I couldn’t do anything right. I was devastated, humiliated, and grieving. In the darkness, alone in my squalid apartment, I’d shake my fist into the radio silence of Mr. Y, who was across town, safe in his marital bed, tangled in his wife’s 500-thread-count percale sheets.
I knew that my misery was utterly deserved. Lying alone, stricken in this darkened cabin, as I’d abandoned my husband and Mr. Y his wife, now I in turn was abandoned. What idiots we’d been, Mr. Y and I. We had torpedoed our families and children for a love that hadn’t stuck.
I BEGAN drinking with a divorced girlfriend named Elise. White wine does not go down well when you’re angry—probably red wine or whiskey are better—but chardonnay is what one drank at this ridiculous Westside bistro Elise loved, and I was desperate for company. Men were not Elise’s favorite species, so she was drawn to my story like a moth to flame. “I can’t believe he would do that to you!” she wailed operatically, clutching my hands in hers. “How could he hurt you like this? What an asshole. Oh Sandra, I’m so sorry.”
And while I appreciated the support, I didn’t entirely agree. The image she had of me as the jilted middle-aged woman—the victim—was not helpful or entirely accurate. I knew that Mr. Y’s decision to move home to his family had been hard. I knew that his wife was a gracious and elegant person, and I knew that Mr. Y’s betrayal had been awful for her. I had been irresponsible and narcissistic, destroying his family as well as my own.
“Well, look, Elise,” I said. “It’s not like my husband left me for a younger woman. I chose to have a damn affair with my best friend of ten years, and he moved home to save his family. It’s kind of noble. Kind of beautiful. It’s actually what a decent man would do. And I can still have a life. I mean, look at The Bridges of Madison County! Two middle-aged people have an affair; Meryl Streep’s character makes the honorable decision to preserve her family, and Clint Eastwood’s character says, nobly, “Fine, I respect that.” He continues to travel the world and have adventures and do cool photography for National Geographic and is a romantic cowboy figure. Why shouldn’t I be like Clint Eastwood?” I exclaimed, waving an oily bruschetta.
Never mind that Mr. Y and I had had no such noble conversation, and to my knowledge Clint Eastwood never called Meryl Streep in the middle of the night and screamed: “Why have you done this to me???” Which is one of the reasons I had started duct-taping my phone shut at night and locking it into my trunk.
Being out on my own (also, giving up drinking, and perhaps moving to an ashram in India) probably would have been a good idea, but, of course, that’s not the way it went.
In fact Mr. Y didn’t end up at home for very long. In the end the betrayal had been too enormous. After a few months of the marriage’s mutually painful continuation, it was his wife who decided they were done. The moral truth is that adulterers deserve being punished—of course we do—but the deeper reality is that middle-aged people like Mr. Y and me are statistically lucky to find anyone who actually really enjoys spending time with us. Which is to say within a year Mr. Y’s marriage was finally really over, and he and I were living together again. This time it stuck, and I consider us both to be unfairly blessed.
SINCE OUR reunion Mr. Y and I have begun in bits and pieces to set up a new home together. We’ve developed a new normal. After the divorce, Mr. X and I established a flexible fifty-fifty custody schedule that worked pretty well (it fluidly accommodated our work, in a similar way as our married, separate-track, co-parenting had). Due to a savagely depressed real estate market and the fact that Mr. X and I both worked a lot during our marriage and were conservative savers, I was able to take my half of the money and buy a three-story Victorian house in Pasadena. While my girls complained about going back and forth between two homes that are twenty miles apart, they also admitted to enjoying our new home’s antique pull-down attic and the fact that they had their own bedrooms.
At first Hannah and Sally were understandably wary of Mr. Y, whom they’d known for years as my business partner. But after many fits and starts, my girls eventually got wise to the fact that Mr. Y genuinely likes children, is interested in their tales, never misses a birthday, is generous with ice cream and chocolate, and is one of the few people they can depend on who will always cheerfully buy tons of the crap they’re selling for school. While she won’t outwardly acknowledge it, this is a huge deal for Sally, who loves school contests the way I once loved refinancing.
