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

(with milk) over the gearshift; there are crushed plastic water bottles on the floor amid nests of children’s socks (at this point I can’t say for sure whose children’s; one time I found a boy’s tiny Spider-Man underpants in my car—this was weird, as I have only daughters); for an embarrassingly long period of time my car had ants. This is an automotive affliction I’ve never heard of: I believe it is akin to saying your car has mosquitoes, mice, its own climate zone, or a small problem with gators. The ants were finally traced to a two-and-a-half-year-old banana that my horrified daughters and I discovered in the trunk. We knew the exact age of the banana because it was in a beach bag that had been packed for a specific Fourth of July trip along with a then-new copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections . “ The Corrections ! There it is!” I exclaimed. So many of the Volvo’s dashboard lights are on, each trying to alert me to one malfunction or another, that turning the ignition key is akin to plugging in that big Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Yet despite its grievances the car continues—reluctantly—to run (indicating, possibly, that my Volvo is also in menopause). I’ve been known to drive this ecosystem while wearing a fanny pack and, I regret to say, Crocs.
    THE STATE of my Volvo—not to mention Crocs—would have been unthinkable in my mother’s world. Hers was the orange-sherbet dreamscape that was Southern California in the 1960s, a stylish Mad Women (instead of Mad Men) era when just going out to the grocery store in one’s shiny Buick with tail fins required lipstick and heels. My mother was a five-foot-eleven Valkyrie who wore an apron in the kitchen, a white pleated skirt on the tennis court, and a shiny Pucci-like dress and heavy amber jewelry to visit the butcher (one had those then). The butcher was short and bespectacled but surprisingly tomcat-like as he patrolled his counter, across which they would flirt lightly over roasts and briskets. Oh, the harmless amusements of housewives who didn’t make their own money (and hence could not leave the husbands to whom they were unhappily married, as was the case)! The only other personal treat my mother seemed to allow herself was relaxing alone at the far edge of the yard in the falling darkness of the evening, sucking with ferocious meditation on a single Camel cigarette.
    It isn’t just the Volvo. Motherhood itself is also different than it was fifty years ago. Consider that today not only is no smoking or drinking allowed during pregnancy, there is no red meat, no sushi, and even—according to the husband of a friend of mine—“No smoked fish due to possible secondhand smoke!” My sisters and I were allowed to eat only kale, while stretching headphones playing Mozart over our bellies. At one point I went to pregnancy yoga classes, where I was instructed to go on all fours and waggle my butt in the air to “turn the baby” (positioned for back labor).
    I’m a little envious of my mom’s Mad Women era, where expectant mothers smoked, drank, and even did amphetamines prescribed to them by their chain-smoking doctors so they wouldn’t gain more than twelve pounds in nine months. During labor, the mothers were knocked out so the doctors could pull the babies out with forceps. The dads were sequestered in the waiting room (no amateur videotaping for them), or, even better, they were out and about in colorful madras pants, golfing. On returning home, the babies were cheerfully fed formula by baby nurses. “Oh yeah, we all had baby nurses,” my elderly neighbor, Mildred, told me breezily the other day, while waving a Tom Collins in a highball glass. The hiring of baby nurses—no one thought twice about it. It was a regular middle-class occurrence. Recently I read, too, that in imperial China, aristocratic women had not just baby nurses but wet nurses. This came standard!
    The world is better here and now, of course, in many