The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  “Where can you go from there? Only one place—and here’s the turn! You have to change the palette entirely at this point, and the way you do that is with Latin! ‘Oye Como Va’ by Tito Puente. Now change of scene, shift of scene, it’s a conga line through the house. Brazil and tequila will segue into another sweet sweet”—I do a Napoleon Dynamite hip flair—“dance hammock, ‘Low Rider.’ From there I may either go Stones and David Bowie or directly, depending on how gay the crowd, into West Side Story original Broadway cast version, ‘One handed catch’!”

  “Great!” he says, picking up the business section.

  But in point of fact, for my girls this morning I have created a special tween dance mix (“Time Warp,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and even—well, you pretty much have to do it whether you want to or not—“Footloose”). Because it’s my birthday and I can, I force my kids to audition my tween dance mix in my bedroom, and I realize that nine-year-old Sally does not try to conserve energy at all: She dances by jumping joyously into the air on every beat. Kids have not learned yet to contain their joy. They still have an endless supply.

  We jump together to the young Michael Jackson, still so sweet and birdlike, still so classic, still so pure, it is like trampolining, and I realize that—fuck the gym and the machines and the grim torture of training and all those steel water bottles and all those rubber straps and CNN televisions. If I just dance every day with my girls the way they like to dance, no holds barred, I will get into the greatest shape of my life.

  The whole day we clean up the house and cook food and I keep re-tweaking dance mixes, in my wonderful sunny home when the nests are (fairly) contained, armed with a core of people I dearly love. We move the furniture aside and these big wooden dance floors open and Hannah spontaneously breaks out into mad spinning and kicking and dancing. I do so love throwing a party. I am the sort of hostess who maniacally checks the RSVP list and tries to introduce compatible people to one another and to have snacks—not brilliant snacks, but enough snacks—and make sure there are plenty of festive beverages. Mr. Y grumbles that the guest list has become too large and he will have to move the cars and helm other burdensome logistics, but I know he is just being gruff for show because, like me, Mr. Y dearly loves a party, any party.

  Mr. Y takes us out to dinner at an old-fashioned chophouse. Wonderfully, with that light buoying cloud lining of estrogen (coupled with a late afternoon snack of turkey and avocado, I’m not going to lie), I now have the capacity to sit with these three people over dinner and to actually converse with them. In fact, I feel so effortlessly bubbly and euphoric, I lead the group in a joke-telling session, which is quite unheard of. I turn it on and I have the girls in stitches, knowing them as well as I do. We don’t just trade a blizzard of Tom Swifties like “The Yellow River, by I. P. Freely,” “Spots on a Wall, by Who Flung Poo,” and one I had never heard before, “African Lion Taming by Claude Mbuti,” I even mention something funny about Burning Man, carefully framed, “Once we visited a camp in the desert that featured just a bunch of comfy chairs to rest in. It was called—and you have to say this very carefully, ‘A Shack of Sit.’ ” The girls literally howl with laughter and declare that I am fun. I declare that they are fun.

  And then Mr. Y begins to get anxious texts from Clare (who is at our house setting up).

  He goes oddly silent.

  It’s then that I notice that the patter of rain on the roof has begun.

  And oh no! Suddenly I know what is happening. It is Los Angeles, after all. Due to the drizzle we are going to get attrition, and instead of 150 people there will be 8 and I will be sorely disappointed and will spend the entire evening outside of myself, as I am so easily disappointed by everything in life. Oh God. Why am I like this? I wonder. I love fun so much that even sometimes in the middle of having fun, I get sad calculating at what point the fun will end.

  Which is a long way of saying I am suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and horror and terror that I am walking into a birthday party trap where but a few hapless awkward souls will be and my children will see their mother destroyed. This was my very fear.

  I feel that, as usual, too-optimistic-WASP Mr. Y probably wildly overestimated the numbers, particularly given the lateness of the invitation.

  I feel like I’m going to an execution where once and for all it will be proved that life is never enough for me.

  The cortisol starts firing. My throat starts closing. I am having a panic attack.

  I have to excuse myself alone to get air in the parking lot, I am hyperventilating.