Mr. Y’s family is not happy that we’re together, but they are no longer “in emergency.” Time has passed. His ex-wife has a new boyfriend. I write a recommendation for his son to get into an MFA program in Northern California.
Mr. Y and I now have a surprisingly quotidian life. In between writing and teaching and speeches and travel we enjoy such harmless midlife pleasures as flea-market browsing, making salads with carefully toasted pine nuts, and fighting over the only pair of reading glasses in the house. We host dinner parties where our theater friends drink wine and discuss their fascinating projects over the croonings of Chet Baker. Such parties would have been hell for teetotaler Mr. X, who had long ago lost patience for certain kinds of euphoric monologues brayed loudly into the night. But not us. There’s always time to talk. What with all of the standing around in the kitchen and gossiping and waving wineglasses, except in the morning, when we are waving coffee mugs, you could well call our home Club Blab. So it appears, in fact, that the giant tear in the cosmic curtain has been finally, mostly, sewed up: that is, until my menopausal freeway hamster meltdown.
Menopause, Old
WHEN I START PONDERING the grand new adventure I’m on called menopause, I get to thinking about my mother. Was this part of what was going on with her? I was eleven when my mother was the age I am today, and that was when things started to go, well, weird. The cause of her change in character was, of course, I now realize, menopause.
But it’s also important to note that my mother lived a very different life from the one I do.
Consider, as a twenty-first-century working-mom artifact, my poor twelve-year-old 140,000-mile Volvo. Every morning to my fake surprise I spill an entire travel mug of coffee (with milk) over the gearshift; there are crushed plastic water bottles on the floor amid nests of children’s socks (at this point I can’t say for sure whose children’s; one time I found a boy’s tiny Spider-Man underpants in my car—this was weird, as I have only daughters); for an embarrassingly long period of time my car had ants. This is an automotive affliction I’ve never heard of: I believe it is akin to saying your car has mosquitoes, mice, its own climate zone, or a small problem with gators. The ants were finally traced to a two-and-a-half-year-old banana that my horrified daughters and I discovered in the trunk. We knew the exact age of the banana because it was in a beach bag that had been packed for a specific Fourth of July trip along with a then-new copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. “The Corrections! There it is!” I exclaimed. So many of the Volvo’s dashboard lights are on, each trying to alert me to one malfunction or another, that turning the ignition key is akin to plugging in that big Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Yet despite its grievances the car continues—reluctantly—to run (indicating, possibly, that my Volvo is also in menopause). I’ve been known to drive this ecosystem while wearing a fanny pack and, I regret to say, Crocs.
THE STATE of my Volvo—not to mention Crocs—would have been unthinkable in my mother’s world. Hers was the orange-sherbet dreamscape that was Southern California in the 1960s, a stylish Mad Women (instead of Mad Men) era when just going out to the grocery store in one’s shiny Buick with tail fins required lipstick and heels. My mother was a five-foot-eleven Valkyrie who wore an apron in the kitchen, a white pleated skirt on the tennis court, and a shiny Pucci-like dress and heavy amber jewelry to visit the butcher (one had those then). The butcher was short and bespectacled but surprisingly tomcat-like as he patrolled his counter, across which they would flirt lightly over roasts and briskets. Oh, the harmless amusements of
housewives who didn’t make their own money (and hence could not leave the husbands to whom they were unhappily married, as was the case)! The only other personal treat my mother seemed to allow herself was relaxing alone at the far edge of the yard in the falling darkness of the evening, sucking with ferocious meditation on a single Camel cigarette.
It isn’t just the Volvo. Motherhood itself is also different than it was fifty years ago. Consider that today not only is no smoking or drinking allowed during pregnancy, there is no red meat, no sushi, and even—according to the husband of a friend of mine—“No smoked fish due to possible secondhand smoke!” My sisters and I were allowed to eat only kale, while stretching headphones playing Mozart over our bellies. At one point I went to pregnancy yoga classes, where I was instructed to go on all fours and waggle my butt in the air to “turn the baby” (positioned for back labor).
