by Ada Calhoun
“The milestones we have ahead of us we can picture. I guess that’s why people call it downhill.”
“In my twenties, life was so vibrant,” said Holly. “Every minute required your full attention. Now, I think, Wait a second. Everything just slowed down. My kids don’t need me as much. Life doesn’t feel as exciting as it did. That feeling—where is it?” She hit her own thigh for emphasis. “I need that feeling back.”
I’d gathered a small panel of Gen X women at a lively hotel bar overlooking Nashville, Tennessee: Holly, wearing jeans and a blazer, is an education reporter I’d met a dozen years earlier. Her sister, Annie, wearing Converse and dark lipstick, had just cashed out of a start-up she’d been working at for fifteen years. Their friend Melissa, in a gray turtleneck sweater, her brown hair tied up, works for a church in Tennessee. They are all in their midforties and have several children among them—children they started having between the ages of thirty and forty.
When they arrived, all tasteful makeup and enthusiasm for appetizers, the three women struck me as consummately pulled together. “Look, we made it out of the house!” one said triumphantly, and everyone laughed. Midway through an $11 glass of wine, the laughter stopped. Holly said she felt numb. She’d been doing the same job for a long time, been married to the same man for a long time, and her life had become a parade of duty and routine. There was no affair, no sports car, no blowing up her life—just the terse, desperate gesture of hitting her own leg.
A year or so before, Melissa, too, found herself feeling stuck. She’d done everything “right”: breastfed her babies, paid her taxes, taken care of people in the community all day and her family all night. And then looked around at her life thinking, “Is this my reward?”
She caught herself spiraling: I don’t want to do this job anymore. I don’t want to be a mom anymore. Definitely don’t want to be a wife anymore. I want to run for the hills.
Holly chimed in: “I remember hearing my own mom say those words in our house. She was coming so unglued that she opened the door and said, ‘I’m going to Mexico, and I’m not coming back!’ She slammed the door and took off in the car.”
“Did she go to Mexico?” I asked.
“No,” said Holly.
“Of course not,” said Annie. “She went to the grocery store by herself.”
“Don’t forget how to have fun!” an older woman once told me when I was in high school and busy with school and several jobs. “If you forget how to have fun, it becomes really hard to remember.”
I didn’t quite understand what she meant then, but now I do.
When our Boomer mothers were middle-aged, they, too, weathered the hormonal swings around menopause. The pressures of this stage of life, coinciding as they do with difficult physical changes, are enough to make anyone storm out of the house or snap at people or fantasize about having less responsibility. Feeling that our life is robbed of joy is a mainstay of middle age for most people at some point or other. But there is something in Holly’s quietly saying that she just wants to feel something that illustrates how, for Generation X, our obsession with doing it all—and doing it all well—can add a layer of shame and loneliness. In so many women’s stories I heard variations on: We were supposed to have solved this by now.
“I need to create some more surprises for myself in my life,” one Midwest woman told me. “Because now I can plot out how it’s all going to go, and I hate that. Who will I marry? How many kids will I have? All those milestones, gone. I’ve done it. Now it’s just seeing my kids off to college and traveling with my husband, if we can ever afford it. I don’t mean to sound so grim, really. I do love my life, but what comes with excitement is hope, right? I remember what it was like when you first met a guy, and it was so electric, and I’m never going to have that again.”
From more than one woman I heard variations on what one said to me the other day through tears: “Don’t get me wrong: I chose my life. I just never thought I’d feel this average.”
If these women chose their lives, then what exactly happened? How did choices made freely turn so stale? How could women who wanted the challenging job and the financial independence, plus the full home life, still relate to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique? Why do they want to run away just as much as their mothers did, and why do they, too, often end up seeking emotional shelter alone at the supermarket?
At the Nashville bar, conversation turned to feeling unappreciated at home and work.
