The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (2 page)

AS ANN
and I hang up, mostly I’m relieved at her diagnosis. As though a temporary fog has been blasted away with lemon-scented Febreze, I turn the key in the ignition, pick up my girls, go to Target, and follow that with Trader Joe’s. Invigorated by this new information, I’m again rocking my chores. In the checkout line I fumble with keys, sunglasses, debit card, and change, as is increasingly common for me these days. I have this thing where if I forget my canvas bags, I feel so guilty about the harm that plastic wreaks on the planet that I stack all my groceries into my arms. Doubled over, I shuffle out to the car, leaving a trail of broken eggs, milk, cantaloupe.

“You need a hand, hon?” the female checker asks. “Oh no,” I say. With a big smile I turn to the entire line behind me and grandly announce: “Don’t mind me—I’m just forty-nine and entering
menopause
!”

Burning Woman

B
UT THAT
’
S NOT WHERE
the story of my midlife crisis begins.

Flashback to two years before. It’s 9:00
A.M.
on a blindingly bright Monday morning. I am forty-seven years old, in T-shirt and overalls. I am weeping as I hurl paperback after paperback into a clanging metal Dumpster in front of a U-Haul storage facility in Pasadena. This is my personal library, those familiar literary classics lovingly assembled in my salad days (college, grad school, etc.). It feels like sacrilege to toss them. It’s a betrayal of the concrete blocks, then red milk crates, then black IKEA Billy bookshelves they once stood on. I am jettisoning into the trash all of art, and history, and goodness, and knowledge.

On the other hand, I appear to have no fewer than three separate copies of Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. This is a book that, to be honest, I have never read and that, I now realize, I never plan to. I cannot even remember pretending to read it, though I must have been assigned it in a course (perhaps three times?). That’s the case, too, with my moldering pile of Henry James, which I am also jettisoning.

I’m here at U-Haul on a blistering Monday morning because I’ve just been kicked out of my home of twenty years. My home, I see in retrospect, was a kind of Eden, a funky hippie enclave in a bucolic part of town, with two pools, a recording studio, and even a charmingly jerry-rigged home office overlooking a hot tub. That’s where my library of unread books had room to loll sunnily, next to unused exercise equipment and unopened boxes of life-improving (one day!) things like TurboTax.

But all this has been packed up and labeled for me in cardboard boxes—forty-three of them—by my former husband, henceforward to be referred to as Mr. X. I drove the giant shuddering U-Haul truck back home one last time to retrieve the boxes, stacked six feet high, under a blue rain tarp on the driveway. There was so much stuff it didn’t all fit into the truck: I left lamps, CDs, and wedding platters scattered along the sidewalk.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. For such a long time our union was happy and solid. Mr. X and I met two decades ago, in Los Angeles. I was twenty-six and at a crossroads. Raised by a Chinese engineer father and a German mother in 1970s suburban Southern California, I had been shuttled to constant piano and ballet lessons with the middle-class idea that these would be nice hobbies to complement a sensible future job in aerospace engineering. But after struggling to earn a degree in physics and then moonlighting for six years in English graduate school (to my father’s horror), I had veered offtrack: I wanted to be an artist. What sort of artist I had no clue—I played the piano and composed and wrote and danced and painted and did performance art. I was miserable at all of that, and miserable at being single. I had this dinosaur DNA code that if I had any intimate relations with a man, I would be on his front porch the next morning with packed suitcases, a coffeemaker, and big puppy eyes.

I was lucky then to meet Mr. X, a friend of a friend. Somewhat but not crushingly older than I (eight years), Mr. X was a well-regarded and fully employed studio musician. From a musical family, he had played scales for hours a day from the time he was a boy in Minnesota, and to him making music was as natural as breathing. Mr. X was disciplined about his craft, and as we started to date and he learned of my creative aspirations, he insisted I also be. Crying was not allowed, even if I had a short story rejected sixty times. (“Do you know how many auditions I didn’t get?” he would exclaim. “Get up on your feet, girl!”) He pushed me to leave my freshman-teaching-and-dodging-my-thesis-adviser grad-school safety zone and approach art like a job. Mr. X was a good person, a grown-up, and a romantic. In summer backyards we drank wine and ate barbecue, listened to Miles Davis, smoked pot, and played Scrabble. He praised me for being—as opposed to his ex—“un-neurotic,” a trait I tried to work hard to maintain.

