The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  “Anyhoo, when she was invited to sit down for the interview she declined, saying, ‘It’s just that last night I had so much sex my pussy is sore!’ It so very much cheers me when a sister lowers the bar. Thank you, Devorah. Okay, K. Your turn. What have you been reading?”

  “Oh my gosh, in my book group we’ve been reading the best book—Oops, I Married My Mother!”

  “Oh boy!”

  “Sure! Well, it’s not really the best book, it’s a little on the nose, and she seems to have borrowed all her concepts from other writers. But it was handy to have all these ideas in one slim manual. Okay, so she posits this not-terribly-new theory that whatever wounds we suffered in childhood, via the dynamics of our parents, we carry forward into our adult relationships. Sometimes what we do in fact is marry our mothers, as I did with my ex-husband, Gerald.”

  “Sure,” I say glumly. “That’s nothing new.”

  “With Gerald, I was always patrolling the perimeter, trying to make sure everything was okay in just the same way I used to hover nervously over Mama. Then he got depressed and let everything go to seed, and I probably enabled him as I just kept caretaking him and caretaking him until I realized I no longer wanted to be married to a depressed, fat, unemployed alcoholic. But now of course with my second husband, Steven, I have a totally different relationship. If anything, he’s sometimes a bit too independent. So now I get to be the whiny one.

  “But you know what, Mouseling,” she says turning to me and calling me by my childhood name. “You talk a lot about being lonely when Mr. Y is gone. Lonely. This is even though you guys generally spend more time together than humanly possible—you used to go together to the gym, for crying out loud! And you were never ‘lonely’ with Mr. X. Aside from that one time early on with Mr. X, when he was in Spain for two weeks and you couldn’t take it and were crying on the phone and then he sent you that plane ticket—”

  “He did?” What’s curious is I don’t even remember the incident. It’s hard to remember crying on the phone with Mr. X, but now I vaguely recall that that must have been true.

  “Uh-huh. Oh yeah. And when you were a little girl and we had twin beds, you used to flop out your leg to cross the bridge so your leg would actually be in my bed. Also at night we used to sometimes pile into Mama’s bed, and she would get so crowded and fed up she’d go back into one of our empty beds.”

  “Well, that part I remember,” I say.

  “The thing is, I know you. And you are not by nature a lonely person. You are by nature interested and focused and busy doing ten things at a time that you enjoy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mr. Y has put up with a ton from you, for so many years you don’t even see it. The man loves you so much—he destroyed his life for you. But just like I’m always patrolling the perimeter to make sure everyone around me is happy, which is my pathology, it’s like you’re also patrolling the perimeter, always alert, on watch, to make sure that love is not going away. It’s like you’re asking him to prove it over and over again: Don’t take that job. Come home on time. Don’t be late. Call me back quickly. And he always does, pretty much, but it’s never enough.”

  “It does feel like that,” I admit.

  “But maybe you’re going to have to let that go. Look. You lost your mother quite young to Alzheimer’s disease, and that’s sad. That’s really sad. Starting from nineteen you didn’t really have a mother, and she had been everything to you. But you can sit with those feelings and let them move through you. It’s okay. You don’t have a mother and that is sad. The author of Oops says we don’t sit enough with our grief and let our bodies process it. It’s grief we’ve sometimes been holding on to for decades. And that’s okay until the age of fifty. After fifty our bodies can’t hold it anymore without inflicting self-damage. So our health will begin to suffer with the burden of carrying all this stuff around.

  “Apparently when you actually let yourself feel an emotion—rather than pushing it off because you think it will swallow you—well—when you actually let yourself feel it, and sit with it, it goes away. Maybe it’s okay to want to be loved, and just the fact that your mom died does not make you unlovable. Maybe it will all end up okay. Maybe you can have a joyful life. Maybe you can become the man you always wanted to marry.”

