The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (9 page)

As for the gear, aside from the standard weights, elastic bands, bars, ropes, and pads, apparently the newest thing in exercise technology is something called the Kettlebell. It’s a diabolical little hand weight shaped like a teakettle. Our leader urges us to swing the Kettlebell through the air. I hoist it over my head like a cow tossing its collar. Our teacher further exhorts us to feel the Kettlebell power, to catch Kettlebell fever! Sweating profusely, over the whip cracking and the timer constantly going off, I begin hallucinating. I imagine myself getting a full-blown Kettlebell . . . infection.

Wow! Becoming manic, I am turning into a total exercise-class dilettante. There is no weirdly named exercise class I won’t try once. I try Cardio Barre—fifty minutes of “targeted body sculpting” involving little weights you pick up and move in tiny, quarter-size circles, tilting your arm at a precise unpleasant angle, sixty-four times a side. Seven minutes into Cardio Barre I wish for death, but it is an active wish. Much more preferable was Zumba, the Latin (Brazilian?) dance craze! I
cumbia
, I grasp my machete and cut sugarcane, do Bollywood left, Bollywood right, walk like a model, wave my finger back and forth in rhythm to the music and shout, “No more! No more!” When after class I see I have missed another called Cardio Broadway, I let out a Nathan Lane–size falsetto scream!

A Brief Discussion of Manopause

TOP TEN SIGNS YOU ARE GOING THROUGH MANOPAUSE

Excessive YouTube-ing of old footage of your eighties college rock band

Excited remixing of old band tapes—transferring cassettes to digital, remixing

Those are really the only two I can think of, as per my short attention span.

L
ET ME TRY ANOTHER
approach in order to address the men.

CLUB BLAB
is in session again. Mr. Y and I are standing with glasses of wine in the kitchen, gossiping.

I have been asked by Elise—you recall, my angry divorced girlfriend of the ridiculous white-wine bistro—if I can set her up with anyone. I have to admit to her that I know very few eligible—or even ineligible—bachelors. It’s sad. All the presentable men I know are married. From experience, that is not a pool I recommend.

“Do you know any single men?” I ask Mr. Y.

We puzzle through the list: Dave? Tom? Albert?

“They’re all in manopause,” I complain.

“Sam Johnson!” he erupts. “Gainfuly employed, financially solvent, not bad looking—Sam Johnson is totally eligible.”

“Sam Johnson?” I retort. “He has been on pause since the age of thirty-seven. And the last time we invited him to something—don’t you remember?”

Just the other month I had ten vibrant single forty- and fifty-something women over for dinner. They brought couscous and limoncello and cranberry spread. One woman brought everyone a gorgeous scarf based on their individual color “seasons” out of her new online boutique knitting company. Another demonstrated one-arm planking from circus class, another pole dancing, another some striptease moves (also from class). Someone else confessed her fear of death, a hush fell, then we cried, then we laughed, someone wrote a short blog post about it, she got ten comments, we inked another date in our calendars, all did the dishes, someone shared organic aloe hand lotion samples, someone else got a brainstorm for a new Internet marketing company, and several carpooled home the same way as they had come, to save gas.

It’s a little thing we like to call Tuesday.

“You invited Sam,” I say to Mr. Y, “but he declined. Remember why?”

“Oh right,” he remembers with a start. Sam’s exact response, to an invite for dinner with ten vibrant single women: “Why don’t you just punch me in the face?”

“But his second reason not to come was that quite honestly the Olympics were on.”

“Oh come on, the Olympics?!” I exclaim. “It is streaming over DIRECTV, the Net, my iPhone, and probably the toaster. I saw it in an elevator at Target, and on a Chevron monitor screen while pumping gas. It’s actually quite hard to avoid the Olympics. You would have to go to the desert in someplace like Utah to book a room in a windowless U-Haul storage unit. You would have to put on a blindfold and earmuffs. You would have to knock yourself out with twelve Ambien. You would have to make an effort. I wouldn’t exactly call it destination viewing.”

“Sam very much likes to see things in real time,” Mr. Y notes.

