The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  When I call him at work—where I can hear conversation and laughter in the background (“The costumes just came—oh my God!”)—Mr. Y keeps saying that everything will be fine, this is not a crisis, all of it is manageable. What I should try to bring down is my stress level, and that I can do by breathing . . .

  Which is not a good dynamic between us. The more I come under stress, the more New Agey he goes, and the more his “advice” backfires. To wit:

  1. Advice: If I just let go of my negative catastrophic thought patterns, I will be able to get rid of my continuing insomnia and sleep easily through the night as he does. Result: I continue to lie awake every night with my mind racing as usual, but now I also berate myself for being a bad sleeper.

  2. Advice: If I say I’m feeling sad or stressed, he gently parries with the wisdom that we choose all our moods, the (supposedly) good news being that we actually have power over our own minds. Result: This of course simply makes me feel more anxious, because now instead of just being blue I am a person who makes self-destructive choices (“Oh great—and now I am going mad”) and who has lost all perception of reality (because I have no memory of actually “choosing” the bad mood).

  3. Advice: To bring myself more peace, I should begin meditation. He gives me CDs from Eckhart Tolle to listen to in my car. They were given to him by one of his partners on Jam City. The other day they were all talking about mindfulness and controlling one’s emotions, and they all agreed these were really important things.

  Sample Tolle passage: “Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego. You are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of inner resistance (which we could also call negativity) will create more outer resistance, and the universe will not be on your side; life will not be helpful.” Result: I want to punch him and Eckhart Tolle in the face. “Life will not be helpful”? “Nor will your male partner,” I should add.

  The horrible truth is that, aside from the nests, when Mr. Y is at his job and my kids are with Mr. X, I feel terribly lonely in my big clattering house. Sometimes all I can think of to get through the day is draw a number line from 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. and shakily shade my progress to the evening in half-hour intervals. (My own version of Fifty Shades of Grey.) When he comes home fifteen minutes later than usual (“I got caught in this conversation about the ticketing—”) I am outraged.

  Dinnertime has gone from dreadful to nightmarish. When the girls are in, I just feed them at 5:00 as I used to. Which in a way is a blessing.

  When the girls are away, Mr. Y and I try for increasingly rare “date nights” (oh my gosh—has it come to this now, date night?). I cook dinner now and set the table for us both, being that he is now not the Ethel to my Lucy but rather the Lucy to my Ethel. (I have also started to take in his dry cleaning for him because time is so short on his days off I do not want him to consume all his free time with errands.) Due to his schedule, we often eat at strange late hours, but it’s the best we can do.

  So here we are, shakily, putting one candle in a candlestick, can’t find the other.

  I make the mistake of asking: “How was your day?” He makes the mistake of nattering on about the play, and as I watch his mouth move, I feel an itchy trigger finger and think those awful words only a woman who needs a man neither to support her nor to be a father to her children can think: How long until I vote you off the island?

  So while I and the house are being neglected, where has his customary WASP love and service gone? Into the hapless cast of Jam City. I can hear Mr. Y delivering his special personal care on the phone (which he picks up at all hours of the day or night): “Absolutely. I am completely available. Call me anytime.” I notice him putting an old floor lamp from our garage into his car. What the—? He explains that one of the out-of-town dancers, SpookyZ, needs a lamp for her temporary apartment, and he knew we weren’t using it anyway. I see him printing out twenty résumés for the ten-year-old son of one of the actors, which is not technically his job but he offered to help out as a favor.

  AT THIS moment in life, when the stories are never elegant, everything tends to go wrong at once. There is now a sad turn involving Alice, my father’s little Chinese wife. It seems that her penchant for chattering Chinese at one no matter how many times one reminded her one was American was not, as we’d thought, due to her natural girlish sweetness or simply a symptom of her English skills plateauing after fifteen years.

  Oddly, Alice is starting to . . . disappear. Increasingly, she is being found wandering at 2:00 A.M. on freeways in places like Torrance (fifty miles away), and is being brought home in the dead of night by police officers.