We soon bought a home together, thanks to his income and a loan from my family. Now on our own patch of earth, our roots grew down. On his own land Mr. X turned out to be very much a homebody—if not actually a farmer, as I used to joke. When not on the road, he roasted chickens, baked bread, and grew tomatoes. He hung laundry, hired painters, and installed showerheads. He mended fences, serviced cars, bought insurance. I dug into my writing and began publishing essays, short stories, and even books about what I called the foibles of my generation, and I started to tell coherent stories onstage instead of doing unintelligible performance-art pieces. I soon had so much to do that when Mr. X went on tour, as he often did, I missed him less and less. We both felt this was a good development, as in the early days my overattachment was unmanageable—I used to wail in alarmed grief whenever he went away.

Eventually there comes the day, a decade in, when, returning from a several-month tour, he puts his bags down on the front porch, looks up, and the first words out of his mouth are not “How are you?” but “The roof needs retiling.” When I see him in another room folding laundry and laughing till tears come at
The Daily Show
, I realize I haven’t seen him laugh like that at anything I’ve said in years. When we go to dinner for “date night” and can’t fill more than forty-five minutes of conversation, I know it’s because we have become so unfamiliar with each other’s worlds.

But the loss of Mr. X is not why I am weeping at this moment, as I continue to toss out classic after classic this morning in rhythmic arcs of grief (Hemingway, Melville, Trollope—
thunk, thunk, thunk
). I’m weeping because we were supposed to be . . . doing this . . . together.

But by “we” I mean myself and Mr. Y. And there you go. Life’s next wrinkle.

• • •

I
’
D MET
Mr. Y a decade before. I was in need of a manager for my theater work, and that’s when my director introduced us. Mr. Y was a funny, smart, theater gypsy like the rest of us, but he was a businessperson who calmly took care of the vexing stuff like contracts, and budgets, and 1099s. Mr. Y was fun to have around, either in the theater or on the road. An old-fashioned flaneur with a different tie, hat, or polished boot for every occasion, he had endless patience for shopping, browsing, café sitting. Of Scotch-Irish blood and WASP training, Mr. Y was a fellow always happy to duck into a pub for a nightcap, and he was also a gentleman glad to chivalrously hold open the door. At opening-night parties, when I was marooned, excitedly but rather anxiously holding court before a group of theatergoers, he’d arrive magically by my side with not one but two calming cocktails (“Irish handcuffs”). “Life in wartime!” he’d say.

THE FACT
that Mr. Y and I were both in stable long-term marriages with children—he had a twenty-one-year-old son, and I had two young daughters—put us at ease together. We soon developed a platonic friendship that was as comfortable as an old shoe. As his French architect wife seemed to travel as much as Mr. X did, we increasingly kept each other company in that affable midlife beer garden of our forties. Sharing a business checking account, we were buddies in work and in life. He was the Ethel to my Lucy.

MY PROFESSIONAL
focus was shifting, too. One day when I was forty-two, Mr. X and I attended a crowded open house for a fancy potential private kindergarten for our older daughter. We couldn’t afford the $20K-plus tuition, but neither could we choose public school, as our local public schools were terrible, or so we had been told. But this ambivalence quickly resolved itself. The smug director of admissions answered a parent’s question with: “But
no
one goes to public school in Los Angeles!” When I realized that by “no one” this man was referring to approximately 750,000 children, I knew that I had found my passion and my cause.

All my life I had worked for myself, alone, on narrow intellectual projects, in what I now understood to be a shallow, self-centered void. But now, on behalf of 750,000 children, I could cut the rope to my past and dedicate myself to something
huge
!!! I could join the
worl
d
!!! It turned out that I was but one of many educated, middle-class Los Angeles moms who felt this way. (There had been kind of a baby boom triggered around 9/11, so there were many of us who had toddlers at the same time.) We had all been sleepwalking through our thirties, pursuing less-than-meaningful careers, writing condo association newsletters, and accumulating many sets of wicker furniture, which we had then dutifully painted with sealant. But around forty, awakening to the needs of our and the world’s children, our hormones were sailing as high as in our teens. We, the Burning Moms, were going to save the world by fomenting a public-education revolution.