  Kaitlin makes me write a letter, and here it is:

  Dear Mr. Y,

  Here is my letter of apology. You have been a good and loyal person who has gone beyond the call of duty for too many years. I never realized how much you generously gave, I took it for granted, and I humbly thank you for all the help you have contributed that has helped me prosper, both creatively and financially and as a person.

  I am sorry in the course of our relationship I have behaved so monstrously, which has helped to destroy this magical feeling we once had. At its best, my time with you was truly the most fun I’ve ever had.

  I think I have some unresolved issues that have to do with missing my mom and feeling untethered with my dad and honestly really wanting be taken care of, occasionally, by someone.

  Perhaps that’s the wrong role to try to plug a man into at this point in my life. Our relationship began with you in a kind of caretaker role, and I naively misread everything. Nobody’s fault but mine.

  I wish you well in all your future endeavors and sincerely hope you find happiness.

  The greatest thing I can hope to achieve is, if in five years’ time, I can say truthfully that I am your friend. If not your huckleberry friend, then just a good friend.

  Love,

  Me

  The Great Retreat

  REGRETTABLY, MY SOJOURN AT Sunswept is over.

  I am back in my house. I am back with my girls. I brought them home last night, fed them dinner, put them to bed, and now it is morning. Sunday morning. I am back among the clutter and the wreckage. Oh God.

  And here it is.

  After walking and drinking and Zumba-ing and hydrating and getting together with girlfriends and shopping and fighting and divorcing and kissing and going to therapy and praying and playing Solitaire and sometimes allowing it to overflow but most of the time staving it off by running out ahead of it, driving out ahead of it if necessary, in the freeway’s diamond lane, and then getting a new water bottle and buying new running shoes to dance as fast as one can to keep it from coming down . . .

  It comes down.

  This is no longer a mere purse of anxiety that sits on the chest, it’s like my open coffin already ten feet down, as the dirt slowly, like sand in an hourglass, begins to pile in on me. The sunlight hurts. My body hurts. The visuals of the bedroom hurt, the burnt-tangerine walls, the piles of clothing, the dusty books. Just blinking my eyes hurts.

  It’s 8:17 on a Sunday morning, the day is already too long, and tomorrow will be another day, and another, and another. All upcoming projects represent huge downward-plunging daggers of anxiety; every household task undone (ants, dishes, recycling) is an accusation; the upswell of the heart of love is gone, love has washed out, love is never to return, what is left are chores.

  My heart hurts. I am hyperventilating. The four corners of the bed are tipping. There is more and more noise pounding in my ears. I can’t outrun it. It is overtaking me. I have blown up my life.

  All I can do is lie still.

  I can hear the children puttering in their bedrooms. It’s Sunday. Sunday morning. I should make breakfast for them and inquire after them, how they slept, and send them down to the piano and make sure they are doing their homework, so they don’t just languish in their jumbled rooms all day. There is also laundry to be done and sorted, either by me or I need to reconceive it into some elaborate game. Should I take them to the Huntington, to the Huntington Gardens, to walk and talk and look at plants? The sun hurts. The sun hurts my eyes. I can’t move. When I move, the room appears to tip.

  The more I listen to Hannah and Sally putter—the toilet flushes, one calls out to the other, the TV switches on—the more deathly afraid I
become. I am afraid to be alone with Hannah and Sally because I fear they will immediately read from my dull eyes what I can no longer hide—that I don’t love them, never will again. That’s the horrible secret at the core of this, the devil’s sibilant whisper. At one time the sweet smell of baby Hannah’s head was my whole world; now I have lost that dreamlike forty-ish 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 kinder art, 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. Almost fifty 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 as if I’m in a dream, but a very bad, very sour-scented dream. I have totally, finally, lost the will to continue this day job of motherhood.

  There is a knock at the door. Hannah pokes her head in. She is in striped leggings and 3-D glasses, with her hair in a high, comedy ponytail, hovering with the Kindle. It’s the matter of a two-dollar Kindle purchase. My eleven-year-old has slept in her bra. Her clothes are in a volcano on her dresser. She watercolors on her walls. The window won’t close, so there are spiderwebs. If you look into her room, you would say she has no mother or no mother takes care of her.

