The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  So okay. Suffice it to say that, although references are mentioned, this book does not have a bible of footnotes, so take all with a grain of salt. That said, Dr. Valerie also says: “You have to laugh. This time of life is just so weird. And who knows everything, in the end?”

  So in fact we were able to agree on a general philosophy.

  Here’s how the dream gynecologist would treat you (if you don’t happen to have one nearby). They should not immediately prescribe any one-size-fits-all set of pills, treatments or another. Ideally he or she would listen to you for about an hour, with tissues, as you describe the panoply of emotional and physical issues that are occurring. I believe the length of time alone is important therapy.

  The gynecologist would then deliver the equivalent of the Chinet-vs.-paper-plate speech. Which is to say yes, things are going on with you hormonally that make you feel unstable, but in midlife you may also have a lot on your plate that contributes to this sense of instability. So let’s slow down and look at both. (Admits Dr. Valerie as a footnote, however: “Some women are like Eeyore, you know, they’re anxious. Even if everything is perfect they will always need medication of some kind. Those are the women to whom I do not deliver the Chinet speech.”)

  The choice of treatment offered is between small, tweaked dosages of hormones (“You really have to be committed to monitoring it and tailoring it”) taken for a limited period of time, low-level antidepressants taken for a limited period of time, or nothing at all (“When the feelings come on, just remember why they’re happening, and notice them”).

  Rather than punishing dietary regimes, Dr. Valerie suggests considering becoming, as she is, a “flexatarian.” A couple of days a week consider having a meatless meal, but don’t go crazy.

  Her wish overall: “I’d like women to grow middle-aged gracefully. Embrace being fifty.”

  So that’s about strengthening the plate. As for taking things off one’s plate, my humble menopause tips:

  1. Free Yourself of Accustomed Relational Chores

  Try on for size a fantastically freeing gambit called “Now That I’m Fifty” (or almost fifty—think of it as a happily metaphorical fifty). As my friend Denise puts it, “Now that I’m fifty, I don’t visit my fighting in-laws in Cleveland anymore. My husband can go off and see them if he wants to, but I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and you know what? Never again. [Beat] I’m fifty!”

  2. Free Yourself of Accustomed Domestic Chores

  This is a gambit of my own invention that I call “Stuff It, Barbara Ehrenreich.” Your own version may be different, but this was mine. Part of my own problem with home care was that for years I was afraid to hire domestic help, because Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Nickel and Dimed that to have a Third World woman scrub your toilets is to oppress a fellow sister. But now that I can afford it, not often but enough, I’ve come out of denial over the fact that to have a house cleaned professionally is unbelievably fantastic. Once every two weeks I bring in Marta—whom I refer to sometimes as Marta, and sometimes, baldly, as “the maid”—and when I do so, I silently flip Barbara Ehrenreich the finger. I’m fifty!

  3. Accept the Chaos (If It Doesn’t Drive You Nuts)

  That said, while my own house is now in much better shape, not for show to the outside world but because it was literally driving me crazy, I am resigned to never having a cleaned-up car. My middle-aged menopausal Volvo is an old-enough family friend that she is allowed to remain who she is. In one of our semiannual sweeps, the girls and I made a really concerted effort to totally clean out the trunk, really and truly this time. By being so thorough, suddenly all over town we were finding ourselves without a sweater or without the bottom part of a ten-year-old’s swimsuit or without that sometimes suddenly appreciated Costco twelve-pack flat of beef jerky. Which is to say we had forgotten how used we had become to feeding homeless people out of the back of my car. As opposed to a dollar bill, which I sometimes may or may not have handy, my daughters and I have found that homeless people requesting aid at stoplights may also happily accept a FUZE energy drink or a yogurt bar or a bag of Fritos, but interestingly, to the last man or woman, will not accept a V8.

  4. Cut All Corners Possible, and Don’t Apologize

  I would say, unless you love it, let the Christmas-card thing go. Who really wants them anymore? Particularly not in June. It’s absolutely all right that you didn’t send them out on time, and you don’t need to send an extra note apologizing. For God’s sake. Let’s not and say you did. Give yourself a friggin’ break. Cut some corners already.

  5. Don’t Judge. Lower the Bar

  Maybe you’re just not a good sleeper. Take Ambien if you need to. Don’t berate yourself. It’s not for life. You just have to get through this stage/phase of life.

  The stage I’m referring to, for many, is this sandwich-generation thing, which is no joke. We have to truly and deeply acknowledge that the care units we are taking on would crack not one but five Chinet plates. Which is to say that all bets are off now, and I mean all. There are no conventionally agreed-upon standards that make sense here. Sometimes a few eggs will roll out of the carton and simply crack, “one handed catch,” whoops, no. Sometimes that squalling elder may have to suffer through a whole weekend—a whole weekend!—with the wrong kind of medical tights. Sometimes dinner for the kids will be mashed potatoes on biscuits with rice served in front of a sixth rerun of SpongeBob (a show that I believe, as with many of the new shows the kids love, is at least linguistically clever).