“Right, but to put it bluntly: We like Sam a lot, and he has always seemed fairly functional at least in his job, but compared with much of the rest of the human race, Sam is slow.”

“Well,” Mr. Y admits, “the other reason Sam declined is because he said he ‘felt fat.’ ”

What the—? Manopause!

Parenting Adolescents During Perimenopause, or Medieval Times

A
T FORTY-NINE, THE EXPERIENCE
of having two preteen daughters living in my house is like having a plate-glass window into which two birds are constantly flying—smack! crisis! shrei!—every five minutes. Piercing screams come from the bedrooms over ever-new emergencies. “My
belt
!” “My
zipper
!” “My
chin
!” or “My
shoes
!” That’s if they’re lucky enough to have two of the same kind of shoe. My daughters and I are all in transitional stages of our development: They preadolescent, I perimenopausal, and so, more often than not, in our volcano-pile household, it’s just “My
sho
e
!”

Whereas many of our Mad Woman moms had us in their twenties, I, along with many of my Gen X cohorts, birthed my brood in my late thirties and early forties. We sisters in the new menopause are the first generation blessed with the task of guiding our daughters through wild hormonal fluctuations while living through our own. Or as the late great Erma Bombeck used to say: “I’m trying very hard to understand this generation. They have adjusted the timetable for childbearing so that menopause and teaching a sixteen-year-old how to drive a car will occur in the same week.” Of course, this is a hopeful notion. It is presuming my daughters get to sixteen.

I remind you that a menopausal woman’s hormone levels are the same as a preadolescent girl’s. That none of us is fertile means that none of us is consistently firing those magical hormones that we’d like to associate with women, or at least with respectable women. Which is to say we’re all thinking of ourselves first, rather than about men or boys we’re dating or would like to date, and as such no one is paying much attention to her appearance (or sometimes even hygiene, it seems). Everyone is on her own personal emotional roller coaster, which corresponds not to a moon cycle but to an orbital spray of God knows which planets, some of which inspire us to spend eight hours painting an incomprehensible mural about horses and birthday cake on our own bedroom wall. In addition, without those internal chemicals that promote nurturing, bonding, and nesting, we all lack that magical Doris Day mind-set one needs to cheerfully fold dinner napkins, towels, sheets, and laundry, to cut up vegetables or fruit or bake muffins for other people, or even, particularly, to empty the litter box. Sometimes I feel our house is coming to resemble a boardinghouse for bachelor serial killers.

Granted, I’ve been living with my girls for a decade already, and it has never been particularly easy. I remember wheeling a double stroller through airports, pumping breast milk in temporary apartments, chasing toddlers across Target parking lots in five different cities. I have endured such sensory violations as lice, peed-on car seats, and five-year-olds’ birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s. (For those not in the know, Chuck E. Cheese is like Las Vegas for kids, with constant buzzers and bell chimes and coins clattering. For the Chuck E. Cheese mascot think giant mouse, macarena-ing in a baseball cap, whose fur typically appears to be smeared with suet. My daughters were so uncoordinated they would pull their arm back to throw a Skee-ball and it would fly out behind and hit somebody in the back. There is a wine grotto where you literally shove your mug into a wall under a spigot!)

But now that I am forty-nine and perimenopausal, a new horror is dawning on me. Looking back to my early forties, those still-fertile years when my body was suffused with nurturing “love chemicals” like estrogen and oxytocin, I had a thicker protective epidermis—almost like an elephant’s hide—against the annoyances that, it turns out, children can be. I had the ability to type coherent text into my computer while around me my children were shout-counting with Dora or Sharpie-mustaching their American Girl dolls or stroking the dog’s pelt with my personal hairbrush.

While I love my nine- and eleven-year-old daughters, these days, as I continue to hotflash more and more, there are times when I find it hard to bear the actual sound of their voices. (This reminds me of that very special menopause symptom cited in 1857, called “temporary deafness”—if only!) I pick them up after school and am newly stunned by how quickly my tween daughters speak, how loudly, and at what an incredibly high pitch. There my girls go singing nonsense songs off YouTube, chattering away about who has a crush on whom and, perhaps most irksome of all, eagerly retelling me the plots of their favorite television shows. I believe parents have some obligation to try to listen to our children’s thoughts, probably, but I don’t believe there’s anything in the manual that says we have to listen to them describe the plots of television shows.

