The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (26 page)

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

T
HIS 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 of
f
!
) 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!”

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.