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

ways, than it was in imperial China, or in the delightfully wicked prefeminist landscape that was the 1960s Americans suburbs. But why, I submit to you, can’t we have baby nurses—or wet nurses! Today, women mother while pursuing full-time careers, and pumping our own breast milk in the office. Why, I ask you, can’t at least the top 5 percent of executive women—women “leaning in” to high government positions or running Vogue , for instance—hire a wet nurse? Why can’t it be socially acceptable for these working warriors to chuckle richly when asked how it is that they manage to have it all, responding, “How do I ‘have it all’? With my great husband, great housekeeper, great cook, and of course Sierrah. She’s getting a BA in art at Sarah Lawrence, minoring in political philosophy, and to earn her way through college she’s my wet nurse!”
    Just as their fashions, car upkeep, and mothering habits were different from ours, so the Mad Women’s approach to menopause differed as well. My mother’s generation never talked about menopause. We children of menopausal women witnessed only a sudden cataclysmic shift. For ten years, Mom has been standing cheerfully in her yellow apron in the kitchen, drying the dishes. Suddenly, overnight, she is hurling them.
    Everyone has stories about how their prefeminist moms or grandmothers or aunts suddenly transformed during the change. (Said one still-changing grandma to me recently: “If anyone tells you menopause is easy? Just punch them in the mouth .”) Everyone seems to remember the exact moment it happened, and everyone remembers what the ladies threw: Certain contemporaries of mine have separately reported witnessing their menopausal mothers throwing a telephone at the wall, volume M of the Encyclopædia Britannica at the cat, and beef Wellington through plate glass.
    When I look at this list, one thing strikes me: How deeply cathartic it must have been to hurl an object that actually had heft! And we’re talking that certain midcentury heft. Remember those old black dial phones, with the cord? That’s something you could really kachunk . (Who throws an iPhone? It’s just too expensive and actually too light. Where is the payoff? Who throws an iPad? Also frightfully expensive, and it’s all backed up in the Cloud anyway. Who throws a Kindle? Why on earth would you throw a Kindle? Please .)
    Further, regarding beef Wellington, think through for a moment how you’d actually have to prepare it first, which I think involves something en croute in a madeira sauce, not to mention the usual trip with high heels and full makeup to the butcher. How much more satisfying it would have been to hurl through plate glass the meat-and-potatoes-on-platter-style dinners of yore—your whole turkey, your whole spiral-cut ham, your brisket. Who throws a Lean Cuisine? Where is the grandness? I can’t throw Make Your Own Pizza at my kids—I would be throwing these . . . sticky strands of . . . ropy dough.
    In my family I would trace the change to my mother’s forty-ninth birthday. I remember how proudly Kaitlin and I had banded together to give her a birthday present. Clearly, colorful clothes and scarves and jewelry she already had plenty enough of—good Lord, if you looked in her closet (which I did frequently), my mom had at least ten purses that matched her fifty dresses and seventy belts and God knows how many shoes. What we came up with instead was a rectangular glass Pyrex baking dish because we knew how much she loved to bake, and the old metal one was rusty.
    Imagine our shock when, for no apparent reason, she screamed and hurled the Pyrex dish against the wall. Then, as with many subsequent episodes, she disappeared into her bedroom like a tide washing out—curtains drawn, door locked. How infuriating it must be when—miserable, wildly hormonally imbalanced—one receives a gift from the children one is tired of endlessly caring and baking for that testifies only