The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (24 page)

So instead of being depressed about being bloated or trying to fight it too much, one can happily anticipate the new self who will one day arrive (perhaps when I am seventy-two, it seems). One is free to work on a new nursery for the baby or wonder what the new baby will look like. Will the new postmenopausal me be a happy if frizzle-haired lady in a housecoat with a mustache and three cats, and will she be called “Gladys?” Doesn’t matter! I am feeling absolutely no panic whatsoever.
Ommm
.

I’m just delighted to be giving birth to a new self. A new self who will possibly need diapers, and that’s all good!

In fact, why shouldn’t we menopausal women contemplate throwing each other baby showers? We can register ourselves at As We Change and partake of festive party platters stocked with chocolates, wine, and Ambien (not the generic kind, the good kind—because we’re worth it!).

I can’t wait to see where the new me will end up going to college!

The Contents of My In-box

From Isabel:

I was recently told by my gyno (the wild and wacky Dr. Hamel Azarian) that I was no longer permitted usage of estrogen if I wasn’t willing to add progesterone to the mix.

It had been so long (four years? five years?) since I first started ingesting estradiol pills, then switching to compound-pharmacy creams (the progesterone in that gentle form still gave me raging depression), I’d forgotten what it was like not to be continually dosed with estrogen.

It’s been a month since I went cold turkey, and man! what a difference!

Of course there’s a good news/bad news aspect, but for me the good far outweighs the bad.

Firstly (speaking of “weighs”), I lost 5 pounds of estrogen bloat that had been there so long, I figured that’s what it’s into now.

Without even thinking of cutting carbs, fat, whatever, FIVE POUNDS dropped.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is continual hot flashes. And with the weight loss, I was convinced the flashing actually burned calories. But probably not.

However, things are becoming manageable with ESTROVEN MOOD AND MEMORY FORMULA! And I apologize for this e-mail starting to sound like an ad, but I’m totally in love with ESTROVEN MOOD AND MEMORY FORMULA!

Sure, I had difficulty recalling the word “refurbish” while telling Rich about our new neighbors and the house they’re working to . . .

REFURBISH!

But I remembered it about a minute ago, thanks to ESTROVEN MOOD AND MEMORY FORMULA, and its amazing ginkgo biloba.

Plus there’s tons of soy, and evening primrose, which does help with hot flashes. But, unfortunately, so does abstaining from wine (and coffee, which isn’t going to happen either). However, a wine/caffeine flash is fleeting, once on the ESTROVEN MOOD AND MEMORY FORMULA regimen.

I’m seeing light at the end of the tunnel. I am 170 days from being officially pronounced menopausal, and like my friend Jan, I expect to “dance a fucking jig” to commemorate it.

Hope you’re well.

Love,

I

From Kaitlin:

Papa walking. Next on water. . . .

From Thomas Flores:

hello boss,

just letting you know that everything is fine with FLORES team. eugene is ok and able to walk again. we have 5 days straight schedule in wise.i just hold lexapro pill since it was prescribe for he is ok and very cooperative with me. anyway thanks for trusting us and we do hope that everything will be ok again for this week.by the way if you have time pls. make my deposit tom or wed.(aug 21 or 22) instead on thurs.(aug.23), I made check dated wed and im worried about bank charges. thank you so much.best regards . . .

Thomas

From Kaitlin:

PS. Even if it’s not true about Papa walking again and even if he isn’t even alive anymore (aka:
Weekend at Bernie’s
) isn’t it awesome to get these wonderful e-mails from Thomas?

Turning Fifty

I
ADMIT THAT I
’
M NOT
that thrilled about turning fifty. My instinct is not quite avoidance, but it is to do something very, very low-key. I’m thinking less “celebration” than a kind of subtle holistic offstage underwater birthing . . . ceremony. In Australia.

No. In reality, my idea is to mark this passage with a quiet champagne potluck for perhaps a dozen women friends. I am thinking lots of soft cheeses, and many stunningly expensive little chocolates—of the gourmet kind that invoke sea salt, lavender, rose hips, etc. Our Wiccan circle could dine and share stories and toast the fabulousness of fifty, with many inspiring affirmations (taken from books like
Women Who Run with the Wolves
or
When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
). We could then write down things we wanted to get rid of and throw those pieces of paper into the fire (a thing I had never in fact managed to do at Burning Man).