  Mr. Y, tie askew, finds me in the parking lot. Amazed, “Get yourself together,” he orders me gruffly, pulling me toward the car, where the girls are already waiting.

  In the confusion of Saturday-night traffic, we actually get home a tad late. It is quiet. There are very few cars out front. I start to whimper quietly and hate myself for doing so in front of my children in their fluffy party dresses.

  But as we pull in, yes! There are strings of colorful party lights and a huge crowd spilling out everywhere. People have hats and bottles of beer and tacos, and as if in a dream or in a movie, in slow motion they are coming up and hugging me and laughing and spilling beer on me.

  It is all these wonderful familiar faces—my sister, Kaitlin, my dad and his nurse, for God’s sake, Clare, Ann, Isabel, Elise, Carlos and Judith and Roland. There are Burning Mom friends and their spouses and their children, as hale and tanned as if we were all camping in front of the capitol yesterday, although (can it be?) all the children seem several feet taller, and—oh God—there is Lily and her entire family, including their wonderful dog in a desert pirate bandanna, there are friends from grad school and college and even, oh my God, junior high. These are all the wonderful, wacky, crazy friends who have helped me through this year as I have helped or will help them. It’s sort of like a This Is Your Life reunion.

  Even my ex-graduate-school boyfriend, Ned—the one who preceded Mr. X—is there. I haven’t seen him in seventeen years. Says he, candidly, as though he has been time-traveled in: “I literally have no idea how I got here.”

  I am immediately roasted—first of all for being late, due to my panic attack that no one was coming.

  Says my fellow-nerd girlfriend Karen from Malibu Park Junior High School, with whom I was in the debate club (and who now runs a major animation division): “Even in junior-high school Sandra was deeply uncool, but Sandra has made a career out of it! Till I die, I am proud to remain a friend of a fellow survivor of two words: ‘Jodi Schneekling’!”

  Says my brilliant writer friend Janet: “Instead of running from fear, she moves toward pleasure.” And it seems like such a graciously forgiving way of retelling my spotted life.

  Even the cast of friggin’ Jam City is there. They sing “Happy Birthday” a cappella, with a beat-box background, and they are actually so good I’m moved to tears. “I love those kids,” I murmur to Mr. Y. “And SpookyZ can have that damned lamp.”

  And now of course the dance party unrolls. It turns out the living room is too crowded and the speakers aren’t loud enough, so we put them up on side tables. We end up going not just through hour one and hour two but into hour three. After the Motown and disco and funk and Brazilian conga line with kids through the house, with Roland dancing bare-chested in white fur to Bowie, the dancing ends with myself and a couple of my deepest male-nerd friends (whom I have known since I was a nerdy teen in high school) braying the score of West Side story (“Maria! Maria!”) until 3:30 A.M. At that point Mr. Y excuses himself to go for cigarettes and by accident locks himself on the balcony and has to pee over the side of the house and climb across the roof and break in via a window. It’s a good big epic party.

  The next day, I am actually late to my interview of Chelsea Handler for MORE magazine at the Chateau Marmont. It is the first time in my life I am late to interview a celebrity (or anyone else, for that matter). I am so beyond hungover and addled I simply cannot untangle the headphones on my
tape recorder, so Chelsea Handler—a total professional—leans over and helps me untie them. Thus enabling me to think, on the second day of being fifty: Whew—thank God I’m with a person as sober and sensible as Chelsea Handler.

  And indeed, as Clare promised, I am left with a pile of gifts from my friends and acquaintances and, face it, a few confused strangers who possibly had no recollection of what their relation was to me but who just showed up to be polite. There are pillar candles, liquor, champagne, lavender soaps, tapenades, blood-orange olive oil, and many, many gift certificates for massages. There are even, God love it, a couple of large hand-painted Italian platters, something I really miss from my days of marriage, those things I left scattered on the sidewalk in front of my faraway old hippie house in the mist, dammit. There is even a gift certificate for a wind tunnel that suspends you in midair called iFLY. It looks fabulous, and I will get around to using it one day, as well as to writing the thank-you card to Winnie.