I’m a little envious of my mom’s Mad Women era, where expectant mothers smoked, drank, and even did amphetamines prescribed to them by their chain-smoking doctors so they wouldn’t gain more than twelve pounds in nine months. During labor, the mothers were knocked out so the doctors could pull the babies out with forceps. The dads were sequestered in the waiting room (no amateur videotaping for them), or, even better, they were out and about in colorful madras pants, golfing. On returning home, the babies were cheerfully fed formula by baby nurses. “Oh yeah, we all had baby nurses,” my elderly neighbor, Mildred, told me breezily the other day, while waving a Tom Collins in a highball glass. The hiring of baby nurses—no one thought twice about it. It was a regular middle-class occurrence. Recently I read, too, that in imperial China, aristocratic women had not just baby nurses but wet nurses. This came standard!
The world is better here and now, of course, in many ways, than it was in imperial China, or in the delightfully wicked prefeminist landscape that was the 1960s Americans suburbs. But why, I submit to you, can’t we have baby nurses—or wet nurses! Today, women mother while pursuing full-time careers, and pumping our own breast milk in the office. Why, I ask you, can’t at least the top 5 percent of executive women—women “leaning in” to high government positions or running Vogue, for instance—hire a wet nurse? Why can’t it be socially acceptable for these working warriors to chuckle richly when asked how it is that they manage to have it all, responding, “How do I ‘have it all’? With my great husband, great housekeeper, great cook, and of course Sierrah. She’s getting a BA in art at Sarah Lawrence, minoring in political philosophy, and to earn her way through college she’s my wet nurse!”
Just as their fashions, car upkeep, and mothering habits were different from ours, so the Mad Women’s approach to menopause differed as well. My mother’s generation never talked about menopause. We children of menopausal women witnessed only a sudden cataclysmic shift. For ten years, Mom has been standing cheerfully in her yellow apron in the kitchen, drying the dishes. Suddenly, overnight, she is hurling them.
Everyone has stories about how their prefeminist moms or grandmothers or aunts suddenly transformed during the change. (Said one still-changing grandma to me recently: “If anyone tells you menopause is easy? Just punch them in the mouth.”) Everyone seems to remember the exact moment it happened, and everyone remembers what the ladies threw: Certain contemporaries of mine have separately reported witnessing their menopausal mothers throwing a telephone at the wall, volume M of the Encyclopædia Britannica at the cat, and beef Wellington through plate glass.
When I look at this list, one thing strikes me: How deeply cathartic it must have been to hurl an object that actually had heft! And we’re talking that certain midcentury heft. Remember those old black dial phones, with the cord? That’s something you could really kachunk. (Who throws an iPhone? It’s just too expensive and actually too light. Where is the payoff? Who throws an iPad? Also frightfully expensive, and it’s all backed up in the Cloud anyway. Who throws a Kindle? Why on earth would you throw a Kindle? Please.)
Further, regarding beef Wellington, think through for a moment how you’d actually have to prepare it first, which I think involves something en croute in a madeira sauce, not to mention the usual trip with high heels and full makeup to the butcher. How much more satisfying it would have been to hurl through plate glass the meat-and-potatoes-on-platter-style dinners of yore—your whole turkey, your whole spiral-cut ham, your brisket. Who throws a Lean Cuisine? Where is the grandness? I can’t throw Make Your Own Pizza at my kids—I would be throwing these . . . sticky strands of . . . ropy dough.
In my family I would trace the change to my mother’s forty-ninth birthday. I remember how proudly Kaitlin and I had banded together to give her a birthday present. Clearly, colorful clothes and scarves and jewelry she already had plenty enough of—good Lord, if you looked in her closet (which I did frequently), my mom had at least ten purses that matched her fifty dresses and seventy belts and God knows how many shoes. What we came up with instead was a rectangular glass Pyrex baking dish because we knew how much she loved to bake, and the old metal one was rusty.
Imagine our shock when, for no apparent reason, she screamed and hurled the Pyrex dish against the wall. Then, as with many subsequent episodes, she disappeared into her bedroom like a tide washing out—curtains drawn, door locked. How infuriating it must be when—miserable, wildly hormonally imbalanced—one receives a gift from the children one is tired of endlessly caring and baking for that testifies only to one’s further caring and baking for them!