Unfortunately, my fiftieth birthday actually falls on a Saturday, which seems to give the lie to slipping on quietly through the night with cheeses, food that I no longer absolutely deny myself anyway, now that I’ve given up on my Spartan lifestyle. (What happened was that I had a lucky score at Ross Dress for Less, where I got a few pairs of magical “mom” jeans, on sale. They are in regular-sounding sizes but have tons of room and are all made of stretchy fabric. I feel oddly newly comfortable and stylish, at least for me. Ross Dress for Less!)

No, Saturday night is calling for something big . . . Which makes me feel a bit sullen. Because it seems like I am always planning everyone else’s party and no one is ever planning mine.

I have in fact, just pulled my bachelor composer friend Carlos’s fiftieth birthday out of the fire. Literally two weeks before his birthday, he had sent out a plaintive e-mail that said, “I am turning fifty. Is there anyone who wants to offer their house for a party for me?” And of course being gregarious to a point of self-harm, I volunteered our house. But it was so last-minute that by the time Carlos had tweaked the Helvetica font one hundred times on the e-vite (“Carlos turns half of 100!”) it was like five days before a Saturday, it was like in the nog-flooded middle of December, with all its Handel chorales and holiday office parties and daughters’
Nutcracker
s, so it looked as if we were only going to have six people out of thirty.

In order to avoid a lonely Stella Dallas bomb of an evening, I thought we should
joyously
and
festively
postpone the celebration to the empty weeks of January, but Carlos seemed to take my logistical strategizing the wrong way, and the next thing I saw was a mass e-mail copied to fifty people, titled: “
CARLOS’
50th
BIRTHDAY CANCELLED BY SANDRA DUE TO LACK OF SUPPORT.
”

But in fact we did move it to January. And thanks to my strategic move, there was an upswell and crowd (more than fifty people!) and the wonderful testimonies that people tend to get together for people’s fiftieth birthdays (in a way they don’t quite deliver at people’s fortieths). So, surprisingly, Carlos had the greatest and most touching fiftieth, and now here was mine, and I wouldn’t even get as good a party as friggin’ Carlos, because I didn’t have myself to shill for me. I could really probably only get the twelve women. But maybe some of them could be drafted into bringing their reluctant husbands. Then I might get up to twenty people. I suppose that’s a quorum.

So I am just typing the kind of pointed-if-vague “Save the Date” e-mail one needs to send out one month in advance when Mr. Y confesses that “something” has been planned that was supposed to be a surprise that he wasn’t supposed to tell me about but perhaps now he should. I tell him very, very carefully and calmly I think that is wise. He confesses that Clare and a group of my girlfriends had already approached him five months ago about throwing a big surprise fiftieth birthday party for me. Clare had actually drafted three different invitation templates. But then Mr. Y had sort of let it drop through the holidays and all. But now that my birthday is four weeks away, maybe he should pick up the thread again and give her a shout-out.

You can imagine my immediate cortisol-flooding response. But given that Dr. Stacey is morbidly expensive and Mr. Y and I are trying to live together again more harmoniously, I do my deep breathing. I repeat “All will be well,” and . . . hit Send on my “Save the Date for
MY SURPRISE PARTY I
’M NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT MR. Y IS SUPPOSEDLY COORDINATING
.”

I call Clare and tell her that, given the unfortunate lateness of the project’s launch—particularly given that she started five months ago—trying to throw a big party is probably not a good idea. It’s Saturday, it’s Los Angeles, it’s like setting oneself up to fail. Perhaps something smaller would be better, and throw in some lobster or something so the foodies would have to come (even though of course those tend to be the same people with season tickets to things).

“No, no, no,
no
!” Clare exclaims. “It’s your fiftieth! You have to have a big party, an epic party! There’s no argument! People will come! I will force them!”

“How?” I wail. “Everyone always has a million excuses—the traffic from the Westside alone! Think of Elise. You know what Elise is like. You’ll invite her to my fiftieth birthday party and just get a monologue back about her allergies.”

