Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

These were lines spoken to me by eleven different women whom I found representative of many others. In this polarized era, I found it reassuring, if also a little depressing, to discover how much we have in common at this age.

We’re the first women raised from birth hearing the tired cliché “having it all”8—then discovering as adults that it is very hard to have even some of it. That holds true regardless of whether a Generation X woman has a family or not.

We diminish our whole generation when we dismiss these women’s complaints as unreasonable griping. Societal, historical, and economic trends have conspired to make many women’s passage into middle age a crucible of anxieties—and to make us envy one another rather than realize we are all in the same leaky boat. I hope this book will help us hear women’s concerns not as whining but as a corrective to the misleading rhetoric extolling an American dream that has not come within reach for us—and likely will not for our children.

That said, Boomers and Millennials, sadly, are likely to find a lot to relate to in this book. I hope that younger Millennials will absorb useful cautionary tales and that Boomers will not be too dismayed by how far we have not come.

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.”

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.

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...

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...

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 str...

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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, ‘Whe...

“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’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.”

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.”

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.”

This was before the age of DVR and Netflix, so much of what we saw was advertising. Research from 2017 found that 83 percent of Gen X—more than any other generation—trust ads they see on TV.16 Gen X has been described as both repulsed by materialism and deeply materialistic, and there may be something to that. Those of us whose formative years were the 1980s were steeped in a bath of greed and gluttony: the yuppies’ BMW and Armani fetishes, sports car posters, Wall Street. We may have rebelled against it later by buying secondhand clothes, but we’re inculcated, deep down, with wanting a lot of stuff.

Generation X may well be the “least-parented” generation—more than other generations, left to fend for itself without clear rules, community support, or adult supervision.39 She believes the stress that resulted could be connected to some of our struggles now: “Our suicide rates, liver cancer death rates, et cetera, indicate that something is significantly wrong with the generation. I think we might find that Gen X has higher rates of reactive-attachment.” Reactive attachment disorder—also known by the ironic acronym RAD—involves trouble forming loving relationships as a result of not having had basic needs for caring and affection met.

Today, suicide rates are soaring among middle-aged women.40 For women ages forty-five to fifty-four, it is now the seventh most frequent cause of death, ahead of diabetes, influenza, and pneumonia; for white women in that age group, it’s number five.41 Again, there is no proof of a connection here, but I find it interesting that women are more likely than men to have had four or more adverse childhood experiences.42 With a score of four or higher, you are 460 percent more prone to depression and 1,220 percent more likely to attempt suicide than someone with a score of zero.

In aloneness, one’s life is filled with nothing but the clutter and busyness of activity and, all too often, the painful memories of one’s own past.”44 Women in particular seem to gravitate to the clutter and the busyness. We work so hard because we have to, for money, and very likely because we’re scared.

Marketers have taken notice. One report on selling to us features this strategic analysis: “Life has not been stable. Gen Xers were the children of divorce and dual incomes, and were latchkey kids who grew up by themselves. Selling point: Convince them that your organization is reliable and will simplify rather than complicate their lives.”

“Because we’re women, we’re always going to be seen as complaining. We can’t say anything that has a negative tone to it without being told that we should just appreciate how good things are. So we do what we can. Dye our hair. Try a winged eyeliner. Try to be present, then feel that inevitable letdown when people look right past you.”

And yet both women—raised with unrealistic expectations and running up against countless obstacles—see only what isn’t there. They were taking care of family but didn’t have a career. Or they had a career but never found a partner. They hadn’t lost enough weight, they hadn’t saved enough for retirement, they hadn’t made a significant impact on the world.

It should be plenty to raise children or to have a career—or, frankly, just not to become a serial killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.

:)

“For women, shame is: do it all. Do it perfectly. And never let them see you sweat. I don’t know how much perfume that [Enjoli] commercial sold, but I guarantee you it moved a lot of antidepressants and antianxiety meds.”

One of the goals she encourages women to pursue is what’s known as “radical acceptance”—finding a way to take life as it is, not as you thought it would be. “It’s one of the hardest things,” Chafin says, “to radically accept what’s in front of you.”

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?

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.

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:

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.”

‘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

hysterectomy.

“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.’”

Since our own childhoods, the time parents spend caring for their children’s basic needs has risen dramatically. According to the Pew Research Center,5 in 1965 mothers spent nine hours a week on paid work and ten hours on child care. In 2016, mothers spent twenty-five hours on paid work and fourteen on child care. Something has to give, and it’s usually women’s leisure time or sleep. Even so, of mothers with full-time jobs, 43 percent still lament spending too little time with their children.

According to a study that examined the longitudinal data of men and women from their late twenties to their midfifties, work is good for our mental health except when there are young children at home. When the children get older, psychological benefits of work return. But in that work-and-small-children phase, mothers suffer. Men in the same circumstances show no such effect from the stages of parenthood.

If our generation has been told for decades that we have so much freedom, so many choices, such opportunities, the question women with young children face is: how free are we to reach for the stars in midlife if we have someone else depending on us? Especially when our concept of good parenting involves so much more brain space and such higher costs than it did for our mothers and grandmothers? And when we expect ourselves to be excellent, highly engaged parents while also being excellent, highly engaged employees?

According to a 2015 Gallup poll, no less than 56 percent of working mothers would prefer to stay home.10 That is a huge number, but I can’t imagine anyone who has worked with a baby at home—including the 39 percent of dissenters—being shocked by it. The question of whether we’d rather be home with our new baby or not usually is academic. Few families today can get by on one income; and few employers will grant employees significant time off.

Our parents’ generation, on the whole, did not struggle with exactly the same pressures. If our mothers worked, they often held jobs in which they could clock in and clock out. They weren’t getting pinged from 7:00 a.m. to midnight every day.

Expectations of parental attention, too, were lower. If a 1970s mother had to work or go out, there was no shame in leaving school-age kids home alone, watching TV. One Gen X woman tells me that her Boomer mother comes to visit and is mystified. “Why do you play with them?” her mother asks. “We never played with you.” That is a common sort of exchange between Gen X parents and their elders.

Gen X has been issued the opposite message. Many of the parenting books now in vogue encourage new parents to breastfeed for at least a year and not to sleep-train—two things that usually entail sleep deprivation for mothers.

Perhaps they’ll excel, too, at being partnered while raising little kids. In his 2017 book, The All-or-Nothing Marriage, psychologist Eli J. Finkel points to research which found that, compared with 1975, spouses were spending far less time alone together—fewer date nights, less seeing friends—but doing almost three times as much shared parenting.13 Maybe that’s why Gen X parents often complain that midlife marriage can feel like running a daycare center with someone you used to date.