The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  Suddenly I am recalling the time I myself ran for seventh-grade treasurer—a post literally no one else wanted but that as a geek I was thrilled to campaign for. My campaign featured hand-drawn posters, the design cribbed from a corporate health campaign at Hughes Research, where my father worked. I lovingly traced the image with a gizmo called a pantograph. I remember how in Mr. Vincent’s fifth-period government, Jodi Schneekling (can’t you just tell by the name? Schneekling?)—she of the Farrah Fawcett flip, Kork-Ease sandals, Chemin de Fer jeans with laces crossed in front, like the secret Masonic sign of some evil tween dungeon mistress—turned toward me. “Let’s see that poster,” Jodi said. Flattered at her interest (she was popular!), I flopped it open to her. It was drawn in ten different colored pens, with the catchy tagline: “It’s harder to get a rhino to rumba than to have a great year without electing Sandra Loh for 7th grade class treasurer!”

  Jodi looked at it, slitted her eyes, leaned toward me across our desks, and whispered: “Sandra? I wouldn’t vote for you if you were the last person on earth.”

  Peculiar historical note: Elected boys’ vice president of our whole school that year was a popular surfer named Sean Penn—oh yes, the very same. Sean Penn was widely regarded as affable and easygoing. That’s right. Compared with me, Sean Penn? Affable.

  So all right, yes, these are the sorts of things a normal person would laugh off three decades later. But what I experience instead, as I hotflash in the night, is the explosion of my emotions for my daughter and for my eleven-year-old self into a single, palpable, slowly burning-upward spine flame. The future and the past are one and the same as I burn with rage and hormones. Fertility’s heightened levels of estrogen supposedly calm the parts of the brain that experience hurt and agitation when slights are perceived. Supposedly that’s because it is not evolutionarily useful for mothers to harbor grudges over past injustices when they should be expending energy nurturing others and preparing them for the future. But, of course, neither my daughter nor I are processing those chemicals. Our insults (past and present) are raw, and without that protective estrogen coating—fasten your seat belts!

  “Stop chewing your fingernails,” Mr. Y murmurs, slapping my hand away from my mouth as I lie awake at 3:23 A.M. “Just because your eleven-year-old has one bad experience, you don’t have to negatively anticipate what’s going to happen to her over the next seven years.”

  “True enough—of course not,” I say. “That would be ridiculous, overcatastrophizing.” (Note canny use of multisyllabic therapy word.) “Except, except, except . . .” I stare into the blackness.

  “Why is there never a consequence?” I push on. “Oh no, in the decades beyond, the George12s of the future will reappear at some twentieth high-school reunion as a bland realtor or similar, having no memory of the incident, only dispensing matchbooks with the name of their realty company that everyone is connected to via linkedin.com! As we all turn increasingly gray.”

  I hear a snore.

  Why I train like an Olympian with Stef and subsequently can’t sleep, while Mr. Y laconically trades hair tips with Fabrizio and sleeps as if he has just done the Pyrenees leg of the Tour de France, I don’t know.

  With Mr. Y unconscious, I continue to worry. Alone in the night, I can’t help but wonder: Am I passing down some legacy that should have stopped with me to my child? Am I infecting my child with my own uncoolness? Look at George’s statement: “Said by someone who’s FACEBOOK FRIENDS WITH HER MOMMY!!!!” My daughter is clearly too damn open, and trusting, and unashamedly close to me—she has no protective middle-school shell.

  In being too good a friend to my daughter, have I helped her self-esteem rise a bit too nosebleedingly high? Look at those exotically ragtag outfits she invents, and runs around in! My daughter has no lack of loving, nurturing adults in her life, who enable her to go to museums and the theater and Cirque du Soleil and encourage to her write fantasy stories. Not only do I approve of said fantasy stories, I also help her arrange them in antique fonts. What kind of training is this for the real world? This smothering attachment parenting is evidently piss-poor preparation for sixth grade and for the George12s of the world. But then I realize something else.

  “Facebook friends with your mommy”?

  George12, you have made a fatal mistake. Cue Darth Vader music.