“That’s the other part of the midlife crisis thing,” said Melissa. “Nobody, when you’re forty-five, is telling you you’re awesome. Nobody. Your kids aren’t going to say thank you and validate you and appreciate you. Work relationships are just not that; they care about your output.”
Annie, who dated enthusiastically as a young woman, chimed in: “And if you’re used to getting attention from men all the time, then that just kind of goes away in your forties.”
“I remember having my first baby,” said Melissa, “and thinking, I love myself. I just rocked this baby. I got it out of my body. I made a human. I made its femur. I remember lying in bed with this baby thinking, I love you, but I also love me. I’m awesome.”
Now, though, that same child heads off to school in the morning and doesn’t even turn around to see Melissa waving good-bye. He does not thank her for getting him transferred out of the class where the teacher kept yelling at him or for helping with his Rosa Parks school project. He doesn’t notice the packed snacks and full water bottle or the fresh sheets on his bed. He doesn’t see that the clothes that no longer fit have been replaced with clothes that do. One of the great ironies of middle-age torpor and invisibility is that they often hit just as our children are in or approaching the most change-filled, attention-getting, self-involved years of their lives.
As Melissa talked, I was reminded of the time I was up on my computer until 2:00 a.m. to make a deadline and woke up at 6:00 a.m. to take my son to school. I found him in tears because the tooth fairy hadn’t come. While he was brushing his teeth, I “found” a bill behind his bed that the tooth fairy must have dropped, but my son did not fall for it. This beautiful, gentle child, whom I birthed, looked at me through narrowed eyes and handed me back the money with a note that read “TO [sic] LATE.”
Everyone at that table in Nashville had a story of something seemingly small that illustrated how no matter what she did, it never seemed to be enough for others—even others who loved her. Everyone also had stories about moments that made her feel completely unsupported.
Annie had a good one: She was working hard at her start-up and had two small children at home when her husband’s fortieth birthday came around. She gave him a ski trip to Utah. She usually took care of most of the household bills and logistics, but her husband had one assignment, she said: the electric bill.
“Uh-oh,” said the women at the table.
“So, my nanny calls me at work,” Annie said, “and says, ‘Hey.’ It was nineteen degrees outside. She said, ‘Hey, something weird just happened. The electricity went out.’ And I thought, I know what happened. So I called Todd, and he was on the fucking slopes with his dudes. He said, ‘Oh my God, okay, okay, hold on. I’m going to call right now. I’m going to call and pay it right now.’ Well guess what? When they shut it off, you can’t pay it over the phone. You have to go to the utility place. So I had to leave work.”
For Annie, that moment symbolized how her husband seemed not to have her back. It made her angry, and it turned her into a drill sergeant. When he returned home from the ski trip, she greeted him with a list of jobs that needed doing. “Choose five and you’ll do them,” she said. “You do them well, and you do them on time.” (Whenever I hear anyone describe a middle-aged woman as a shrew or a nag, I wonder what sort of ski-slope phone call may have figured in the situation.)
Annie and her husband went to therapy, and Annie says there the male therapist tried to explain to her that her husband’s brain was just wired differently
. It was the old Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992) school, but with a veneer of evolutionary psychology: “[The therapist] was saying: ‘Todd, because he’s male, his brain is wired as I’ve got to hunt and I’ve got to kill! So Todd is very singularly focused. And the way your brain has been wired, Annie, is that you are in the hut.’”
“Oh, you’re in the hut, all right,” said Holly.
The therapist told her: “The children are crying and the food has to be prepared. And the grandmother is in the hut with you. So you’re thinking about all these relationships. And you’re anticipating Todd coming back with the kill. Todd’s singular focus is to hunt and kill. But that benefits the family.”
Annie said she tried to go with it, to meet the therapist halfway. “I feel like in this analogy, the electric bill is the deer?” she recalled saying to him. “And the hunter would be paying the electric bill. So if he is a hunter, he is a bad hunter.”
To Annie, the therapist’s theory sounded like: “You’re so fortunate to have this other kind of brain wiring, Annie! It means you get to do everything.”
