I remember when they were toddlers and we would lie together in the king bed back in the old house in the afternoon in the sun. Or at night, when sometimes I would sleep across the bottom of the bed, which is the absolute best place on the bed, it is like a totally new mattress because no one goes there, and I would feel complete, like a great universal zero with two Xs on me keeping me securely moored and on earth.
I start to sense, amid the gray, flecks and darts of warm color flitting through the air above me. I am trying to grasp at what they are and trying to articulate them. I realize, as the light lightens somewhat, that I have memories of some real pleasures. I am confessing things to my girls, in half-bitten-off sentences that don’t even make any sense.
“Oh honeys, I know this sounds weird, but I remember how I used to actually kind of enjoy breast-feeding you—”
“Eeew,” they both say.
“Oh kids, come on.”
What I mean—but don’t say—was that there was a time when an inestimably rich atomic soup of hormones was swimming, when I was young, when love was grand and large and easy, and I had a small earth-smelling creature and my only job was to keep feeding it. You could lie in a sunny bed in an afternoon, hook the small fluffy head into your body, have a beer even, and not give a worry about work or laundry or e-mail or for that matter, even dinner. There is this time during babydom that the mother herself can lie about like a baby, like a beached whale, having birthed her bloody spawn, and the mother can just hover in those sparkling dust motes of afternoon sun and be cradled and lifted and suspended in the golden light.
“Oh don’t worry—it was just kind of a hormonal thing,” is what I finally say.
“Nonetheless there will be no breast-feeding today,” says Hannah firmly, and this strikes us all as funny. I snuggle back into her side, hard.
We spend the rest of the day in bed watching television. In the early afternoon something magical happens. Our favorite demon show comes on. “Oh God! Mustard Pancakes!” they scream. “Mom! There it is! A totem from our wretched childhood!” Indeed it is: It is a now-amusing nostalgic memory from their grotesque toddler years of being pulled across Target parking lots and peeing on car seats and hurling Skee-balls at Chuck E. Cheeses. It is from a time when, while single-parenting, I let my daughters watch as much television as hospital patients in full-body casts. “This really is a very bad show,” I agree. “It’s like dirty sock puppets.” We also eat and make buckets of popcorn—butter, salt, no apologies. It’s amazing how deeply relaxing bad habits can be.
“If my mom had only had a television in her bedroom!” I half joke.
IN THE morning at six fifteen I am resigned to my day but not actually incapacitated. I am regretfully pouring my coffee into its ridiculously cute mug and smearing PB and J on a bagel. Which is to say it is Monday morning at six fifteen, and for some godforsaken and unbelievable reason I feel . . . okay. Let’s say the word slowly, as if to preschoolers: O-o-o-k-a-y! I don’t feel great, but I am functional. I wait for it to come down, but it does not come down.
I am startled by Hannah appearing suddenly behind me. This is unusual—usually she waits upstairs for me to bring breakfast. Hannah puts her arms around me and kisses me on the nose. She makes some shy but insistent wuvvy-wuvvy-wuvvy sounds.
“Oh God,” I say. “Here you are kissing your mommy on her wuvvy-wuvvy nose. I feel absolutely pathetic.”
We laugh.
Driving to school, it appears we are going to be late, I am slaloming through traffic, and now Sally is starting to make high-pitched panic sounds because I haven’t filled out her emergency form. I declare loudly that we will not have panic. We will not have panic. “We won’t have panic over the emergency form!” I yell, feeling a rise of panic.
“Sally, it will be fine,” Hannah says quickly and firmly to her sister, and in that moment I see a flash of something I’ve never seen before. It is the unguarded, careful, even slightly frightened face of the wary older daughter, keeping the other children in line, but maintaining a light, studiedly casual singsong as she does so. Because Mother is fragile, and I am her ward, even responsibility, Hannah is patrolling the perimeter.
