Sandra Tsing Loh - The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem

ALSO BY SANDRA TSING LOH

The Madwoman in the Volvo

Mother on Fire

A Year in Van Nuys

Aliens in America

If You Lived Here, Youd Be Home by Now

Depth Takes a Holiday

MY YEAR OF DOMESTIC MAYHEM

Sandra Tsing Loh

Contents

A H, FIFTY-FIVE. The golden years! The heady career summiting, ripening emotional maturity, the confident, gazelle-like loping with a surfboard toward the Pacific blue waters of a sagely planned retirement.

Thats what we find in airline magazines, anyway. (Which I read deep in coach, starving because I havent sagely planned anything, not even a snack that costs less than an eighteen-dollar Wolfgang Puck quinoa/aioli wrap.) Nowadays, coast to coast, I discover, it seems fit silver foxes are busy not just surfing but using their American Express Platinum cards to start their own rockin garage bands, hitting a rad chord and doubling over in laughter as their bangs (really, they have bangs?) fly forward.

But no! My fifty-fifth year was more like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-olds life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-olds body. (And I dont mean Ruth Bader Ginsburgsshe is a superwoman who, if arm-wrestled, would clearly dislocate my shoulder.) It felt like trying to live Arianna Huffingtons thrilling global values without her staff (or dry cleaner). It was like junior high without the carbs.

Lets talk, for a moment, about retirementa word Ive never been able to hear without dropping into a kind of Zen waking sleep state. (And now IRA! is the sound of bankers laughing.) Lets look at what many baby boomers are doing in this Second Act of Life. (Yes, thats what my seventy-two-year-old retired Gestalt therapist friend calls it, without irony. Of course, she also wears Tibetan and Native American jewelry without ironyshe is from Pennsylvaniabut I digress.)

Heres what the boomers are doingcompared to activities in my own household:

Boomers: Oh! We just spent four rhapsodic weeks this summer learning to make bread from Master Chef Ennio from the Food Channel in a sumptuous Tuscan farm villa.

Sandra: On a recent cobbled-together trip to New York, our Airbnb bachelor pad (the only listing without prohibitive cleaning fees) had a single nightstand (next to the futon) bearing action figures, hand lotion, and a box of Kleenex. You do the math.

Boomers: We are building a second home on land we bought ten years ago on a verdant remote island off the coast of Seattle.

Sandra: The closest Ill get to the invigorating scent of the ocean is half-off oysters via Groupon Happy Hour. But those gastrobar Happy Hour menus are so confusing (Its $3 off on well drinks before five? What is a sunchoke?). Eighty dollars later youre still starving. Its a recurring bagatelle (fancy words at least are free) we call highway gastrobbery.

Boomers: Steven has been learning to speak Khmer in preparation for our six-week Norwegian Silver Star Cruise to Cambodia.

Sandra: I have to admit, I am obsessed with those glossy cruise pamphlets that fall like satiny papaya skins out of the Sunday New York Times (which our household purchases at the reduced teachers rate of forty-nine dollars/month). Not only can we not afford $15,000 per person, I couldnt even afford the tasteful luxury/casual musliny blouses and fine linen palazzo pants all the serenely medicated salt-and-pepper-haired cruisers seem to be wearing. (In neutral colors! What about red wine stains? Once againmiddle agethe dry cleaning alone!)

The only aquatic vacation my partner Charlie (he of the 2000 VW Beetle that smells like melted crayons) and I could afford was a three-day Carnival Cruise to Mexico. A traumatic Mr. Toads Wild Ride (its in the chapter entitled 101 Arguments Against Summer Fun ), this floating DMV from hell was survivable only via the weed Charlies mobile L.A. delivery service had prescribed for his (put Modelo beer can down to make big air quotes) glaucoma.

Which is to say, technically, yes, I am a baby boomer (those born between 1946 and 1964), but my birth year1962was at the drooping tail of the boom. Born late in the game, think less true boomers than Baby boom tastes on a Gen X budget, or X-booms. (This can also sometimes look like First World guilt on a Third World budget, resulting in what I call Second World problems, but more on that to follow.) Now in middle age (for those planning to live to 120), the boomers are those silver-haired surfers (former doctors and attorneys) loping toward several million in retirement. By contrast, the life hack many of us aging X-booms have worked out regarding our retirement, health care, and leisure activities? Two words: medical cannabis. (PS: The people who buy that six-dollar red table wine blend whose black-and-red label features a devil with horns or a woodcut of a pirate with some sort of medieval or Old English font on it, because as you know, an ornate font with lots of serifs suggests... classier... wine? Us!)

Okay, let me double back to say the cannabis thing may be overstated. I myself have always had little tolerance for pot. In midlife, Charlie has tried to give me just enough glaucoma medication so I can tolerate Game of Thrones, but the result is always me losing consciousness fifteen minutes in and yet still waking up the next morning covered with a dragon breaths worth of Maple Bacon Kettle Chips crumbs. This is an amazing new menopausal innovation: sleep-eating.

However, its no secret that our whirling blue marble has been going through some tumultuous, almost apocalyptic-feeling times lately, about which literally millions of words have been written. (Bumper sticker: WHERE ARE WE GOING, AND WHY ARE WE IN THIS HANDBASKET?) So even if one isnt getting stoned regularly, though no judgments if you are, I do think, as we struggle through day by day, theres something to be said for checking out a little occasionally, taking a breath, and finding some restorative joyor at least some humor, dammitin the small things.

So this, in short, is what this book is: a simple year in midlife. True, being this age did not seem golden, but feeling old and young at the same time can turn out to have silver linings. (Gratitude is not just a word on a throw pillow any more, although it is, in fact, also a word on a throw pillow.) Yes, the daily news is surrealbut the Walmart reading glasses I bought for the fun Tina Fey frames with the slightly too-low prescriptionfuzzes it. Yes, there are some weird hip-joint things going on, but no more periodsf@#$ing awesome! Yes, the personal trainer you booked is commanding you to do burpies, but thats the beauty of not being in junior high any morefire him!

Speaking of junior high, this year my golden years included parenting my somewhat maturing/somewhat not school-age daughters. This is the year I woke up from all of that you-go-girl nurturing (And do we feel you have a soy allergy, honey?) to full-on freaking out about college. There were some unexpected (and I blush to say, not entirely unwelcome) funerals. There were the joys and surprising annoyances of spending the Second Act of ones life with ones soulmate. (We are both bohemian; we are both messy; we both do not understand home repairor pest control. Charming at twentynot so charming approaching sixty! Although, as always, those Tina Fey/slightly-too-low-a-prescription reading glasses help take the edge off.)