  Because if Mommy is on Facebook, she can read in real time what everyone is typing—including you, George12. And while the word “mommy” suggest a nice lady in a housedress with a tray of nummy-nummy muffins, this mommy is deep into perimenopause, and she doesn’t have any estrogen left (the hormone that makes mommies “nice”). My womb is so empty one need only brush aside the cobwebs to make room for the tool kit of medieval hurt I’m going to bring down.

  Let’s just say I have known George12 ever since he wept and peed in his pants his first day in kindergarten. This mommy’s fanny pack contains iPhone photos of George12 at the Cheesecake Factory from back when all the kids were still real friends, when I bought George12 not just a deluxe pizza and red-velvet cheesecake but, if memory recalls, a second Cherry Coke. This mommy knows quite a few of George12’s secrets, like—something that would surprise his famously conservative, Armenian, limo-driving dad—his penchant for musical theater.

  I am actually hyperventilating with anger. It is as if I’ve taken five hits of testosterone and nine of crack. I’ve never done crack, but I assume this is what it feels like. Need I remind you that during the change, testosterone does not wane? In some women it actually rises.

  Which is not to say that this mommy’s anger-management issues are new. Oh no: These were in full swing even when Hannah was in her crunchy-granola preschool, where a philosophy of “nonviolent conflict resolution” backfired and spawned a literal axis of four-year-old evil. One day the play yard bully—Andy Johnson—pulled this “Mommy” down and started punching her in the face. When the other crunchy-granola parents weren’t looking (they were hand-grinding organic hummus) I picked the kid up, pinned his arms back, and whispered, very, very quietly: “Andy? You punch me again and I’ll kick you in the stomach so hard you’ll wish you’d never lived.”

  In short the question is not Am I going down to the schoolyard to take this twelve-year-old out, it’s Which ball gown shall I wear?

  Content with my savyy plan of action, sometime before 5:00 A.M. I fall asleep.

  • • •

  AT 2:52 P.M. the next day I am sitting on a bench in front of George12’s sixth-period classroom. I am wearing jeans, boots, and aviator glasses, and I have put on goth-dark lipstick. For a divorced forty-nine-year-old mother, our impending confrontation qualifies as a “date.” I have caved before so many bullies before in my life that it is urgent that today I call this asshole out. Hannah’s honor—and mine—depends on it.

  As I wait, I get a text from Clare: “Sandra? If your preteen basically seems okay and you are the one lying awake at 3:16 angsting, is it about the kid or is it about you? Do you think you are perhaps—oh, what’s the phrase?—perimenopausally overreacting?”

  I close the text box.

  I watch three middle-school boys lounging in front of the bathroom. They sport shaved heads, bad skin, and patchy facial hair. What an ungainly age! The youths are talking and laughing and punching each other, like the overhopped young bucks they are. Outside of Facebook, I think, George12 certainly has his own middle-school work laid out for him, down this echoing Escher-like row of lockers. Cue Sondheim, “Send in the Clowns.”

  I explain that I am sitting outside George’s classroom, waiting for him to come out of sixth-grade English so I can throw him down on the ground and punch him in the face, hard.

  Hannah flies into a panic: “Please, please, please, Mom, don’t do that! I will be so embarrassed!”

  “He won’t get away with this,” I declare coldly.

  Her tone goes not colder but hotter, tipping into a kind of intense tween hysteria.

  “Mom, if you do anything like that
? I swear I am going to unfriend you!”

  Heh?

  So I put my gun down.

  I simply rat George out to the assistant principal—and how fortuitous the timing! It’s Bullying Awareness Month in the LAUSD—and call it a day.

  MY SISTER, Kaitlin, visits and dispenses her usual wisdom. In Pema Chödrön mode, she is just giving great, great sister. The nuggets of comfort and wisdom conversation she’s giving are just so, so good. It’s like buttah. Or artisanally hand-carving a melon in an ingenious way you never thought possible. Look at how brilliantly Kaitlin turns this.