When I was in my teens I was sleepwalking, with myself at the center of my world, and everyone else as minor characters—that’s how for granted I took my mother. And so I don’t remember exactly when my formerly charming, humorous, omnipotent mother, who would swim a mile out into the ocean to get your beach ball in choppy seas, did the great recede. But like a tide gradually but irrevocably washing out, she retreated, she receded, she drifted away, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Why?
I’m not a great reporter on this because, being the younger, I feel I don’t have firsthand information. There are unique memories my older sister, the firstborn, still holds—bedroom conversations they had, and harsh instructions that only she was privy to. I was the younger, but a lowly private marching in the losing desperado mission that was my family.
All I know is that my mother did recede. And as in so many cases, there is a child standing on a shore and watching her mother recede.
Fighting to stay in the game, I feel very conscious of my daughter’s heart vibrating in front of me, absolutely exposed and without defenses. She has an openness of heart, a purity of intention, and the absolute belief that at eleven years old she can change the dictates of fate. Her eleven-year-old heart is like a golden egg trembling in a spoon I hold in front of me.
I want to keep this egg safe. Keep it safe.
Dinner at Home
I HAVE TO SWING BY Judith’s in the afternoon to pick up a duffel bag of clothes I mistakenly (or perhaps not so mistakenly) left behind. My children are back at their dad’s. It is with a heavy heart that I turn home, just before dusk. I have not bought any groceries for dinner. The night looms ahead.
But when I pull back into the crunchy gravel of the driveway, the doors are open, lights are on, jazz is playing, and I can smell something wonderfully garlicky cooking.
I mount the steps to the back-porch door, put down my duffel bag. In crisp shirt and chef’s apron, Mr. Y comes immediately toward me, takes my face in his hands, and says, “How are you, honey? I missed you.”
He looks good and smells good and fits me as naturally as a glove, as I do him. As usual, I don’t even recall what we were fighting about, except it was all shadow puppets on the wall and, as always, to the death.
I sink into his chest and touch his hair. “I missed you too.”
Inside I see the house has been cleaned and put back together. There are fresh flowers everywhere, packed-up cardboard boxes where Mr. Y’s nests used to be, and fresh candlesticks waiting with new candles. It’s such wonderful middle-aged woman’s soft porn.
He pours me a glass of wine, and we have an elegant and delicious dinner that feels like coming back home again. We have sorely missed talking with each other, and missed the bonhomie and actual friendship we used to have before the Desert Storm days came down. We are able, once again, to talk vividly and yet noncombatively, catching each other up on a panoply of subjects, happenings, and gossip. We are actually even able to talk about Jam City, which just finally closed, which I had seen three times after all during its run. Oh yes I had, even though I am a narcissistic diva with no interest in anyone’s work, although I did have some notes—as usual, I always have notes—but he graciously acknowledged that they were good notes, and that in certain cases he had thought the same thing.
After dinner he insists he will clear the dishes. But first he goes upstairs and draws a bath for me, into which he shakes lavender. He puts on Bill Evans on Pandora, which he knows I love, and lights candles.
But no.
This was a dream.
But—yes!—it wasn’t a dream. It was real! Because in fact this is the sort of magic Mr. Y pulls off easily when he has it in mind to do it, which generally is fairly often. It’s a sort of beautiful and civilized domesticity that I miss
when he leaves.
But I have it today and am grateful.
“Thank you,” I keep saying. “Thank you. Thank you.”
As surprised as I am when he takes a job, I am always just as surprised when it ends. I always have this feeling that he is going to go there and sit in the darkened theater regardless, but in fact, no; when it’s over he stops going—he comes home and picks up his New York Times again. And things are as they were.
IT’S NOT enough, however.
When I wake up in the morning, even though we are in our usual tangle with our arms around each other and weight against each other under our warm blankets, the familiar gray light comes through the windows, and I feel the heaviness come down. It is still here.
“Oh no, not again!” I cry out in despair.
Mr. Y’s presence is not enough to cobble everything over. There is such darkness.
