrogen gel on the inside of my wrist, and even though she said it would take a few weeks to take effect, I instantly felt high!