  Of Hannah’s suffering at the hands of bullying middle-schoolers, Kaitlin says:

  1.“What a wonderful opportunity to begin to help your daughter acquire the tools she will need all her life.”

  2.“Congratulations—how developmentally appropriate—middle school is where the crucial character building for adulthood starts to happen.”

  And finally—perhaps a bit over the top, but it still lands nicely and salves my wounds:

  3.“Children pick their parents—there is a reason you are her mother. I am so pleased my niece has such involved and loving care.”

  Soothed by her warmth and kindness, I continue to warble:

  “Middle school is pretty rough for me right now, given my lack of emotional insulation. The other day Hannah was weeping, her face turned to the wall. It was because her former besties, Chloe and Michelle, have moved their seats in English class. The three of them used to sit together, but now Chloe and Michelle have moved to the back. And then to the left. And then to the back again. For twenty minutes Hannah drew it for me, the elaborate ever-changing seating chart. I could feel the pain of each move all too well. It was like the shifting and squeezing of my own internal organs. It’s not that I care too little, it’s that I care too much! I have such outsize emotional reactions these days, I don’t know how I’m going to make it to seventh grade!”

  “Oh there, there,” she says.

  “Sometimes I think dads are better than moms at dealing with this. A dad friend told me recently how his seventh-grade son was approached by a kid after school who handed him a folded-up note. It said: ‘The entire 7th grade class has voted and 90% of the class thinks you are weird.’ To which his unfazed dad jokingly said, ‘What? Just 90 percent thought you were weird? You didn’t get 100? Work harder!’ His son laughed!”

  “Oh, funny,” Kaitlin says.

  I ask her in bewilderment, “Did we ever tell Mama when we were bullied?”

  “Oh God no!” she exclaims. “I mean”—she thinks about it—“it’s just . . . You never told your mother things like that. You never wanted to burden her.”

  “That’s right,” I agree. “I was bullied all the time at Malibu Park Junior High.”

  “Oh sure,” she agrees matter-of-factly. “I remember these two guys who told me for three straight years, every day on the bus, that because my skin was brown I looked dirty.”

  “Sure,” I say. “But telling Mama—that would be like confessing to something really shameful. I was afraid I would depress her further by admitting that I wasn’t really popular at school. I tried to assure her that I was popular, but of course I wasn’t. By contrast Hannah tells me everything about middle school, even stuff I don’t want to know. I take too much to heart stuff she doesn’t even remember the next day.”

  My sister nods thoughtfully.

  “I think Hannah is basically okay and that you can relax a little around this transitional time. You know? Let her have those experimental conversations!”

  “Those what?” I ask.

  “Whoops,” Kaitlin says, furrowing her brow. “Maybe this is one of those secrets she said absolutely not to tell you?” She shakes her head. “Meh—I can’t keep track. Anyway, apparently Hannah says at school she is experimenting with different ways of having a conversation. Like sometimes, when her friends are talking about boys, which Hannah is not interested in, she will suddenly interrupt and say loudly, ‘I’m really bored with this!’ and will flounce away. Hannah says she is also experimenting with this really loud British-accented voice, based on the nanny of those kids in that show.”

  “What show?”

  “I don’t know—I try to block a lot of this out.”

  “She sounds sometimes maybe a little histrionic,” I admit.

  “I wonder where she gets that?” says Kaitlin.

  I AM depositing some laundry on that horn of laundry plenty known as Hannah’s bed. I notice that hidden behind her headboard she has penciled the word “SADNESS,” augmented by a row of about a dozen tears. That’s the final straw. I snap.

  I go and get her immediately. She is cheerfully cutting out Internet cat photos and using a lot of Scotch tape from the dispenser that is supposed to live on my “desk” (the dining room table). On top of her open science book is a striped legging and the wrapper from an ice-cream sandwich.

  “Hannah,” I inform her in no uncertain terms. “I know you are a preteen and you are going through a tough transitional time, emotionally.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says guardedly.

