by Ada Calhoun
In 2017, another major study found that the two biggest stressors for women were work and children, with a compounding effect on those having both.¹² We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising—in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.
One in four middle-aged American women is on antidepressants.¹³ Nearly 60 percent of those born between 1965 and 1979 describe themselves as stressed—thirteen points higher than Millennials.¹⁴ Three in four women born in 1965–1977 “feel anxious about their finances.”¹⁵
For a while, I thought only corporate strivers were having a hard time managing. Then I started hearing the same angst in the voices of women with all variations of work and home life. I was shocked when a friend whom I’d never seen rattled by anything told me that in her forties she’d become so consumed by caring for her two little kids, full-time job, side hustles, marriage, and ailing father that she worried constantly about money and couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept well.
As I’ve spoken to women around the country, I’ve marveled at how similarly they talk about their lives:
Over a diner breakfast, a successful single woman in Texas told me she thought she’d have a husband and kids by now. She asked, “What did I do wrong?”
While her baby slept on her chest, a married mother of three in Oregon said she thought she’d have a career by now. “What did I do wrong?” she asked.
While scientific study of aging has increased in the past decade, the research still often skips middle age.¹⁶ Where research is done on the middle years, the focus is typically on men. The rare middle-aged-woman 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 mid-life 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 more than two hundred 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 the time I spent prepping for the class and the time I spent marking papers, this worked out to less per hour than I’d made as an office manager when I was a college student.
The other interview was for a full-time job paying far less than the one I’d held fifteen years earlier. It would be a huge demotion, working for a company that seemed not very stable. But what the hell, right? I knew the industry was in a bad place, and a job’s a job. The interview went well. On the way home, I wrestled with my hopes and dreams. I decided that I would go ahead and accept, overqualified though I was, shaky though the workplace seemed.
I didn’t even get a callback.
I resolved to broaden my search, explore all my options.
Options. We still have them in midlife, but they can start to seem so abstract. Yes, I could go to graduate school and get a doctorate, but where would I find the tuition? I could switch careers—therapist? Zamboni driver?—but at this stage of life, do I really want to start from the bottom, surrounded by twenty-year-olds? If I went on an Eat, Pray, Love walkabout, who would pick up the kid from school?
“Every decision you make in life sends you off down a path that could turn out to be a wrong one,” writes the British musician Viv Albertine in her memoir of midlife. “A couple of careless decisions somewhere along the line, that’s all it takes to waste years—but then you can’t creep along being so cautious that you don’t have adventures. It’s difficult to get the balance right.”²⁵
“Difficult” is an understatement. How do you know when it’s time to give up a dream? How do you know if you’re like one of those success stories, the type who never surrendered in spite of everyone telling them they were deluding themselves, or if you’re a sap who needs to stop kidding herself, be realistic, and grow up already?
As my family enjoyed the summer, I brooded. I was sure that my career was over, mortally embarrassed to be in debt, and I couldn’t stop agonizing about what to do. My thoughts were dark:
If only I’d never gone freelance.
If only we’d stockpiled cash for a rainy day.
If only my husband were a day trader.
We were dumb to take that vacation.
Each morning, I looked in the mirror and saw a very tired middle-aged person—no longer young, no longer vibrant. I was forty-one, but didn’t look, to myself, two years older than thirty-nine; I looked a century older. There were deep wrinkles around my eyes. My skin was ashen. The skin under my arms was loose. I’d been hearing “In middle age, you’re more likely to gain weight around the middle of the body” for a while; and now I knew what the magazines were talking about. I had widened, and I did not like it.
Some of this was vanity, but I also felt disoriented: Whose body was this?
Oh, and my very first mammogram showed an “irregularity.” Two ultrasounds, a biopsy, more than $1,000 in co-pays, and weeks of dread later, it proved to be nothing. But the experience felt like the first rattle of a car ready to be traded in.
And the periods! Sometimes they’d be two months apart, sometimes two weeks. Sometimes light. Sometimes so heavy I’d bleed through a tampon, a pad, and jeans. The cramps were apocalyptic. I found myself emotionally erratic, too, in a way that seemed out of proportion to the money and work pressure. I’d slam drawers, so irritated I could hardly look at my husband. A day or two a month, I would cry so hard it was as if someone had died.