  Meanwhile, forensic analysis reveals that Alice has withdrawn thirteen thousand dollars, gone to a bank in Chinatown, and purchased a useless universal life-insurance policy, an event she cannot recall. Clearly Alice is getting confused. But the situation is more acute than that. Alice is now even starting to disturb the tenants—the tenants! She is waving butcher knives at them, hurling their things into the street, setting fires in the backyard (Malibu is brushfire country). She is also starting to hit my father, leaving him bruised and bleeding.

  I learn this last bit via the Malibu police, whom my father called because Alice was hitting him—not to have her arrested but, as my dad says, just to “scare” her. To evade capture, Alice ran away with a duffel bag stuffed with their passports, marriage certificate, immigration papers, and two small, tightly packed envelopes, one with exactly thirteen crisp one-dollar bills inside it and another with a Keystone Kops–type mélange of Chinese money, Turkish money, and . . . as I said ruefully, upon discovery, to my sister: “I didn’t know Bill Nye the Science Guy had his own currency.” When I gave Alice the bag (returned by the police), she accused me of stealing two thousand dollars from it.

  In short, a doctor’s visit confirms that Alice’s once-quaint-seeming disconnects are actually symptoms of deepening dementia, the crows that are now coming to roost. Which is to say that instead of being my dad’s twenty-years-younger insurance policy, it is now a relatively young seventy-two-year-old Alice who requires full-time care, at six thousand dollars a month, and she could live—what?—another twenty years? At that rate she will go through all his money, and then Kaitlin and I will have to begin to pay.

  We’ve just seen this happen with Patty, a longtime family friend of ours. Patty had just gone through a devastating experience with her mother, Sabine, who lived until ninety-eight—ninety-eight! By the end of Sabine’s life, the last ten years of which she had spent in various states of dementia, the family was totally destroyed. Even though they had secured long-term-care insurance early on, due to various (Medicare? Medicaid? Medi-Cal?) complications (involving shoring up? spending down? who could follow it?), the care of Patty’s mother ended up costing the family the staggering amount of almost six hundred thousand dollars. Patty cut her work to half-time to oversee the constantly shifting emergency modes of her mother’s care, while gradually annexing more and more of her and her husband’s savings to pay for it. This in turn financially impacted her children’s choices of college, setting off a range of tortuous family dynamics.

  Over this time it seems Patty herself has aged thirty years. Though her mother had a relatively benign disease (I visited Sabine once in her convalescent home and, albeit probably medicated, she seemed waxy and distant but calm), by contrast Patty has had a viral one. Before one’s eyes, you could watch forty-something Patty herself changing into an old person. Under the shadow of her mother’s decline, she descended into the frowse of the full-time caregiver, she whose tireless efforts no one else understands. The hair frizzed and grayed; her resting expression changed: the eyebrows went helpless; the mouth sagged; the shoulders rounded and dropped. Patty even began dressing like a senior, in bulky cardigans (due to the cold hospitals) and flat almost nurselike shoes (due to long walks to the parking structures, she said, carrying multiple bags of supplies—the medicines, hot-water bottles, medical ti
ghts).

  Clearly Patty—the eldest daughter—felt guilty about her mother, perhaps overly so, and she lost perspective around weighing the needs of her still-growing family against the needs of her ever-declining mother.