Melissa, too, went to see a psychotherapist. She went because she’d found herself obsessing over little things and seeing them as symbolic of massive problems in her marriage. For example: “The bed’s not made. I’ve asked him to make it. Why can’t he just make it? Why doesn’t he love me enough to make the bed?”
When Melissa’s mother turned forty, it was with an empty nest and “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40!” partyware. When Melissa was forty she was pregnant—and taking care of her ailing father, plus three children, and working full-time.
Ultimately, Melissa hit rock bottom on the fifteenth anniversary of September 11. She’d seen the tragedy firsthand because she was living near the Twin Towers. A friend had lost his life there. On the 2016 anniversary, she was spending the day reflecting on what had happened and what she’d seen. She started crying and found she couldn’t stop.
Going through her head were how many things had changed that day—not only for the country, but for her: “September tenth, everything was different. The whole world was different. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t have a career. I didn’t have a husband. I didn’t have kids. Everything about me was different.”
She followed her therapist’s advice and took time off to sort through all these feelings: “I spent five days at an intensive program. I kickboxed and screamed in the woods and walked a labyrinth and wrote a letter to my fifteen-year-old self and talked to my mom.” She realizes, she says, how self-helpy it all sounds, but she threw every cliché she could think of at the problem and found a lot of it actually did help.
She changed jobs, stopped drinking for a while, switched from coffee to tea. She also stopped expecting her husband to change: “Fifteen years I waited for him to bring home dinner,” she said. Now she’s reconciled to the knowledge that he will never, ever bring home dinner.
Oh, and one more thing helped her feel more alive: she bought a new car.
There’s no more iconic midlife-crisis fix than swapping the family wheels for something sporty.
“I turned in the minivan,” Melissa said triumphantly.
“What did you get instead?” I asked.
A Ferrari, I thought she would say. A Ford Mustang. A Dodge Viper. A convertible.
There was a pause as every woman at the table waited to hear about the hot new car.
“A Prius,” said Melissa.
“Not a Cadillac?” asked Annie, deflated.
“No,” said Melissa.
There was silence, and then Annie said what we were all thinking.
“I’m sorry I have to say it,” said Annie. “A Prius is not a midlife-crisis car.”
“It’s also ten years old,” said Melissa. “But it might be the nicest car I ever get.”
Annie recently sought help for the doldrums, too, via an unholy number of ballet exercise classes and a few doctor visits: “Physically, I hadn’t been feeling well. I knew there was something hormonal going on. I went to a couple of different doctors to talk about it. My gynecologist told me: ‘Oh, well, if you’re having heavy periods, let’s do a hysterectomy.’ I said, ‘Hey, let’s put the brakes on, because we haven’t talked about anything else.’” (Her doctor is not the only one rushing to surgery. One study estimated, based on their numbers, that 18 percent of hysterectomies performed annually in the United States for benign conditions may have been unnecessary.)¹
“Then a specialist finally got the answers because he did the right blood work. In my first consultation with him, he said, ‘The medical community does not pay enough attention to women in their forties.’ He’s probably in his late sixties. He’s been doing this for a long time. He said, ‘What happens to you in your forties, as a woman, will determine how long you live, will determine how happy you are for the next forty years. Your body is changing so dramatically. The hormone shifts that you’re going through are not insignificant. And they have so many downstream health effects.’”
When Annie’s test results came in, the doctor told her: “You have zero testosterone in your body. No wonder you have no energy, don’t want to have sex, and feel tired and listless all the time.” Hormone therapy—something many women of this age (for reasons that will be made clear in chapter 9) associate with a higher risk of cancer—has resurrected her energy and libido.
I’ve heard stories of other low-energy, low-libido women being steered, by women’s magazines or nonspecialists, toward role-playing games, sexier outfits, or sex toys (as ever, more things to plan and shop for). Trying to look or act “sexy” in middle age can be a tough needle to thread. One woman told me that when she hit forty she felt the world was telling her: “Hand over your miniskirt. Step into this Eileen Fisher sack.” If you don’t comply, one woman told me, you run the risk of being mocked as “mutton dressed as lamb.”