  Sure, it would be nice to be sitting down to a home-cooked sit-down dinner with the whole family every night, with fresh plateware and glassware and folded cloth napkins, but if it doesn’t happen, why blame it on the mothers? If America cares so much about the family dinner hour, let the Republicans get that family dinner on the table. Or Crate and Barrel.

  6. Bed Rest: Lots of It

  The medical advice will be all about hydrating and walking and yoga, but sometimes all that simply adds up to more exhausting tasks—more things one must do that are good for one but do not give one pleasure, and indeed, too many of which make one dread the day. You are very fragile right now and can’t take any more weight on either your paper or even Chinet plate. And honestly—stop the presses!—I don’t think personal training is all that it’s cracked up to be.

  An enormously freeing thing is to see how long you can stay in bed. Read in bed, work in bed, watch TV in bed, eat in bed, sleep in bed (if you can sleep). It is wonderful to commit on, say, a Saturday, to just staying in bed.

  If people ask you what you’re doing, say: “I’m in menopause. One of the recommended cures is bed rest.” I’m serious! When you really get bored with it, you will get out of bed—eventually. But why rush it?

  7. Therapy May Not Be a Complete Solution

  Beyond refereeing difficult conversations between spouses, as perhaps a priest or rabbi would, I believe therapists can be limited in how they can help. It is but one utensil in setting one’s entire perimenopause table. It’s not their fault. We pay them to be reasonable. By the time you’ve driven to his or her office and gotten your little ticket for parking and flicked the light switch and sat quietly on a wicker chair in the waiting room drinking chamomile tea and reading Shambala magazine, it’s as though the problem is somehow containable, and it’s really not. Therapists have the most carefully choreographed work schedules in the world (“I have Tuesday at 5:30 P.M. or Thursday at 8:00 A.M.”), they watch the clock like hawks, they’re rarely available for naked drumming—why do we bother with them? No amount of dialogue or intellect is going to solve some of these big kundalini-rising midlife problems. My old therapist urged me to live alone for a while before moving in with Mr. Y. Good advice, sure, but she wasn’t the head of my village, I was madly in love, and the whole thing was going to come apart when it was going to come apart anyway. Therapists can’t talk you out of a train wreck that’s on its way—sometimes you just have to go through the crash and see if you can
walk away on two legs.

  They can help with the mother stuff. But it’s not rocket science and you don’t need a PhD, nor do you need fourteen hours of therapy to set up the backstory. You can also help yourself by breathing and just letting the grief wash over you.

  8. Consider Everything and Anything to Get You Through This Passage

  When you hit the midlife shoals, I’m going to recommend that you read everything, have a séance, do the tarot, maybe look into some past lives, get a gypsy lover. . . . Try everything. A close girlfriend of mine who is highly left-brained—she is a pharmacologist—at one point was trying to have a baby at forty-one. Times were desperate. It looked as if it was not going to happen. She was hysterical. She ended up, on a lark, going to a Vedic astrologer. She talked, cried, asked questions. The Vedic astrologer listened and consulted her chart. Suddenly she said: “What—oh! I see five little children here who will come to you with their suitcases already packed.”

  Thanks to her siblings, she ended up having two nephews and three nieces, who chatter on the phone with one another every week and whom she has had a total ball being an involved aunt to, without having to do the daily grunt work. In short, suitcases packed! A therapist is never going to come up with that in a million years.

  Which is to say in the end, probably the biggest, and related, survival tip, though, is to have no shame. The middle-aged women I know, clawing their way one day at a time through this passage, have no rules—they glue themselves together with absolutely anything they can get their hands on.

  They do estrogen cream, progesterone biocompounds, vaginal salves, coffee in the morning, big sandwiches at lunch.

  They drink water all day, they work out twice a week, hard, with personal trainers.

  They take Xanax to get over the dread of seeing their personal trainers, they take Valium to settle themselves before the first chardonnay of happy hour.

  They may do with just a half a line of coke before a very small martini, while knitting and doing some crosswords.

  If there are cigarettes and skin dryness, there are also collagen and Botox, and the exhilaration of flaming an ex on Facebook.

  And finally, as another woman friend of mine counseled with perfect sincerity and cheer: “Just gain the twenty-five pounds. I really think I would not have survived menopause—and the death of my mother—without having gained these twenty-five pounds.”

  Sure, we’re supposed to take calcium pills to avoid brittle bones and hip injuries at ninety, but who worries about living long when we’re just trying to get through the day? In the end the real wisdom of menopause may lie in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is.

  And I must tell you, as a middle-aged woman who labors mightily—and fails even more mightily—every day to wear the mask of being sane, to admit to experiencing only the narrowest spectrum of emotions, from good-humored cheer to only the lightest irritation, a mood soothed easily with a good chuckle thanks to NPR—that it is beyond delicious.

