Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  Our lives can begin to feel like the latter seconds of a game of Tetris, where the descending pieces pile up faster and faster.

  Worse, at this hectic age, we have to make many of the toughest decisions of our lives: Is it time to give up on starting my own business? Is it time to switch careers? Should I get married? Should I get divorced? Am I done having kids? Will I ever have kids? Where should the kids go to school? Do I put my parent with Alzheimer’s into a nursing home, and, if so, who’s going to pay for it? When it comes to realizing my dreams, is it too late?

  Being beset with these hard questions while dealing with all of the pressures of midlife is like coming upon an emergency situation for which you’re untrained. Your performance is unlikely to be maximally efficient.

  In this, Gen Xers are ill-served by our default cynicism.

  When we saw the 1989 film Say Anything in our youth, kickboxing romantic hero Lloyd Dobler’s dinner-table speech, something many Gen Xers can recite verbatim, may have seemed profound: “I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” This proposed wisdom has not aged well.

  Dobler’s “unifying philosophy was adorable and original and so crazy it might work in 1989,” a friend said to me the other day, “but now that guy is sitting on your futon playing Grand Theft Auto in a Pavement T-shirt.”

  The year I was born, Gail Sheehy published the mega bestseller Passages, which took seriously both men’s and women’s midlife reckoning with their mortality and described predictable phases of life in the manner of the terrible twos, with tags including “Trying 20s” and “Forlorn 40s.”

  It was a new spin on the influential psychologist Erik Erikson’s work with what he described as eight psychosocial life stages. He said that infancy is about the tension between trust and mistrust. If you complete that phase successfully, you achieve the basic virtue of hope. Your adolescent years are a crisis of identity versus role confusion. Ages eighteen to forty are about intimacy versus isolation. At issue from ages forty to sixty-five, according to Erikson, is avoiding stagnation, with the goal being an investment in society that leads to “generativity,” shaping a legacy and having a lasting impact on the world.

  According to Sheehy, the years between thirty-five and forty-five are the “Deadline Decade,” during which people might feel they are running out of time. She argued that Erikson’s writing on the stages of growth applied only to men: “If the struggle for men in midlife comes down to having to defeat stagnation through generativity, I submit that the comparable task for women is to transcend dependency through self-declaration.”³²

  When Sheehy wrote a new introduction to Passages in 2006, she acknowledged that Gen X women were a whole new ballgame: “There are still broad, general stages of adulthood, and predictable passages between them. But the timetable has stretched by at least ten years, and counting. Age norms for major life events have become highly elastic. Since there is no longer a standard life cycle, people are left to customize their own.”³³ Women of this generation, she said, are living “cyclical lives that demand they start over again and again.”

  Gen X women had sky-high expectations for themselves. The contrast between our “you can be anything” indoctrination and the stark realities encountered in midlife—when you might, despite your best efforts, not be able to find a partner or get pregnant or save for retirement or own your own home or find a job with benefits—has made us feel like failures at the exact moment when we most require courage. It takes our bodies longer to recover from a night of drinking and it takes our spirits longer to bounce back from rejection. We may wind up asking questions like the one my friend posed to me the other night: “Do you think my life is ever going to be good again?”

  “You may or may not run out of money,” another woman said. “But you will definitely run out of time.”

  As dark as all this may sound, I promise that there is cause for hope.

  When I told someone recently that I was working on this book, he said, “That must be depressing, talking to hundreds of women about how miserable they are.”

  Actually, I’ve found it the opposite. The project has made me feel less alone, and it has given me clarity about my life and my friends’ lives. I see now, finally, a way out of our crisis. It begins with facing up to our lives as they really are, letting go of the expectations we had for ourselves growing up, and finishes with finding a viable support system and realizing that this stage of life doesn’t last forever. The truth is, when you look at what we were up against as a generation, we are doing better than we had any reason to expect.

  1

  Possibilities Create Pressure

  “If you said you wanted to be a nurse, everyone would say, ‘Why not a doctor?’”

  When Kelly was a little girl growing up in the 1970s, she believed that girls could do anything. The daughter of blue-collar parents in the northern New Jersey suburbs, Kelly was the first in her immediate family to finish college.

  Kelly and her friends played a game called Mary Tyler Moore, inspired by the 1970s TV show. They would play-act being spunky, independent women living in the city on their own. Rather than pretending to be a cowgirl or a princess, Kelly would be “this young, working single woman who was out to conquer everything.” She loved the theme song: “You’re going to make it after alllll!” And she loved the cap toss. And she loved the way that Mary found her tribe at work.

  Kelly went through school in the first flush of Title IX, the federal law passed in 1972 that said boys and girls must be treated equally when it came to federally funded educational programs and activities. No longer could schools legally discriminate when it came to financial assistance, recruitment, admissions, or athletics.¹ The playing field would be more level, and girls, everyone predicted, would flourish.

  The thwarted ambitions of Kelly’s own mother raised the stakes: “She was living through my life. There was always the fear: what if she was disappointed?”