After long periods of dating during our single years (during which members of Gen X tally an average of ten sexual partners),² we may feel frustrated by the relative calm of a monogamous partnership. Or, if we missed out back then, we may go for it now.
“I spent my forties sleeping with men I didn’t get to sleep with in my twenties,” one woman told me. The only problem: she was married. Her husband caught her in an affair and didn’t trust her for years afterward. Not only did she put her marriage in peril, but she also wound up being stalked for years by her affair partner’s wife.
My friend says she knows why she did it. She felt her sexual potency waning. She wanted to feel alive again—just like Holly hitting her leg. And, in the short term, it worked. My friend went out and found some aliveness, all right. But at a price. It’s the catch-22 of midlife restlessness: that trip alone to the supermarket may make you feel dead inside, but going to Mexico could spell disaster.
A forty-two-year-old software engineer in Asheville, North Carolina, told me she grew miserable enough about a lack of passion that she did go ahead and blow it up.
“A couple of years ago,” Diana said, “I was getting ready to turn forty. My life was very comfortable and pleasant and safe. I was in a long-term relationship and everything was fine. It was also unsatisfying, empty, and lonely. And then some things happened. I had a couple of friends die unexpectedly. I don’t know if that got me thinking; it wasn’t conscious. I just look back on it now and I can see that it was kind of a trigger. I started realizing that I was so afraid of everything. I kept hearing the word ‘fear’ come up in my conversations all the time.”
Diana broke up “a very nice, pleasant relationship with a really wonderful person. And I hurt him. I took up with a more unsafe relationship because it was full of passion I had never felt before.” She also started riding motorcycles and took a pole-dancing class. She made new friends with each hobby.
So, did it work? Did she get over her malaise?
“I don’t really necessarily feel like it was the right thing,” she said. “Or a ‘good’ thing or a beneficial thing, even, but I fe
el like it’s all been necessary. I would say the breakup is still causing me some pain, and I’m plagued with second thoughts and doubts about the decisions I’ve made. But the other stuff, the pole fitness, the motorcycle, every other aspect of my life, I’m so grateful for. I’ve let go of so much of the fear that I had holding me back from an enjoyable, passion-fueled life. I wouldn’t change that at all.”
Wind was whipping up outside the Nashville bar, and darkness had fallen. Inside, somewhere between Beyoncé’s “Love on Top” and Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” the music had grown very loud. A young woman came in and sat at a nearby table. She was wearing a short, tight, brightly colored dress and very high heels. It was hard not to stare as she shimmied and flirted. She was glowing.
“You’ll never feel that way again,” said Annie to us, gesturing toward the girl.
“I don’t want to feel that way,” said Holly.
“When I was that age,” said Annie, “I was living in New York City and I weighed, like, a buck ten. I bought wild clothes. I thought I lived in Sex and the City, you know?” Her takeaway from that show: “Women can have sex and nothing’s going to happen. You’re just having fun. Now, she says: “I have moments where I’m driving my minivan, and I drop my kids off at school and I’ll remember something from back then, and I’ll go, ooh.”
“Cringing?” asked Holly.
Annie shrugged. Just remembering. “And I keep going in the minivan.”
“Just a little faster,” said Holly.
As we spoke, our eyes kept darting over to the young woman, who was growing drunker and louder and more electric. She’d become the sun of the room; all activity was revolving around her. She was swaying now, eyes closed, full of life, full of energy, full of the future, blind to the four older women gazing at her from a table in the corner.
I thought of the memento mori optical illusion “All Is Vanity,” published in Life magazine in 1902. A young woman stares into a vanity mirror. Looked at another way, the image becomes a skull. That’s our table, I thought: the reminder of what comes next, when the tiny dress doesn’t fit, when you can’t have five vodka sodas and feel fine the next day.