At the apex of my mania I decided to throw a massive public-school rally in Sacramento. At this point Mr. X was starting to look askance at all of his wife’s frenetic activity as one would look askance at Don Quixote tilting at windmills. A former performance artist himself, however, Mr. Y, unlike Mr. X, found my activities perfectly reasonable. He even agreed to drive a twenty-seven-foot U-Haul housing a gigantic papier-mâché elephant up to Sacramento. It is a measure of how much I took him for granted that I never doubted Mr. Y would do such a thing, if asked.

This political rally was, unfortunately, more a ragtag multifamily outing than a politically effective transformative event. As I’ve learned since, real change involves more than stenciling banners rhapsodically in the sun with one’s children. But still I felt I’d been a part of something magical. The night before the rally, one hundred women and children had camped together in firelight, and I poked my head into row after row of gaily flapping tents to give my soldiers cheery huzzahs. Less Joan of Arc, I was a mother on fire.

OUR NEXT
adventure was more in the spirit of fun, not protest. The simple act of RV camping proved so liberating for several Burning Moms, who were starting to sport aviator sunglasses and bandannas, that we decided we were now badass enough to hazard a trip to Burning Man. Which is where the magic flipped upside down.

Burning Man is an annual pagan, clothing-optional, drug-friendly weeklong gathering of some fifty thousand people who build a temporary city in the scorching Nevada desert. It was an unlikely destination for a suburban middle-aged mother such as myself. But the year before, Mr. X, in his constant search for offbeat movies on Netflix, had found a documentary focusing less on the culture of Burning Man than on its spectacular art. Mr. X and I watched in genuine wonder. Wow! Here were giant metal dune buggies and alien-spaceship-inspired flamethrowers and even a fairy-tale-like wooden temple into which people threw whatever they wished to get rid of, from wedding dresses to letters from dead wastrel fathers, which was then burned to the ground. For a moment Mr. X and I had considered going, but given that he was a fifty-something-year-old dad who had long given up all of his youthful bad habits (including not just pot but alcohol)—whereas, of course, somewhat furtively, I myself had not—we mutually and sensibly let the idea fizzle.

However, now that I had formed this tribe of Burning Moms, we could go as a she-wolf pack and take pictures. And for protection we would take not just Clinique moisturizer but our mascot and driver, Mr. Y. Breathed Mr. X, “A male chaperone. Yes. Thank goodness.”

Burning Man turned out to be a lot how you’d expect a desert “city” of half-nude stoners to be, particularly stoners who had built makeshift “camps” with names like Andy’s Wonder Factory, Astral Headwash, Big Puffy Yellow Camp, Barbie Deathcamp and Wine Bistro, A Shack of Sit, and Zombie Unicorn. Ours was called Camp Baggage Check (“Check your emotional baggage at the door”), a relatively normal camp run by a software engineer from the Pacific Northwest. Reassured by such ordinary recreational totems as Doritos, beer, and dominoes, our group of six felt ourselves slow down and relax into the heat. We women gradually stripped down to our shorts and flip-flops and even bikini tops. There was no fear of appearing fat or of even being looked at twice at all by the sixty-something-year-old men rattling past naked on bicycles (ouch!). Feeling as though we were falling into a pleasant, heavy dream, my friend Lily and I set out for an exploratory stroll around the sandy metropolis’ grand central circular boulevard.

As lulling as the drone of midafternoon bees, our conversation began with chitchat about our families. Lily was married to Brian, and they were the parents of Nick. Together they were the quintessential comfortable alterna-family—they barbecued, brewed their own beer, and hosted a funny Christmas-caroling party that always featured antlers on pets and kazoos. They had a bungalow in Silver Lake. Their son was in a wonderful new homegrown charter school, and they had a wonderful dog. Lily and I were making plans for our fall “Martinis and Magnets” (where we would ply anxious parents with martinis as we explained LA’s frighteningly complex magnet-school system). It was in the middle of this conversation that Lily turned to me and asked: “You know what I’m going to get myself for my forty-fifth birthday?”