Look: I just want to reiterate that I consider my mom to have done an outstanding job as a mother and wife. She clothed us, fed us, bathed us, made our beds (oh yes), did the laundry, cleaned the house, drove us to all those middle-class suburban lessons, provided a loving ear and shoulder to cry on, and kept all the dental appointments. In the trunk of her gleaming Buick, to keep our strength up, instead of ants, she often had carefully foil-wrapped home-baked cheesecakes, both plain (my favorite) and blueberry (Kaitlin’s). She did all this mothering uncomplainingly, in a context of zero career fulfillment (her copious letters suggest she might have enjoyed being a writer) and a marriage only barely made possible not just by her evening Camel cigarette but by the fact that she and my dad slept at opposite ends of the house, an arrangement I grew up thinking was normal. Like the Queen of England or Jackie O, my mom was a class act all the way. In no way do I begrudge her the odd Pyrex toss. All that said, I could never toss a glass Pyrex—or anything else—at, or even in response to, my daughters. I couldn’t explode like that at my children because I am way too worried about damaging their feelings of security (which fuel their self-esteem and creativity). Oh no: In this modern era of no parental boundaries, my girls and I are best friends and we talk and talk and talk. Much of it is in the car as sometimes with their commute and schedules we spend as many as three hours a day on the road. (Statistics suggest that today’s full-time working mothers spend more hours with their children per week than did 1950s stay-at-homes. I wonder if much of this time is spent in the car, shepherding them to and from activities.) My children can sense how I am feeling by a mere squaring or slump of the shoulders (which they can detect from the backseat while we’re flying down the freeway). If I’m tense they’ll start massaging my shoulders, and later they may even make me elaborate get-well cards out of colored paper. Never mind that it is colored paper I have actually bought for a work project. No worries, they are completely confident that they will be appreciated for their creativity and sensitivity. There is no shock, there is no awe, there are no boundaries—there is only warm NPR-filler acoustic guitar.
Parenting has changed since the 1960s, and that means that menopause has changed. Today, we so-called helicopter parents worry endlessly about our children’s feelings and budding psychological and intellectual development. We do not throw their gifts at the wall, even when said gifts are thoughtless testaments to a lifetime of my baking for them. I don’t bake for them.
The bad news that follows is: We are not allowed to have gothic moods
in menopause, any more than we were allowed to have cigarettes and martinis during pregnancy. I will have to manage my menopause without simply hurling things. I will have to discover some more humane, modern, and enlightened methods. The good news, of course, is that, unlike my mother, I can actually talk about the changes age has wreaked upon my body. I can talk to my partner and my caring, outspoken children. I can talk to other women. I can, in fact, write an entire book. What can go wrong?
Menopause, New
I DECIDE TO BEGIN MY journey of exploration by seeing Menopause: The Musical! at Mildred’s recommendation. This musical will, I learn, soon have enjoyed a longer run even than Cats. Mr. Y gallantly offers to accompany me, as is his wont with any theatrical event, but I say: “I don’t know, honey. The contrast between our Burning Man romance two years ago and us now attending a Wednesday matinee on menopause seems just a bit sad. I will see you after.” So I go by myself.
THE CROWD is, unfortunately, not one I feel particularly at home in. When I arrive thirty minutes before showtime, giant Lincolns and Oldsmobiles are already fishtailing into the jammed parking lot. From behind each car you can see wrinkled bird arms gripping the steering wheel on both sides of a giant head of Barbara Bush hair. Menopause’s production values seem Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride–cheap, the plot negligible (it’s about four women bra shopping at Bloomingdale’s—I think), the “script” nothing more than parodies of pop hits from the fifties and sixties, rewritten in the vernacular of shvitzing and bloating (instead of the Supremes’ “My Guy,” think “My Thighs!”). As if possessed by demonic spirits behind my control, of course, I laugh until I cry. I cry as hard or harder than I did that day I pulled off the freeway on my way to Trader Joe’s.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 3