  Better to just hurl those coffee mugs straight out the window.

  And if what works is black cohosh tea with a vodka chaser, and an overturned Greek tragedy mask as a chocolate-fondue fountain, then bottoms up! Avast, ye vampires and werewolves and pirates! Arrr!

  It’s a mad time of life.

  And trust me, as one who has lived the miracle:

  It really will get better.

  Acknowledgments

  ALTHOUGH MOST OF THE men who inspired this book’s composite male characters might rightly want to seek refuge in various witness-protection programs, I want to single out and thank first and foremost Ben “master refinancer” Schwarz, who appears on page 1. My longtime editor at the Atlantic, Ben was urging me to write the source material for this book years before I was actually flood-spotting and spot-flooding. He was tireless in pushing me to get it right—I remember many editorial phone conferences that actually took place while I was waiting for the Volvo to be serviced. Due to his remarkable brilliance, care, and attention, Ben is the sort of magazine editor who comes but once a century—thank you.

  Thanks, too, to my brother Eugene and his family, whose lovely Pacific Grove home I breezily tend to treat as a second one whenever I’m writing (or not). Thanks also to my friend of several decades now, Dan Akst. Wailed I at Pirate’s Cove: “I used to feel really on top of it. I think I was super together around thirty-five. But the older I get, the stupider I feel. It seems more and more like I know absolutely nothing!” Replied Dan: “Don’t worry. You’re not getting stupider. It’s just that your perception of yourself is finally catching up to reality.” Hilarious, witty, true.

  Other men who have been golden in times of stress: John “June gloom be gone” Fleck, Carlos Rodriguez, and Dave (Mr. Q) Zobel (trading “one-handed catches” with David Coons).

  It’s a cliché to say one could not have made it through certain life crises without one’s girlfriends, but for me that’s so to the nth degree. The icing on the cake is that aside from mothers, daughters, artists, geniuses, and renegades, I know some of the world’s greatest writers, who provide hope that eventually the chaos will have a narrative shape. As some of my girlfriends whose fleeting imprints appear in this book may themselves be seeking a witness-protection program, I thank all obliquely but specifically: Anny C. and Danette C. (New Orleans Mardi Gras joy division), Kate C. (surprise fiftieth-birthday-party division), Rebecca C. (for, God, the AeroBed), Donna D. (who literally keeps my family in Playboy binders), Samantha D. (who knows a thing or two about tumult), Janet F. (who always makes us feel heroic, because she is), Caitlin F. (car mitt/cleaning supplies, queen frame and mattress still in plastic, grief counseling), Karen F. and Maria D.H. (fellow Malibu Park Junior High survivors), Annabelle G. (just because), Jude J. (of the perfect English muffins), Gina K. (of iced Grey Goose and emergency blow-up mattresses), Irene L. (I see us living together and going to a lot of theater eventually), Kerry “Fightin’ Writin’ Mom” M., Susan M. (cosmopolitans, shoe closet, “Estrogen Mood and Memory Formula”), Beverly O. (my home away from home), Joanne “School Mom” (big quotes) P., Rachel R. (for those yelling-over-desert-sand calls from Burning Man), Erika “Dusty Nethers” S. (too marvelously complex to reference in parentheses), Kaelyn S. (literally first on life’s speed-dial), Mona S. (whose notable proverb about men in bow ties still haunts), Deb “Barn Dance” (big quotes) V., and Spike W. (who practices literally the “art” of menopause). Chiropractor Deb Yerman has also been a lifesaver (TMJ!).

  In their own special enigmatic category of life fun, I thank, always, David Schweizer and Frier McCollister.

  As Julie Andrews herself is not available for life counseling, I am so grateful to have met and subsequently interviewed the wonderful gynecologist Dr. Valerie Myers of Pasadena, whose calm and enduring wisdom inspires this book.

  If I cannot have Pema Chödrön to call every Monday at 8:00, I am delighted to call my kick-ass sister, Tatjana, who has yet to collect royalties on the character of Kaitlin, whom she inspired.

  This book would not have happened, of course, without the amazing Jill Bialosky.

  BUT MOST of all, my heart belongs to my daughters, who made me find my smile. Only they will know what bad television we’ve watched together that that phrase is based on; they will giggle, and I do love the sound of that laughter.

  ALSO BY SANDRA TSING LOH

  Mother on Fire

  A Year in Van Nuys

  If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now

  Aliens in America

  Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles

  Copyright © 2014 by Sandra Tsing Loh

  All rights reserved

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  Except where noted in the acknowledgments, the characters appearing in this book are composites who are not intended to refer to specific people. While inspired by true events, the actions, scenes, and dialogue in this book have been chosen to illuminate the changing states of mind of the narrator, and are for story-making purposes only.