Dinner is worse. Back in my previous marriage, when Mr. X was on the road working and it was just me and the girls, I fed them early, sometimes on TV trays. I’d snack later, while making the lunches for the next day. Everything was loose, everything was mellow, and all was well. Unfortunately, in his formal WASP way, Mr. Y believes in a “dinner hour” where everyone sits down at the table at the same time. I think it’s a nice idea in theory. But I am a perimenopausal woman with increasing head ringing and hot flashes, and now there are even night sweats. It’s like the inside of my head has itself become a Chuck E. Cheese. At forty-nine my strong preference would be to eat dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon in a darkened cave in Antarctica. I have become this kind of hulking, irritated bison who truly wants to be left alone as I eat. To be fair, it’s partly because of what I eat. On the rare occasions where Mr. Y lets us do Make Your Own Taco night—he thinks it’s boorish to eat with one’s hands—out of years of habit I will try to roll up a burrito using lettuce instead of a tortilla. Trembling with hunger because it’s already almost 6:00
P.M.
, when by rights my door should be closed to the world with a Do Not Disturb sign, I jut my jaw forward to bite into the collapsing thing. Tomatoes are dropping, it’s a losing battle—and when my teeth close against each other, half the construction falls onto my neck—and now my entire household starts pointing at me and laughing (“Mommm! How gross!”).

“Good God!” I exclaim, standing and picking up my plate. “I love all of you very dearly, but I can’t stand another minute with you!”

BUT IF
you’re the perimenopausal mother of a tween, the trouble runs deeper than all that.

It’s tough in middle age in general to be an old dog learning new electronic tricks. My thumbs are too fat to write texts on my iPhone, and my eyes are too dim to read them. I don’t know how to turn off the Kindle, so when planes are taking off I frantically take a pillow and “smother” it. There is no device upon which my girls won’t keep playing with the ring tones, so when the next thing goes off I find myself feeling completely addled—was that my phone, is there a space-alien invasion, or has the microwave finished some popcorn? And do the space aliens want some?

But in fact none of this has prepared me for the peculiar horrors of Facebook. When Hannah first introduced it into our lives I was neither aware of what to do with Facebook, nor of the fact that one is not even supposed to be on Facebook until the age of thirteen (Hannah is eleven). Never mind. My own Facebook account seemed to exist only for the purpose of enabling me to peer into the relatively benign world of my keyboard-tapping daughter and her out-of-town cousins. As I’ve experienced it, preteen Facebook is typically a sleepy, as-innocuous-as-a-Christmas-letter world of angsting about the English paper due tomorrow while qvelling about the latest funny cat photo, finished off with a curt BRB or GTG (Be Right Back or Got To Go). My daughter’s set are the sorts of kids who friend their grandparents and aunts and uncles, the better to accost them to buy candy bars for the school PE program fund-raiser. Even Internet predators would have to struggle to stay awake through the continual pelting of trivia, as relentless as an avalanche of stuffed animals.

One night, while I’m writing at the computer . . . well, to this day I cannot account for how this happened. Perhaps it was a temporary glitch or experiment Facebook was trying. I swear to God, all I know is I was sitting there at my computer, and suddenly on the right side of my screen I saw this conversation unrolling in real time. It appeared to stem from a post on a page of one of my daughter’s friends (he posted a photo of what appeared to be a badger in a Dodgers cap). Perhaps I was seeing this post because my daughter opened her Facebook account on my computer, and hence when she opened one for me there was a period of strange hybridization between our two identities. Even today my Facebook page states that I am a fan of Bruno Mars, Starbucks Mochachinos, and Keyboard Cat, all artifacts of my daughter’s. So I can’t account for the mysterious mechanics of this, but suddenly, scrolling down the right half of the screen, in real time, is a Lord of the Flies comment thread of sixth-graders “flaming” my completely wide-eyed and innocent Hannah, she of the leotards, goofy glasses, and angel wings.

The thread is something like: