The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Read Online Free PDF Page A

on my own (also, giving up drinking, and perhaps moving to an ashram in India) probably would have been a good idea, but, of course, that’s not the way it went.
    In fact Mr. Y didn’t end up at home for very long. In the end the betrayal had been too enormous. After a few months of the marriage’s mutually painful continuation, it was his wife who decided they were done. The moral truth is that adulterers deserve being punished—of course we do—but the deeper reality is that middle-aged people like Mr. Y and me are statistically lucky to find anyone who actually really enjoys spending time with us. Which is to say within a year Mr. Y’s marriage was finally really over, and he and I were living together again. This time it stuck, and I consider us both to be unfairly blessed.
    SINCE OUR reunion Mr. Y and I have begun in bits and pieces to set up a new home together. We’ve developed a new normal. After the divorce, Mr. X and I established a flexible fifty-fifty custody schedule that worked pretty well (it fluidly accommodated our work, in a similar way as our married, separate-track, co-parenting had). Due to a savagely depressed real estate market and the fact that Mr. X and I both worked a lot during our marriage and were conservative savers, I was able to take my half of the money and buy a three-story Victorian house in Pasadena. While my girls complained about going back and forth between two homes that are twenty miles apart, they also admitted to enjoying our new home’s antique pull-down attic and the fact that they had their own bedrooms.
    At first Hannah and Sally were understandably wary of Mr. Y, whom they’d known for years as my business partner. But after many fits and starts, my girls eventually got wise to the fact that Mr. Y genuinely likes children, is interested in their tales, never misses a birthday, is generous with ice cream and chocolate, and is one of the few people they can depend on who will always cheerfully buy tons of the crap they’re selling for school. While she won’t outwardly acknowledge it, this is a huge deal for Sally, who loves school contests the way I once loved refinancing.
    Mr. Y’s family is not happy that we’re together, but they are no longer “in emergency.” Time has passed. His ex-wife has a new boyfriend. I write a recommendation for his son to get into an MFA program in Northern California.
    Mr. Y and I now have a surprisingly quotidian life. In between writing and teaching and speeches and travel we enjoy such harmless midlife pleasures as flea-market browsing, making salads with carefully toasted pine nuts, and fighting over the only pair of reading glasses in the house. We host dinner parties where our theater friends drink wine and discuss their fascinating projects over the croonings of Chet Baker. Such parties would have been hell for teetotaler Mr. X, who had long ago lost patience for certain kinds of euphoric monologues brayed loudly into the night. But not us. There’s always time to talk. What with all of the standing around in the kitchen and gossiping and waving wineglasses, except in the morning, when we are waving coffee mugs, you could well call our home Club Blab. So it appears, in fact, that the giant tear in the cosmic curtain has been finally, mostly, sewed up: that is, until my menopausal freeway hamster meltdown.

Menopause, Old
    W HEN I START PONDERING the grand new adventure I’m on called menopause, I get to thinking about my mother. Was this part of what was going on with her? I was eleven when my mother was the age I am today, and that was when things started to go, well, weird. The cause of her change in character was, of course, I now realize, menopause.
    But it’s also important to note that my mother lived a very different life from the one I do.
    Consider, as a twenty-first-century working-mom artifact, my poor twelve-year-old 140,000-mile Volvo. Every morning to my fake surprise I spill an entire travel mug of coffee