  This was happening all over the country. First-wave feminists had fought for the right to vote at the turn of the nineteenth century. Second-wave feminists who’d been fighting for women’s rights starting in the early 1960s were now raising their daughters to receive the torch and to reach new levels of success: becoming doctors, not nurses; professors, not grade-school teachers; CEOs, not secretaries. If our grandparents worked the land and our parents toiled in middle management, we would get the corner office—and, of course, have a family, a nice house, and a social life. Echoing in our ears was the second-wave mother’s mantra: “Girls can grow up to be anything—even president!”

  One midwestern woman I know wanted to go to school locally, but her own mother, who hadn’t been allowed to go away to school herself, insisted her daughter leave her home state for college. The family got a second mortgage to pay the out-of-state tuition. “I spent all spring and then thirteen hours in a car driving there trying to figure out how to say I didn’t want to go,” the woman, now in her late forties, recalled. “My poor mother. The minute we started unpacking—which she was so excited about—I burst into tears.”

  “A lot of the media at that time,” Kelly told me, “said, ‘You can bring home the bacon, and fry it up …’” Kelly hummed the notorious commercial for Enjoli perfume² that many of us still keep in our psychic filing cabinet along with “Mikey likes it!”

  In the 1980 Enjoli ad, set to the 1962 hit “I’m a Woman,”³ a blonde woman sings that she can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan—and never let you forget you’re a man. In the course of one day—during which her perfume, we are assured, never fades—she wears a business suit in which to make money, a collared shirt and pants in which to cook, and a cocktail dress and sultry pout in which to seduce. Tagline: “The eight-hour perfume for your twenty-four-hour woman.”

  So successful is the woman in the ad that while she is reading a book t
o off-camera children, an off-camera man’s voice says, “Tonight I’m gonna cook for the kids.” She responds with a coy, pleasantly surprised smile. I guess on this one special day she gets to be a twenty-three-hour woman.

  Kelly, like many young girls watching that ad, saw the actress going from office to kitchen to bedroom not as an absurd, regressive fantasy directed at men to make them buy their wives Enjoli perfume but as a blueprint for a full life. Looks doable, thought many young women. I’ll go to work and come home and make dinner and be sexy the whole time, just the way I doubled up on AP classes while serving as captain of the volleyball team and editor of the yearbook and teasing my bangs with just the right amount of hair spray.

  When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984, Kelly was enthusiastic but not surprised—because of course women were smashing glass ceilings. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before women ran companies and eventually the country, too.

  The opening montage of 1987’s Baby Boom showed shoulder-padded women proudly marching into corporate offices. In the film Working Girl (1988), Melanie Griffith’s character says to Harrison Ford’s: “I’ve got a head for business and a bod’ for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?”⁴ (Flustered, he says no.)

  Kelly and her friends dreamed big, and they went on to higher education. Supplied with both heads and bods, they assumed that in addition to conquering the business world they would one day acquire their own Harrison Fords.

  Post–Mary Tyler Moore Show, the TV show Murphy Brown, starring a sardonic Candice Bergen, became Kelly’s lodestar. When Brown became a single mother in the 1992 season 4 finale, while holding down a powerful newsroom job, Kelly again got the message. Women could have a life rich in both love and achievement. All you needed to make it all work was a good work ethic, supportive friends, and maybe a wacky house painter-turned-nanny named Eldin to watch your baby while you worked.

  This was the plan. But once Kelly became an adult, reality intervened. While at college in Washington, DC, she started noticing that the promised land was not quite as easy to reach as she’d been told it would be. One of the main problems in making dreams come true? They cost money.

  Halfway through college, Kelly realized she would need a master’s degree to achieve what she wanted to in the field of psychology. Her parents wouldn’t pay for more school. She was already accumulating a lot of debt from her undergraduate degree and was “terrified,” she said, of ending up broke and having to move back home. She resolved to get a job and pay off what she owed. Later, she would find a way to get her advanced degree and make a career change.

  She couldn’t. Kelly graduated into a bad economy and had a hard time finding any job. After a long search, she wound up settling for an administrative position with scant opportunity for growth. As soon as she was able to switch, she moved to the insurance industry, then the field of human resources. She worked long hours and felt rather less than fulfilled, but it was steady work. Still, the grad school money never materialized.

  A few years of dating later, she married at twenty-eight. She had her first daughter at thirty-one, at which point she stopped working full-time. She had another baby two years later, and planned to return to work once both children were in school. Two years before that could happen, though, when her younger child was three, the family was in a car wreck. Her daughter suffered a traumatic brain injury. There was a lot of caregiving to do, and there was never a question of Kelly’s husband staying home.

  Many women told me their careers were derailed by family responsibilities or medical problems—whether their own or a family member’s. For our generation, the odds of having a child diagnosed with an intellectual disability or a developmental delay have increased. The number of teenagers thought to have attention deficit disorders went up by 43 percent between 2003 and 2011.⁵ Autism spectrum disorder diagnoses surged from ten per ten thousand children in the year 2000 to fifty per ten thousand by 2010.