  I have nothing to offer her. All I say is: “Honey, come lie down next to me.”

  She obeys, and I wrap my arms around her and bury my head in her neck. This is all I can do. I feel her weight. Then I start to cry.

  “Uh-huh,” she murmurs, stroking my hair. “I understand, Mommy.”

  What’s curious is that I detect very little anxiety coming off her. In fact there is a sort of calm. Not just a calm, a sense of quiet theatrical importance around our moment together. Having been invited back into her mother’s bed, where she dwelled on and off until the age of six, Hannah has a renewed sense of real estate. There is something deft about her hair stroking. It is not unlike the motion of brushing the hair of a Barbie or a stuffed unicorn. Poor baby. So confident. So clueless. What story can I tell her? “Honey,” I say, “when I was a kid, my mommy had moods and she would literally disappear for three days, lying in bed, curtains drawn. And nooobody could get in. Nobody. Mommies had those kinds of moods back then. Very big stuff. Like when she—”

  “Threw the glass Pyrex dish on her birthday,” Hannah recites immediately.

  I’m surprised. “I told you that?”

  Hannah rolls her eyes. “About fourteen times! And about the butcher and her tennis skirts and the big amber jewelry . . .” Hannah rattles off my mother’s story, and I am amazed at the fact that we’re so close, we talk so much, and the boundaries are so invisible my daughter seems to know all my thoughts and memories, even the ones I forgot I told her.

  But I know there are some things I haven’t told her. After my mother hurled the Pyrex dish against the wall and disappeared into her bedroom like that tide washing out—door locked, curtains drawn, the thick silence—well, that was only the first time. What we didn’t know then was that the highs would start waning, and what would eventually be the new normal was a fearsome long-term depression. The culmination was early Alzheimer’s at fifty-nine and her death at sixty-nine. The last four years of her decline were so painful I didn’t visit her in that horrible convalescent home, not once.

  That’s one gothic horror tale I don’t have the heart to tell my daughter in this moment . . . but here is another. All these decades later, it is perhaps even more to the point.

  Which is to say, my general experience with my mom was that even when that bedroom door closed and the silence fell, my mom was gettable, always eventually gettable. This was because I, her youngest, had learned a trick. I had learned how to break the spell.

  Let us say we had all been planning to go to a fun neighbor’s barbecue, of the sort my gregarious mother loved, but suddenly, an hour beforehand, my mother had shut down and taken to her bed. All you needed to do was take a deep breath, wedge yourself in, and sit—almost nonchalantly—on the edge of her bed, declaring, “Well, Mommy, if you are not going to the neighbor’s barbecue, I’m not going either.”

  “What?” she’d say wanly.

  Drop the head: “I’m too shy to go by myself.”

  And indeed, after a certain amount of pathetic-speak, the foam would form in the distance, the gurgling would begin, and the great tsunami of my mother would rise. She would get up and go to her closet and start coordinating an outfit, saying, “Let’s show them. Let’s show them, you and I. Who do they think they are? We’re doing it—I insist—we are going to that barbecue!”

  But once I became a teen, the age Hannah is entering now, these gambits started working less and less. I remember one day after school, sitting down on the edge of my mother’s dark bed and prattling on about some award I won that day or how a hated rival of mine bombed a test. The report was always about how I aced something and how my enemies fell. We thought this was the kind of story she liked. (As she said to my sister one day, excitedly, about a billboard she had seen: “When you put the ‘oomph’ behind ‘try’ you get ‘tri-oomph’!”)

  Anyway, so there I sat wittily prattling on in a way I still do—I like to tease people with a bit of gossip, give them a little amuse-bouche of random detail, and then serve the main meal of it, the red meat encircled with garnish. I sat there wittily prattling—adding funny descriptions of wacky hair and what was said and what went wrong—and then I looked up, saw her dead eyes, and heard her say, “Mouseling? I’m sorry. I just don’t care. I have things of my own to worry about.”