I went to the gynecologist, who said nothing was physically wrong with me. She prescribed Serenol, Swedish flower pollen delivered via online subscription at $40 a month for my mood, and evening primrose oil for breast aches, and she encouraged me to take a multivitamin with calcium and vitamin D. If none of that worked, she said, we could try antidepressants—something I resisted because while on them a decade earlier I’d lost my sex drive, gained twenty pounds, and didn’t want to write.
The supplements did not seem to be helping, though I took them every day and tried to convince myself that they were effective. Meanwhile, I followed every bit of reasonable advice the books and internet offered for someone hoping to feel better on a budget. I went for long walks outside in nature, took the stairs instead of the elevator, drank lots of water, cut back on alcohol and caffeine, ate vegetables, wore sunscreen, packed my lunches, planked.
I woke up every morning and showered and took care of my kid and went to the dentist and bought groceries and listened to my husband talk about his day and helped the neighbor girl with her high school applications and plucked my eyebrows. I read the books about how midlife was an opportunity in disguise. I watched TED talks and listened to advice shows.
“So,” my husband said, sounding distressed. “You’re a podcast person now?”
After doing everything I was supposed to do, I felt a little better, maybe? But there was still the money fear and the feeling that my career was over and the bone tiredness.
There were flickers of joy, particularly when friends came over. One night a friend texted me: “I need an OUTING.”
“Want a beer?” I wrote back.
“YES,” she replied.
Minutes later, she was at my place, telling me about the fight she’d just had with her husband and how much pressure she felt being the primary breadwinner, her own ambitions often delayed to make way for her family’s needs. She told me that everyone at her job was younger and that after many years of being happy with how she looked, she’d started googling things like “noninvasive procedures.”
“I haven’t shot anything into my face—yet,” she said. “I’m still wondering if it’s better to go no-makeup-don’t-care or lots-of-makeup-making-an-effort.”
She thought spending money to look younger might pay off in the long run, because it could keep her from being pushed out by the Millennials angling for her job. The topper: she concluded she couldn’t afford to have anything done.
What I didn’t know that summer is that historic forces have been at work in the lives of Generation X women:
We were born into a bleak economy and grew up during a boom in crime, abuse, and divorce. We were raised “prespecialness,” which meant not only no participation trophies but a
lso that we were shielded far less than children today from the uglier sides of life.
We started our job hunts in the early 1990s recession, which was followed by a “jobless recovery.”²⁶ If you were born later into Generation X, you might have entered the workforce around the 1999ish stock market peak, but then the tech bubble started to burst, landing you in the 2001 recession. Yes, the economy began to recover, and by the mid-2000s you might have taken advantage of easy-to-get mortgages, but then in 2008 the sky fell.
Now, in middle age, Gen X has more debt than any other generation²⁷—a whopping 82 percent more than Boomers and about $37,000 more than the national consumer average.²⁸
Compared with other generations, we also have less saved—and women have less than men. At the same time, we face a much higher cost of living than Boomers did at our age, particularly for essentials like housing.²⁹
Generation X marks the end of the American dream of ever-increasing prosperity. We are downwardly mobile, with declining job stability. It used to be that each generation could expect to do better than their parents. New research confirms that Generation X won’t.
Many of us have delayed marriage and children into our thirties and forties.³⁰ This means that we are likely to find ourselves taking care of parents in decline at the same time that we are caring for little children—and, by the way, being urged to ask for raises and lean in at work.
This stress is compounded by the hormonal chaos and associated mood swings of the years leading up to menopause. In a cruel twist, the symptoms of hormonal fluctuation are exacerbated by stress, while the symptoms in turn raise stress levels.
Meanwhile, we are bombarded with catastrophic breaking news alerts, social media’s curated images of others’ success, and nonstop work obligations—not to mention phone calls, texts, and email. Workers in upper management today spend an average of seventy-two hours a week making themselves available to work.³¹