  It is indeed a kind of baby shower . . . for my new self.

  I will need to rent a U-Haul storage unit just to store it all.

  Old Lady Running

  I’M WALKING ALONG the Arroyo trail, something I do semiregularly now. I’m listening to the opening of Petrushka, “Shrovetide Fair,” which is so lush it’s like an extraordinary musical canvas deepening into color. The foliage smells good and the air is fresh and the world is full of light. Oh God, what a miracle, just to feel that, just to feel that.

  What a gift just to be able to look out into nature and have this sense of deep okayness. Nothing is haunting me. There are no winged clawed things at my back. I just feel the sun and am okay.

  Oh my God. I believe I am . . . fine.

  I have, as usual, agreed with my girls to let tonight be Make Your Own Pizza. And I laugh. Because I have now acquired the wisdom to transform Make Your Own Pizza into Make Your Own (Damned) Pizza!

  This switch was inspired by Christiane Northrup’s story about wanting to skip putting up a Christmas tree when her kids were older, while also realizing she could reinstate the tradition as soon as they were willing to help her put it up, decorate it, and dismantle it. This is the important difference between caring, which is healthy, and overcaring, which is exhausting and manic. So not only do my kids cheerfully decorate and dismantle the Christmas tree every year—although I do make a point of carrying it over the porch myself, as I would my own bride (as I continue to try to become the man I want to marry)—they cut up all their own little “pizza” vegetables now with Costco Henckel knives, and they put all their own crap away, or at least most of it.

  So we have converted Make Your Own Pizza into an enjoyable ritual that features me furtively yet joyously swiping generous amounts of shredded mozzarella, as is my right as queen of the kingdom, a new middle-aged pleasure I’m celebrating being that of stealing generous bites of my children’s typically much-more-yummy food (macaroni and cheese, barbecue potato chips, Miracle Whip). Then we will stack my insanely colorful plates in the dishwasher and turn it on with a roar and will be done. The girls will get into their beds, lights will go off, I will do some abridged, updated version of a Beatrix Potter bedtime story—an abbreviation of their too-long childhood bedtime stories—and then I will snarl at them that it’s enough already. I will go into the bath with a glass of wine and the good book I am reading. Mr. Y will try to coerce me into watching a Netflix movie with him on his tablet. I may agree. I may stay up too late and wake up cranky, but Thursday I have completely off. And all will be well.

  It is a marvel to behold. It is a miracle. By changing my thinking patterns, I have somehow become able to excrete a hormone that douses anxiety instead of fuels it.

  And I’ve come to appreciate my tribal time alone. In spurts I am able to leave my village—Kaitlin and Ann and Isabel et al.—and spend time in my cave.

  I am able to enjoy being alone, because I will see all those people again, soon, and everyone is fine.

  Spontaneously—and this is unbelievable, I know—I break into a run. It’s really a jog, but I call it a run. My exuberance takes me halfway up the next hill, at which point I realize the grade is really getting a lot steeper.

  Uh-oh. It’s suddenly an effort.

  My legs ache. I have to bend my body forward practically in two.

  I’ve never “run” in this position before. My feet keep moving, but seeing my crippled shadow, I think: Oh my God! I’m an old lady! This is the shuffling run of an old lady!

  But then comes another voice (Streep? Lansbury? Mirren?). Call it the Hey, Chinet Girl voice. It pushes back at the gloomlet: Let’s be real here. When were you ever a good runner anyway? You never ran! You never competed. Your life average has always been pretty much an eighteen-minute mile. You and Kaitlin used to do basketball layups that looked like small jetés. You have never remotely rocked as an athlete.

  I remember also the shoulder and neck aches I used to have as a sixth-grader, due to my too-heavy backpack. The migraine headaches—they’re the same exact ones I have today.

  The fact is that I always worried. I always made to-do lists. Even at the age of eleven.

  Then I think: Maybe I always was a fifty-year-old inside, and it was a matter of finally becoming my ideal age!