“Come on!” she says. “This is huge. If need be with Elise, I will tell her that you are in very, very fragile depressive mode and if she ever wants to see you alive again she needs to come and bring a very large gift. And that’s the beauty of a surprise party, because then people can’t bug you with phone calls begging off. It’ll be much harder for them to diss me. I’m just waiting for Mr. Y to get me a guest list.”

“Oh God, no!” I wail. Of the many things Mr. Y can do, putting together a thorough e-mail list of my friends without my help is a super-Herculean task of which I believe few heterosexual men are capable. They just don’t have that gene. “This means I’m going to have to do it! For my own surprise birthday party!”

“Well, you’ll do a much better job,” Clare assures me. “Just focus. Be shameless. Don’t edit. Put on that list anyone you can think of. Go far and wide. Include everyone—old boyfriends from high school you have dropped entirely, girlfriends who became whiny and whose e-mails you actually stopped responding to, an old work colleague who did you a professional favor you never quite returned. Invite people you friended and then whose ‘feeds’ you immediately unsubscribed to, invite your fat friends, fat-friend new people and invite them, go to town. Invite all your bosses—”

“Oh for Pete’s sake—they’ll never come! It’s the last thing they want—”

“But they may be shamed into sending you a gift! That’s the beauty! Because the next time they get an official announcement about you, you may be dead. Invite your financial adviser, your mortgage broker, or anyone else who sends you a card at Christmas. I must say how delightful it was the day before my own fiftieth to sit on my doorstep and open a giant gift basket—the full Monty, champagne, chocolate, cheese, spa sandals—from Millie Olivas, my realtor from Dickson-Podley. I had put so many fishing lines out there, it was a surprise to pull up such a big fish on just one. But of course a realtor always will send a gift, particularly a female realtor.”

“You invited your realtor to your fiftieth birthday party?”

“Sure I did! Had I known it would work so well I would have also invited my dentist, my gynecologist, and my newspaper carrier. Numbers, people, we want numbers!”

“This sounds awful,” I say. “I just can’t take the stress of this. And I’m going to be driving my dad around a lot this month. I simply cannot do this. No.”

BUT THEN
what happens is that I get tragic news about my friend Ray. Ray is one of my oldest friends, literally from college. As twenty-year-olds we used to grill things on a tiny outdoor hibachi in our dorm’s courtyard and listen to music and talk about books. Ray has always had a wonderful optimism and sense of humor, and has gone on to have a successful career as an engineer in a beautiful part of Seattle. Or so I had surmised from his friendly annual Christmas letters, full of cheerful detail about hobbies (his was boating), his and his wife’s two dogs, and wry commentary on the varying fortunes of his favorite sports team, the Seattle Mariners. You really couldn’t have constructed a more normal, happy-looking life—they were always smiling on a mountain somewhere, or biking, or sailing, shading their eyes from the sun.

But no. Apparently Ray had been struggling with depression for the past ten years, and they couldn’t quite get the mix of chemicals right. So he took himself out, and now after decades of e-mailing back and forth and sharing funny YouTube clips, now I’m finally flying to Seattle to see him, and he is in a coffin.

I admit that I am extremely pissed off at Ray. I am pissed off that he kept this stream of chat going (the Seattle Mariners? who the hell cares?) while he was so sad inside and could not admit it, so he covered it up with all of this trivia. I am pissed off that while women are accused—and perhaps rightfully—of shrei-ing and kvetching and rapid-cycling and parsing, men suffer many of the same depths and unpredictability of moods we do, but they seem to do it alone, for fear of oversharing, and it’s a waste of life, literally.

I am very pissed off that by the time one hundred of Ray’s friends and relatives have gathered here in this small white wooden church just outside Seattle to “celebrate” his life, he isn’t here to see it. Because maybe if he saw this church full of people he might have staved off the darkness a bit longer, because in point of fact we would have come flying if we had known remotely how much he was suffering. I am pissed off that I am the only friend from LA who flew in.

My black jacket and pants feel too tight, and my cheap pumps are uncomfortable. The picturesque Norman Rockwell quaintness of this church is suffocating and discordant.

Why is the organist playing “Amazing Grace”? It has nothing to do with Ray. He was into Steely Dan, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Berlioz. I look around around at the rows of wooden pews. Why are so many smiling white-haired elders of the church here, and so few of his same-aged friends?