I start to sob. I’m happy he is here, I guess, but everyone is just too intense for me. It’s all just too much weight to drag forward.
“What do you need, honey?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”
That gray light: I hate that gray morning light.
Dr. Valerie
I FINALLY SURRENDER AND GO for estrogen replacement to Ann’s dream gynecologist, Dr. Valerie. Although Dr. Valerie is not in my Anthem Blue Cross PPO plan, Mr. Y insists I go to her anyway. In fact he drives me himself. After a series of tearful, incoherent conversations when I tell him I can’t possibly go because I’m afraid to be weighed, he simply puts me—still weeping—into the car, and takes me to the doctor. It’s another thing straight men do well.
A nurse opens the door of the waiting room and says, “Sandra?” I go in, get on the scale, it’s a horrible number. But then the nurse frowns at her clipboard and says, “Sarah? I’m sorry—no, I meant Sarah, not Sandra.” So I go back into the waiting room, cry a bit more, thinking at least I’m losing water weight. Five minutes later another nurse calls me. She puts me on that same scale again and I am not kidding, I am actually a pound and a half heavier.
I just cry harder. And clearly just by that very act am putting on more weight. Jesus. I cry and gain weight and don’t even have to eat anything. My tears are actually making fat.
But Dr. Valerie has been worth—well—a year’s wait.
With kind cornflower-blue eyes and a comfortingly patterned knit cardigan, exuding an air that you might expect from a Scandinavian maiden aunt, Dr. Valerie gently interviews me—while continually handing me tissues—as I sit on that archetypal metal table, finally, in my own paper gown, weeping for what seems like an hour. I describe all of it, the infinite varieties, colors, and shades of my depression, the gloomlets, the darkies, the panic attacks (going heavy to light, light to heavy, heavy to light), the whole horrible fucking mess.
Dr. Valerie, listening quietly, writes down the dates of my periods on a tablet, lending my ravings a reassuring scientific structure. And then she gives 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,” Dr. Valerie says, “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 leans 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 smears the tiniest dot of clear estrogen gel on the inside of my wrist. Even though she had said it would take a few weeks to take effect, I instantly feel better, almost even a little bit high. Although, to be quite frank, I also loved her handing me the tissues, patting me on the knee, and saying, “There, there.”
I’M NOT saying the rest of the year was perfect, good, or even happy by any means. But a little bit more of it shifted from somewhat darker to somewhat lighter, and that balance helped.
I also did start practicing some of Mr. Y’s New Age breathing, and started to force myself to say aloud phrases like “All will be well” and “I feel okay.” And sometimes I actually found that it tipped the balance forward and actually worked!
I didn’t end up using the estrogen gel for longer than three months, but I loved having it. I’m happy to have it in my bathroom drawer like insurance.
A more regular housecleaner also did wonders.
The Wisdom of Menopause
SO WHAT DID I learn in this year?
Arguably, I learned that perhaps if I had stopped protesting too much and gone to the doctor (rather than just a therapist) earlier, I could have—somewhat—ameliorated a few months of grief.
Arguably also, I could have gotten a bit more of a handle on what was going on if I had read a really fantastic book on menopause—one that wasn’t only about hormones or only about therapy, but something that combined both.
And never mind all my earlier quibbling about menopause literature, I did finally discover one totally helpful book, a classic that rises like a Mount Etna above the rest. The wonderful Dr. Valerie recommended it to me. The book subsequently became my own personal Dr. Valerie (a doctor to whom, oddly, I never felt I needed to return, although I think about her often, which in my mind only deepens her mystical quality).
The problem, of course, is that this magical book is 656 pages long, which can be extremely challenging for middle-aged women struggling to concentrate. So as a public service to the planet, let me try to convey its essence to you.