  In fact, I now think about my performing-arts daughter, Hannah, and know for sure she is even less inclined to run—anywhere, ever—than I am. In fact, now that I think of it, my daughter always has the fifty-year-old-lady neck aches and always wants me to give her a back rub. And she is also always making to-do lists. In certain ways Hannah and I are developmentally the same age.

  Nine-year-old Sally is not so far off either. Like me, Sally hates mornings—“I hate Monday!” she screamed recently, from under her covers.

  “Oh darling,” I said to her. “No one hates mornings more than me. No one has been an enemy of morning longer than your mother.”

  It then also occurred to me that perhaps the universe is sending these teen/tweens of mine exactly the mother they need. Perimenopausal as I am. I may be wildly deluding myself, but it keeps my head out of the oven. And all is well.

  Here is another surprising upside about aging if, as I was, you were an average-looking kid. When I was thirty-eight, people said, “Oh, you look about forty. Are you forty?” It would freak me out and drive me to weeping on my own bed. But now that I’m more than fifty, people say I look pretty good. All my life I’ve looked about forty-two, and now I’m reaping the benefits. Sometimes I like to tell people I’m seventy just to get their enthusiastic and amazed reactions.

  I believe it is a gift of the age that we live in that we have the luxury of looking at age as a construction. Because in contrast to every earlier milestone birthday (ten, twenty, thirty, and forty), my fiftieth was the most fun birthday of my life. So I’ve henceforth decided my fifties will be the fun decade. I am just so weary of the imposed tedium of adulthood. People always say, “Fifty is the new thirty-eight.” “Why settle for thirty-eight? Thirty-eight is but another low-fat-yogurt-type form of sensible compromise. For next year, ‘Maybe fifty-one is the new eleven!’ ”

  I think of this and feel a bouquet of party balloons lifting into the wide blue sky.

  And I’m reminded of the quote that Clare recently sent me (via Pablo Picasso via Jane Fonda): “It takes a long time to learn to be young.”

  Menopause Tips

  THIS IS NOT TECHNICALLY an advice book, à la Menopause for Dummies. But some direct advice is perhaps needed. Here goes:

  Women of this certain age need a particularly wide berth of compassion because of the extremes they may find themselves experiencing. I mean, since the beginning of time, people have had moods, sure, but menopause sets a totally different bar.

  Saying a woman may have ups and downs during menopause is like calling Sylvia Plath a tad skittish. It’s like trying to cover a bell jar with a tea cozy.

  It’s like saying Janis Joplin would have been okay if she had only drunk eight glasses of
water a day and had been really firm about hydrating.

  It’s like saying Medea would have been fine if she had just done “this amazing ten-week Groupon course I just got Tweeted, about combining Pilates with restorative yoga!” (“And hey, have you tried this great Whole Foods shade-grown chamomile tea?”Fuck off!) Like Jason’s nettlesome ex, men in literature have also had some legendarily dark moods. One thinks of Mr. Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) and Captain Ahab (Moby-Dick). However, note that unlike Medea, neither was a title character. Oh no, their books were named after (1) a river (more or less) and (2) a whale. How telling.

  So herewith for the beleaguered (and those who love them) are some handy menopause tips. This is non-sugar-coated, boots-on-the-ground advice from the field, from women who themselves have survived the change. That’s right, people. This is for real.

  FOR YOUR elucidation, I recently met one more time with Dr. Valerie, she of the ingenious Chinet-girls-vs.-paper-plate-girls comparison. (“I only have about four good metaphors, and that’s one of them,” she chuckles.) That said, Dr. Valerie did not recommend The Wisdom of Menopause only because she hasn’t read it—her experience is based on several decades of her own practice. For ease of reading, I conflated Dr. Valerie and Christiane Northrup because I found that what we are really looking for in this time are mother figures—sensible, smart, loving, emotionally balanced tribal “elders” (although in fact Dr. Valerie is not old at all) who can describe to us how all can be well.

  Dr. Valerie is always one to utter a faint and carefully polite “Aha!” at any mention of chakras, but she also betrays her professional medical bias when she suddenly starts exclaiming, “Footnotes! If a book doesn’t have many footnotes citing rigorously documented long-term medical studies, don’t believe a word they say!”