  But Kaitlin will not make that same mistake, because Kaitlin is a brilliant manager. So she jumps into full gear to manage the Alice project. Her efforts are heroic. She is eventually able not just to switch over Alice’s health insurance (for years, my father hadn’t purchased her any, preferring to play the odds on her relatively young age), but to find the only assisted-living facility in California that has Mandarin-speaking caregivers. Kaitlin is able to do that after an enormous amount of research, augmented by the fact that she is both a development director and former scientist, speaks Mandarin herself, and has the laser focus of the Terminator. The facility is a relative bargain at four thousand dollars a month, given that Alice requires a private room, due to her penchants for ceaseless pacing until 4:00 A.M., putting on the clothing of her roommates, and, well, going to the bathroom in the middle of the floor and then bagging up and hiding . . . what has come out. While Alice has traveled, I have performed backup when I can, pouring a heavily medicated Alice from her wheelchair into my Volvo, or helping lift her wheelchair in a winch onto a—all hands waiting, with goggles and safety gloves and orange jumpsuits—Southwest flight. But it is never enough; my sister is doing one hundred times more than I am, and I continually fail her. Except for terse Alice emergencies, the phone lines between us lapse into icy silence. And you remember there is also my dad. As opposed to a mentally addled wife/caregiver, Dad now gets his own health professional—a forty-two-year-old Filipino male nurse named Thomas—and as a result he is suddenly receiving the best care of his life. Understand that my Dumpster-diving father is a man who can survive on things like past-its-due-date sushi and the leftovers of other people’s Starbucks coffee. He has ingested bacteria for so many decades he may actually have morphed into another life-form (with a resting pulse rate of 34, I remind you). But now—hydrated, fed, washed, and laundered—weirdly, my father is roaring back with a formidable energy. Which is to say we now have a sometimes-wheelchair-bound but nonetheless always extremely active now eighty-nine-year-old who greatly enjoys getting bathed and diapered and fed ice cream and crashing UCLA science lectures and—oh, by the way . . . every day he calls me now—are you ready for this? He wants sex. He proudly needs only one-sixteenth of a Viagra pill for sex. There is some automatic Googling to find, to one’s slow-blossoming horror, in-home services that use the phrase “healing hands”!

  And this is merely to try to protect those around him—he has started to proposition female nurses at his doctor’s office, trying to grab their breasts, begging them to touch him. Which he can’t do himself, as he can barely clasp his hand around a spoon.

  As Ann notes, in an e-mail exchange we have about it: “That’s disturbing not in a having-sex-with-Donald-Trump way but in the sense of carrying a corpse up a flight of stairs.”

  I am half tempted to hit my dad on the head with a frying pan just to calm him down, but then even I will go to jail.

  It is, of a piece, heart wrenching and frustrating and terrifying and irritating and awful and thankless and hopeless and expensive—did I say expensive?

  BUT IT’S the bowl of fruit, finally, that does me in.

  One afternoon, I am running errands for my kids and my dad and my dad’s caregiver, Thomas. (As he is the only caregiver who will stay with my father, Kaitlin and I now basically work for him. I have just completed a bout of fixing up a beater car for him and checking it and smogging it and getting it handicapped plates.) I stop in at Crate and Barrel, quite frankly, to smell some Lavender, Rose Hip, and Ylang-Ylang pillar candles. There, I’ve said it. I don’t buy those pillar candles, I just pick them up, close my eyes, and smell them, in order to ingest a little—oh, what do you call it?—happiness.

  But on the way to the wicker-basket-flanked aromatherapy section, I come upon a sight that does me in. It is a soft-lighted display of perfect tangelos in a kiln-fired celadon-hued bowl. Of all the fantasy settings of Crate and Barrel that I always laugh off (really? I’m going to sit at a desk under a silver-framed photo of Hemingway and type on this antique typewriter?), it is this sight that stops me.

  I am actually stopped.

  Who are the women who maintain houses whose every room contains a bowl of beautiful seasonal fruit, fruit that is magically not rotten? It is unthinkable that, in my own house, there might be a ceramic bowl that is not full of old keys and dead AA batteries and rusty nails.

  A glowing celadon bowl of perfect tangelos.

  It cuts me to my heart.

  Biting my lip to hold back the tears, I send Mr. Y an admittedly cryptic text: “PERFECT BOWL OF FRUIT SO NOT MY LIFE. VERY UNHAPPY ABOUT JAM CITY AND HAVOC IT IS WREAKING.”

  His reply is that he is sorry I am feeling badly but will be home late. We can talk about it on Monday (five days from now).

  He is so not hearing me.

  Couples Therapy Round 117

  MR. Y DOES AGREE to find a hole in his busy schedule into which he can fit some couples therapy. I haven’t been to couples therapy in years. It gives one pause when you realize you have lived long enough to have had couples therapy over several decades with multiple partners.