  “It’s like this,” I say in exasperation. “So am I. Listen, everybody has a different kind of mother! I’ve done a lot of reading about this. There is the difficult mother, the reactive mother, and the envious mother. I of course had a depressed mother. And right now you have a mother who is going through that thing right now, perimenopause, which means you have a medieval-times mother. Everything for me right now is medieval times. George12 brings dishonor upon you, I ride my horse to George12’s castle and disembowel him with a giant spiked metal ball on a chain, singing lusty Gaelic chantey tunes the whole time and I twirl his spraying intestines above my head. Like with my middle-aged Volvo, I don’t have a temperature or emotional thermostat that actually works.

  “This means that if you are going to noodle around and do teen-goth things like penciling ‘SADNESS’ on your wall with a row of arty tears, you’d better be prepared to be yanked out immediately of that ridiculous performing-arts middle school you are in where half the class is named Savannah or Chloe and to be transferred immediately instead to Van Nuys Middle School where everyone is either a six-foot-tall Latino or Armenian or Egyptian boy with tats and where I will put you in seventh-grade Running. You’ll be on the running team! Either that or I am going to lock you up until you turn forty, and I am not joking around. I mean it. Capisce?”

  “I love my school!” she cries out in alarm. “No! And I’m actually not that sad! I was just experimenting with drawing eyes!”

  “Well, missy,” I say. “Then you’d better pull it together.You are simply going to have to manage your emotions like a school extra-credit project. If you want a teen-goth wall, fine, put it up, but really go big with it. Don’t do something sad like pencil it on a hidden place on your wall because that alarms me. And also please take down that ridiculous mood meter on your Facebook page because there is only room for exactly one moody person here, and that is your mother. Who is the biggest middle-schooler of all? Your mother! So toughen up, TTYL and BRB!”

  So in the end we two infertile and possibly “unfeminine” females shake hands, step over our piles of laundry, and go downstairs to make popcorn, which we douse with Tabasco and chili powder while discussing the fascinating architecture of the dishes piled in the sink, which neither of us chooses to wash at that moment. We may not have solved all of middle school’s problems, but there’s a temporary truce over the battlefield, and in an hour there will be a new episode of Family Guy. We will continue to take an elaborate break from the chores of discussing our feelings. Which in a way is a kind of female liberation.

  Bench Warrant for My Father’s Arrest

  THANK GOODNESS, GIVEN THE wreck I’ve made of my midlife, I have someone solid to depend on, regarding the futures of my daughters. Thank God there is Grandpa, standing by with his wisdom, support, concern, and, last but not least—money.

  Oh but wait a minute—no!
>
  Which is to say, a call now comes from Grandpa. It is not, as one might hope, an announcement that he is transferring new funds into his granddaughters’ college accounts. Rather, he asks, could I rush out to Malibu to help him? There appears to be a bench warrant for his arrest.

  LET US pause for a moment of explanation.

  My eighty-eight-year-old, thrice-divorced, retired Chinese engineer father is the local Malibu eccentric. He has the unkillable disposition and leathery constitution of a lizard. (His resting pulse rate is something like 34.) His cheapness is legendary: It goes beyond frugality into actual sport. He doesn’t just hitchhike, he Dumpster-dives (it may be expired grocery sushi, but it’s free!). When my mom was still around, when she was running in her lipstick and heels and my dad was disappearing daily into his aerospace job, our family had to hold it together—sort of. Sure there were beakers of green tea bubbling like in a mad scientist’s lab on the stove and stacks of his company washroom’s stolen paper towels in our bathrooms. Sure my parents fought (always about money), but my mother maintained at least a physical order. The fridge was full, the beds were made, and overall our 1964 Southern California tract house was gleaming. However, now my mother is gone, my elderly dad still lives at home, and sad to say, the house has never been updated or even really cleaned. In a sort of Miss Havisham–style, the family house still has the same sparkling cottage-cheese ceilings, 1964 sunburst linoleum, grease-spattered—and that’s several decades of grease—O’Keefe and Merritt stove, and cracked glass shower stalls, since repaired with duct tape. It’s the sort of a home where you might find a broken toilet currently being used as a planter. I say “might” as I have not dared to enter a bathroom there since the (first) George Bush administration.