The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh Page A

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