  I admit that I have mixed feelings about therapy. In my experience couples therapy is typically a nice way for one person to say, “My crazy partner needs therapy.” But of course the crazy partners need to be driven to therapy, otherwise they won’t go because they don’t think they’re crazy, and then anyway on the upside you, the normal person, get the added midlife pleasure of watching a therapist in slow motion read your surprised crazy partner the riot act about what an unbelievable jerk he is.

  That’s the dream, anyway. Sadly, though, I have found that no matter how provably wrong one’s partner is, therapists play this game where they don’t take sides. Instead of simply ordering your partner to stop doing what he’s doing, the therapist will just turn to one and ask: “How does that make you feel?”

  Still, one tries, if one can, always to improve one’s relationship. So here I am again, as if in a dream, sitting in another little waiting room under another row of Tibetan masks, with the little light switch flipped up. We are seeing a Beverly Hills couple’s therapist with the enigmatic name of Dr. Stacey, at the suggestion, of course, of my friend Ann.

  I survey my own internal landscape. The illustrative tale I used to tell about husband number one—if you’ll recall—was this. After being away for a month on the road, Mr. X would step onto the porch, put his bags down, look up above him, and say, “The roof needs retiling.” Because he didn’t first say, “And how are you?” I like to claim that there was an emotional connection, after twenty years of cohabitation, that had gone missing.

  By contrast, Mr. Y and I have plenty of emotional connection, but we also seem, more and more, to fight like dogs. His show has been extended, which is glorious but not necessarily lucrative, not yet, it has a ways to go, and he has pledged to pick up his share of the housework if not more, but it’s not happening. So all our tension and strife starts to boil down into domestic affairs of the most mundane nature, which have come to represent our mutual incompatible personality differences writ large.

  Dr. Stacey, a tall brunette with round glasses, a long sad face, and a knee-length maroon cardigan, regretfully flicks the light switch down and somberly greets us.

  “So, Sandra,” she says, smoothing her skirt as she sits. “I’m interested to hear you describe your situation.”

  “Well,” I say. “In a nutshell I feel that Mr. Y has thrown our life out of balance by coproducing this show without really thinking it through—and our home life is really suffering.”

  “And how do you think he feels?” she asks gently.

  I know the answer to that too!

  Smartly I retort, “I would say Mr. Y, in turn, feels that he would like t
o pursue things he is interested in and I am too stressed out and too micromanaging of his time. What is the contract, though? I would ask. What is the contract?”

  “What contract?” Mr. Y erupts. “We are partners—and we support each other in whatever we want to do in life! That’s what people who love each other do! It’s simple! We don’t need a contract!”

  “Oh but we do,” I say, in a sudden deeper tone of voice.

  “What do you mean?” asks Dr. Stacey quietly.

  “Well, in the old days,” I say, “I did the art, Mr. Y managed the art, and then when we got together, well . . .” I turn to him. “You seemed more domestic than I did, you were a better cook and into all the kitchen stuff, I paid the bills, we were in a kind of flow.”

  Mr. Y’s mouth is in a line, and he is shaking his head.

  “What do you mean, you did the art?” asks Dr. Stacey. “I need a little background.”

  “To be entirely candid”—I forge forward, not knowing what else to do—“during our ten-year partnership when Mr. Y was producing my one-woman shows, I was indeed, well, I’m sorry, that’s what you call it—the talent. That means when you have to go onstage in one hour and perform for one hundred or six hundred people who have paid forty dollars a ticket and you have a sore throat, someone will rush out to the corner and get you two or three flavors of cough drops. It is kind of amazing. I recall the first time I saw a professionally laid-out dressing room, when I first hit the repertory theater circuit (and hence, in my modest profession, the big leagues). In the corner, your freshly dry-cleaned costume will be hung up waiting for you, wireless microphone coiled and ready, shoes polished. In front of a mirror a fresh white towel will be laid out with Alka-Selzers, Ricolas, bottled water, tea makings, a basket of crackers, a bowl of fruit, or whatever else you have requested. Everyone’s job is to get what you requested.”