  Even parents of children without this sort of difficulty can struggle to find good support. One single mother told me she returned from a business trip and discovered that her babysitter had neglected her baby; he had developed a severe rash. She didn’t want to travel for work after that, and a few months later she was laid off for this lack of commitment.

  “Plenty of women saw themselves in Dan Quayle’s description of Murphy as ‘a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman,’” wrote Caryn James in 1992 in the New York Times.⁶ “They were able to think, ‘Murphy Brown, c’est moi,’ until it occurred to them to ask, ‘Where’s Eldin?’”

  That could be a bumper sticker for our generation: “Where’s Eldin?”

  Kelly had another child, who is now ten. She has never returned to work.

  “I haven’t worked full-time for almost twenty-two years,” said Kelly, sounding embarrassed. Now that she no longer has young children at home and her injured daughter is stable, she knows she could go back, and she knows she probably has at least fifteen or twenty years left before retirement. But who will hire her? She’s been out of the business world long enough that she no longer has viable connections, and she didn’t love the HR industry in the first place.

  “How do you go back, and what do you do, and is it going to be satisfying?” she said. “I also worry that I’m going to be too old. I have a sister-in-law who’s two years older than I am. She’s had a career, but she got laid off. It was really bad. She’s had a really hard time finding permanent employment. And she feels it’s her age, so she took the year she graduated off her résumé.”

  Kelly fantasizes about doing something creative. She and her husband have partially written a book about their experience raising a disabled child, though they haven’t made much headway on edits or trying to get it published.

  She says she’s lucky to have the chance to think about these things, not to have to go to an office every day and support the family. Yet deep down, she considers her husband the luckier one. He gets to be off on his own all day. He has downtime during which he can go out to lunch or daydream. She feels she can never catch up to her own thoughts, because her more routine obligations—doctor appointments and driving the kids around, filling out forms and cleaning and cooking—never let up. “There are times,” she says, “when I get resentful.”⁷

  Kelly’s oldest daughter, when she was about eleven or twelve, said to Kelly one day while they were driving in the car: “No offense, but I don’t want to be a stay-at-home mom.”

  Kelly replied: “I’m not offended. I want you to do whatever makes you happy. And if you want to have a job and be a mom, that’s fine. If you don’t want to be a mom, that’s fine. If you don’t want to get married, that’s fine. Whatever you want to make you happy, that’s all I want for you: to be healthy and happy.”

  She’s given her daughter the gift of lower expectations, but she still can’t permit herself the same. Every day, Kelly wakes up feeling that she should be looking for a job, writing a book, being more productive. And every day she worries that even if everyone rallied in support of her dreams now, it would be too late.

  Deborah Luepnitz, a Boomer psychotherapist practicing in Philadelphia, said, “What I see in my Gen X patients is total exhaustion. They feel guilty for complaining, because it’s wonderful to have had choices that our mothers didn’t have, but choices don’t make life easier. Possibilities create pressure.”

  We kept hearing again and again that we could be anything we wanted to be. We had supportive mothers insisting we would accomplish more than they had. Title IX made sure our after-school classes were as good as the boys’. We saw women on television who had families and fun careers. So, if we happened to fail, why was that? The only thing left to blame was ourselves.

  One day in an email after we’d met for lunch, my friend Caroline Miller, a Boomer who started in journalism as a newspaper reporter in 1976 and went on to be editor in chief of Seventeen and New York magazine, said, �
�It seems unfair that the wave I got to ride through my forties, not just the economic boom but the exhilaration of finding our way as ‘liberated’ women, isn’t there anymore. Exceeding expectations was so much easier when there basically were no expectations. Whatever you managed to do was more of a win. It’s as if the idea of stress hadn’t been invented yet when I was your age.”

  If I had to pick an onset date for Generation X stress, I’d put it in the mid-1970s. Nostalgic tributes to the ’70s and ’80s usually ignore the fact that in many ways it was a rough time to be a kid. Crime spiked. The economy tanked. There was an “infinite tolerance” policy when it came to bullying and a conviction that kids should fight their own battles.

  One Gen X friend from New Jersey recalls her high school guidance counselor telling her that she had been “raised wrong” and was going nowhere. Another friend tells me her counselor had a public meltdown in their Philly school’s lunchroom—yelling at the kids that none of them would amount to anything.

  When I hear stories like that, it makes me glad that my own school administrators were largely AWOL. My friend Asia had what for the time was an extended conversation with our principal. This was their exchange:

  “Asia, why did you punch that boy?”

  “Because he was picking on little Eric Lee.”

  “Oh,” the principal said. “That’s okay then. Good job standing up for your friend. When you go out there, tell everyone I yelled at you.”

  That was a good part of the laissez-faire approach to children back then: the freedom. A bad part: without adult protection, we were more vulnerable to harassment.

  At my middle school, the boys made a sport out of snapping girls’ bras in the hallway. Plenty of times that happened in front of teachers, and no one ever did anything about it.