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

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.