  The throwing of the Pyrex was nothing.

  It was in that moment that something died.

  When did she lose her will for all of it?

  I remember my mother driving around in Brazil where, due to a university job of my father’s, we lived for two years. I remember how she drove around aimlessly in the afternoons because she literally did not want to go back home to the dark, narrow student dorms (with monklike single beds in a row) where my cheapskate-to-the-death dad insisted we live. My father stamped out her spirit, again and again. There was no escape for her. She had no workplace, or mortgage of her own, or a Mr. Y. She did not even have Judith’s house on Sunswept to visit. She had only the car, and the empty rainy streets. I feel so badly for her. I feel her sadness so deeply. I miss my mother so terribly, like a hole in my heart. . . .

  And I feel rage that he is still alive! Why! Why? Why?

  Why does the grotesque live, dragging us down? Why does he live on like a wizened diapered baby while my mother has been dead already for so many years? Why did I need to face adulthood without a mother?

  I remember when my kitten got run over. My mother was devastated. She put it in a green garbage bag and cried and cried. She said she couldn’t stop picturing that little cat. Just as I couldn’t stop picturing poor Hammy the Hamster. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling.

  “We know you’re not feeling well, Mom,” Hannah says, turning elegantly, balletically, to pick something up from the nightstand. “So I made you a card.” She opens it for me. It reads:

  Dear Mommy,

  Get Well Soon.

  You work so hard,

  You need a break,

  You have more stress,

  Than we could take,

  So just shut your eyes,

  Lie down, relax,

  Throw around money,

  Who gives a shit about tax?

  I UNDERSTAND AND FOREVER

  LOVE You!

  Hannah!!!

  “Is this from . . . the three-hole-punch-paper packet? In the cabinet?” I ask. “That I bought for that project I’m working on?”

  Hannah pauses, guarded, like a deer at a water hole.

  “Oh never mind, honey,” I say, taking her hand. “Thank you.”

  Then I turn over and cry.


  The next gambit is breakfast. The girls decide they will bring me breakfast. Not hungry at all, I obediently hobble downstairs like an invalid and sit on the porch on the outdoor chaise, like a muffin, under my comforter. I know there is a bit of self-interest here: My girls wait for any opportunity to invade the kitchen and start a huge messy project—cookies, lemonade, cupcakes, Depressed Mother Special Breakfast. The ants, however—just as Mr. Y predicted—are gone. The teeny-tiny armies of darkness have gone home.

  Sally comes out as a waiter (sweatshirt around waist) and presents my feast. First comes her special scrambled eggs with cinnamon, pumpkin-pie spice, basil, and what appears to be a little bit of orange. It is not delicious. Here comes another moment of despair. Ever since I let the girls and their cousins perform “Sliced” (a kid version of the cooking show Chopped) in my kitchen, where some of our “found” ingredients included canned pineapple and stale mini-marshmallows and expired Ricola cough drops (which actually got grated into a burrito), very strange cooking things have begun to occur. It is yet another example of how I have let the horses run out of the barn on this whole parenting thing.

  And yet I think of Judith’s coffee rule. You must transcend your actual candid response to the food, and just appreciate the gift of being brought it. I pretend to enjoy some and Sally beams.

  I GO lie in Sally’s large bed in her room, which, due to a cable logistical snafu, in fact holds our house’s only TV. SpongeBob SquarePants is on, but not too loud, so it is passable. Sally is crocheting. Hannah is Kindle-ing. I am trying to look at an article I am working on, but can’t for the life of me focus. Eventually I just put it aside and stare up at the sunlight on the ceiling. I invade my daughters’ space by insisting on grabbing an arm of one and circling my ankle around that of another and this feels good. My heart-pounding lessens somewhat.