More than ten years old, The Wisdom of Menopause, by Christiane Northrup, MD, is the literal bible of middle-aged womanhood. After spending forty (seventy? one hundred?) hours with it, I’ve come to believe that The Wisdom of Menopause is an actual masterwork. Weighing more than two pounds, it is an astonishingly complete, mind-bogglingly detailed orrery of the achingly complex, wheels-and-dials-filled Ptolemaic universe that is womanhood. Featuring, archconventionally, its smiling doctor-author on a soothing pastel cover, the book is very much of the genre, and yet explodes it. About three times as big as any other menopause book, Wisdom is no less than the Jupiter in the menopause-book solar system, our Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest (eat nothing but zero-calorie noodles and gain seven pounds? Ho ho ho! Infinite Jest!).
ARE YOU grasping, yet, the scope of this thing? (I’m sorry—just treated myself to a bit of estrogen gel—am really excited.) Wisdom is a Homeric poem of modern womanhood. No stone from Western or Eastern (or Southern or Northern) medicine is left unturned, from folic acid to breast exams to personal dancing to selenium to feng shui to cosmetic surgery (Northrup allows it, while counseling discretion as a protection against judgmental friends). She both delivers biological analyses of an almost kidney-squeezing complexity and boils them down to news you can use. For instance: “I highly recommend a snack at around four in the afternoon, right during the time when blood sugar, mood, and serotonin tend to plummet.”
Doesn’t that hit home? Although the Hour of the Wolf is typically considered to be four o’clock in the morning, for many mothers of school-age children, how many of our inner wolves appear at afternoon carpool time (4:00 p.m.)? This partly explains why many of us want to eat at five and why by “family dinner” at seven we want to kill someone—our family.
But what I really love is how passages on blood sugar and serotonin alternate with woo-woo passages on Motherpeace Tarot cards, and the chakra work of the astrologer Barbara Hand Clow.
That’s right—I am not kidding. One of Dr. Northrup’s sources is literally an astrologer. I do not rule my life by astrology, but I was curious enough to go to Amazon.com to order some of Barbara Hand Clow’s seemingly oft-referenced work. Imagine my shock when I saw this—at least in my case—rather pointed title: Liquid Light of Sex: Kun
dalini Rising at Mid-Life Crisis. (As dubious as that title might sound, isn’t it much more interesting than The Happiness Project? Sing? Clean out your closets? Oh please!) In it, she describes the Eastern mystical notion of kundalini rising.
Look, even if one is not a believer in chakras, on this I think we can all agree: From forty-five on, one can have a host of body ailments—from headaches to backaches to heart palpitations to gastric problems to fibroids to insomnia, and one can have a host of professional and relationship challenges going on at the same time. The seven chakras simply posit connections, say between jaw tenseness and blocked communication, or between lower-back issues and blocked creativity. (Northrup believes there’s a connection between women who overworry and bladder issues—this actually describes 90 percent of the women I know. Neck and arm problems can be related to the heart chakra, which makes me think of my monstrous claw, an ailment I’ve never had before or since.) A typical Clow-type story is of a grieving empty nester having heart palpitations, for which she prescribes getting a puppy and lying down each day for an hour with that puppy on the sad person’s chest. Instead of medication, a rescue puppy—who can quarrel with this? For myself, I found this chakra stuff folksy and sensible and interesting reading—I’m just generally more interested in stories about people’s lives blowing up and how they put them back together than in a recipe book of a lot of low-fat menus involving flaxseed. Your results may vary.
I also enjoyed Clow’s archaic astrological language involving the violence and upheaval of Saturn returns and Uranus returns and Chiron returns in seven- and fourteen- and nineteen-year cycles. (In her view, around age twenty-nine is a major passage, as is around age fifty.) I’ve seen many women (and men, whom Clow’s book also refers to) go through real volatility in midlife, involving wild larger-than-life emotions and drives and imbalances that I think truly cannot be solved by date night, a beach vacation for two, or even more regular maid service. (Or you can do those things to keep up appearances but lead an entirely secret life on the side, and lie.) From forty on, I myself felt less like I was having some minor emotional issues and more like I was going through some kind of deep cosmic disturbance, something very old and molecular and primal.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 17