Why We Can't Sleep. Ada Calhoun
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book usually addresses Boomers’ work disappointment or marital disillusionment17 or tries to make light of physical signs of aging, with emphasis on our necks.
The term “midlife crisis”18 is usually attributed to psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who used it in a 1965 journal article exploring how the creative expression of male artists—Dante, Goethe, Beethoven, Dickens—often changes in quality and content when they pass the age of thirty-five. “Working through the midlife crisis,” he writes, “calls for a reworking through infantile depression, but with mature insight into death.”19
In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Daniel Levinson claimed that about 80 percent of the men he studied experienced “tumultuous struggles within the self and with the external world” in midlife.20 “Every aspect of their lives comes into question,” he wrote. “And they are horrified by much that is revealed.” They may find that they’ve given up creative dreams or sacrificed their values for a stable income—a theme taken up in countless hits in popular fiction and cinema, from the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire.
As rendered in popular culture, the stereotypical male midlife crisis involves busting stuff up— mostly marriages but also careers, norms, reputations. Panic may commence when a man starts losing his hair, resulting in a frenzy to unearth college vinyl. Treatment: regular application of younger women and brightly colored motor vehicles.
There have been any number of movies and books about such men—some even played by actors who are not Michael Douglas. The Woody Allen–American Beauty–Sideways industrial complex has given us dramas in which women provide a reliably boring backdrop—the shrill wife, the tedious aunt, the sad sister—to men’s life-affirming hunger for the passionate life, which materializes with suspicious frequency in the shape of a teenage girl.
A middle-aged woman’s midlife crisis does, I know, pose a dramaturgical problem. In my observation—and as many experts I’ve spoken with have affirmed—women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a “she shed” in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.
From the outside, no one may notice anything amiss. Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone, use CBD edibles to decompress, or cry every afternoon in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie wide awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centered on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.
So I understand why some people consider “crisis” too extreme a word for high-functioning women experiencing what can look like merely malaise or a funk or a rough patch. When I appeared with prominent academic Susan Krauss Whitbourne on a panel this year, she said that there was no scientific evidence for a predictable breakdown in midlife and that calling midlife stress a “midlife crisis” was “an excuse for bad behavior.
“If you’re depressed in midlife,” she said, “there may be many reasons for this, the least of which is your ‘age.’”21 And yet, even Whitbourne granted that Generation X is a particularly morose bunch and that women of this generation were “very stressed out.”
I do take her point. And can we really say women are in “crisis” if, despite how they feel inside, they’re able to crank out well-structured PowerPoint presentations and arrange elaborate gift baskets for teachers on the last day of school?
My friend’s sister, Jenny, a mother of three employed in the STEM field before a recent layoff due to federal budget cuts, said she didn’t think she’d had a midlife crisis. Then she politely added: “Or does the tanking of my marriage, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and a move to LA after twenty-six years in Seattle following my aneurysm constitute a midlife crisis? If so, you can interview me.”
When I asked my friend Aimee, who lives in Baltimore, if she was having a midlife crisis, she said no. Then she said, “Wait, like a ‘What the hell have I done with my life and who am I?’ sort of freak-out? I am definitely having one of those.” While that’s probably an apt description of what many of the women I talked to for this book are undergoing, I still prefer the term “midlife crisis.” I like it because it makes what’s happening sound like the big deal I believe it to be. In my experience, Gen X women spend lots of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”
And that’s true enough. We are fortunate in so many ways. America today, in the global scheme of things, offers us far more opportunity than our grandmothers or mothers had. Although many women are trying to make it on minimum-wage jobs (and have a crisis not specific to middle age), the overall wage gap is closing. Men do more at home. There’s more pushback against sexism. Insert your “reason why we don’t deserve to feel lousy” here. The complaints of well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women are easy to disparage—as a temporary setback, a fixable hormonal imbalance, or #FirstWorldProblems.
Fine. Let’s agree that Generation X women shouldn’t feel bad.22
So why do we?
When I started working on this project, I knew I felt lousy, but I didn’t yet fully understand why. I just knew that I was having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad June. Cue the 1984 Bananarama hit “Cruel Summer.”23
I said, often, that I was very lucky and had no right to complain.
I’d been with my husband for seventeen years. Our eleven-year-old son had been accepted into a great public middle school. My twenty-three-year-old stepson was looking at physical therapy grad programs.
Workwise, I felt better than ever. I’d just published a new book and it had run the table on press coverage—the Today Show! The Washington Post! No less than Star called it a Hot Book.
From the outside and on social media, I knew my life looked enviable.
So why was I miserable? That summer I woke up every day at 4:00 a.m., plagued with self-doubt and anxiety. Lying there, I thought of all the things I really should do or absolutely should not have done until either I’d cycled through my full list of regrets or it was time to get up.
Before even opening my eyes, I would see a number: $20,000. That’s how much credit card debt we had. I walked around under a cloud of worry. That spring, thinking we had money coming in, we’d taken a family vacation to the Grand Canyon and done some home repairs. Three freelance gigs that were supposed to keep us comfortable until the fall and pay off our credit card debt had evaporated. One boss let me go right after I delivered what I’d thought was a completed project. Another replaced me with someone else. A third went AWOL. And now it was summer, the worst time to find work. We had only a month’s worth of cash on hand and it was disappearing fast.
After nearly a decade of freelancing, I began applying for job-jobs. When I’d left the full-time workforce following a layoff in 2009, I’d been making six figures, plus full benefits. Now I was looking for anything that would give me a steady paycheck and—dare to dream—insurance. Health insurance for my family costs us $1,186 a month. We have the cheapest “bronze” plan, with a deductible of several thousand dollars a year. (And, again, I’m lucky; a third to half of middle-aged people in this country go without necessary health care because of cost.)24
I’d always told myself that returning to a full-time job was my “fallback plan.”
Oh, fine! I imagined saying to the corporate world. You can have me!
Only, now that I was willing to fall back, no one was there to catch me.
As I frantically applied for jobs and fellowships, I felt like I was living in the children’s book Are You My Mother? I sent out dozens of résumés and was called in for two interviews. One was for a teaching job paying $600 for a six-week class. I took it, even though, between