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

by Ada Calhoun

Health care is another expense that can wipe out a family’s savings, even if they have health insurance. Middle age is when conditions like type 2 diabetes are most likely to be diagnosed.50 According to the National Institutes of Health, chronic pain disorders, like TMJ, are more common in women, and strokes happen more often to middle-aged women than to middle-aged men.51 Our risk of getting breast cancer in our thirties is 1 in 227. In our forties: 1 in 68. In our fifties it is 1 in 42.52

About 75 percent of autoimmune patients are women, Virginia T. Ladd, president and executive director of the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, told me, and autoimmune diseases overall are on the rise. The reason why such afflictions—particularly thyroid disorders like Hashimoto’s disease—are booming remains mysterious.

According to the Social Security Administration, the year in which the Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted is 2034.54 That’s right as many of us will be hitting retirement age. Roughly three-quarters of Gen Xers don’t believe Social Security will provide them with full benefits when they retire.55 If the reserve funds are depleted, that doesn’t mean no more Social Security checks.56 But it may well mean people receive just about three-quarters of what they’re counting on; cuts to Social Security would hit women hardest.

“Chances are, Social Security will still be around once you hit the eligibility age,” writes New York Times finance columnist Ron Lieber. “But it probably won’t provide enough money, after taxes, for all the expenses you’ll face in retirement. Plus, it’s possible that some of the rules will change before it’s your turn to collect.”

Adulthood exerts a steady pressure on us to make decisions: which car insurance to get, where to send the kids to school, whom to marry, what job to have, whether or not to switch careers. Gen X women internalized a fatalism that one friend described to me as: “You have so many choices! Go for the most difficult one or whatever guarantees misery and hardship!” No wonder women in midlife may feel tempted to delay decisions, to hang out a little longer in an in-between state.

Women with children may face additional pressures once they start trying to be more serious about their work. One CEO told me that the number one thing that she sees holding women back in their careers is maternal guilt.

A short Retro Report documentary called The Mommy Wars10 dismantled the “toxic myth” that lasted through the 1990s: that putting young children in daycare or with other caregivers while mothers worked would damage them. The result of the myth was a brainwashing campaign designed to make women feel bad. The most chilling parts of the documentary are the clips of daytime talk shows and nighttime news programs that pit working women and stay-at-home mothers against one another. Then the anchors or hosts, so many of them men, turn somberly to the camera to ask if a woman should choose her job or her children.

Has the same “your career or your life” question ever been asked of men? Despite research showing that a father’s attention is one of the key factors in a child’s emotional health? Not to mention, again: a working mother in 2000 spent just as much time ...

The “Mommy Wars” uproar did drive home one truth: pretty much everyone in America would like to have more support. This wasn’t much of a revelation. In 1971, Judy Syfers Brady wrote the justly famous essay “I Want a Wife”: “I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me.”

Economist Heather Boushey writes in Finding Time12 that when women started working, America lost its “silent partner”—the traditional American wife: “She took care of all the big and small daily emergencies that might distract the American Worker from focusing 100 percent on his job while he was at work. Little Johnny got in a fight on the playground? The American Wife will be right there to talk to the school. Aunt Bea fell and broke her hip? The American Wife can spend the afternoon bringing her groceries and making her dinner. The boss is coming over for dinner? The American Wife already has the pot roast in the oven.”

What I, personally, wouldn’t give for my very own American Wife. She would cook my meals and clean my bathtub and make my appointments and enforce my son’s screen-time limits and drop by to visit my 101-year-old grandmother at the retirement home every week. I would get so much work done. M...

You can buy that sort of support, of course. But then there’s a question of whether or not you’re earning enough to warrant the cost. When my son was a baby, I spent an entire stage play with tears streaming down my face—not because the show was sad or because I particularly missed my child, but because the play was awful and I felt physical ...

The whole “throw money at the problem” solution is awkward also because it suggests that fixing rich or middle-class women’s problems requires poor women’s work: the manicurist, the takeout delivery person, the night nurse, the Uber driver, the masseuse. Talk about invisible labor.

Taking advantage of the disadvantaged.

Generation X women are told incessantly that they should do—or should have done—things differently in order to get what they want. Still, however many times you make a vision board or try to magic a partner or a baby or money or success into your life, sometimes it doesn’t happen. And that’s not necessarily because you didn’t try hard enough.

In 1950, about 22 percent of American adults were single. That number has more than doubled, marking one of the most significant changes to American demographics in the past century. In 2016, 59.8 million households in the United States were maintained by single people—47.6 percent.2 Close to 40 percent of babies are now born to unmarried women.

Not necessarily unpartnered / single mothers i.e. de facto couples.

magazine, “living alone is one way to get a kind of restorative solitude, a solitude that can be productive, because your home can be an oasis from the constant chatter and overwhelming stimulation of the digital urban existence.”

Another friend in her midforties said she’s not going online in the wake of her recent breakup: “I’d rather look through midcentury modern end tables on Etsy than scroll through men.”

:)

Offering a catharsis was Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update: “Sylvia’s right. I definitely should have had a baby when I was twenty-seven, living in Chicago over a biker bar, pulling down a cool twelve grand a year.”24 Fey provided a counterexample, too: she gave birth to her two daughters at the ages of thirty-five and forty-one.

Many Gen X women make a conscious decision not to marry or not to move in with a partner—or not to be parents. They are able to go where they want when they want, to work as much as they want, to cultivate friendships, to give back to the community, to make their own life without interference from or obligation to anyone else. Members of the Childfree by Choice movement state a strong case for living life without kids and for offering support to those who make that choice.

Single women may still be marginalized or stigmatized even—some say especially—when they are happy about being single. In her book Singled Out, social psychologist Bella DePaulo calls this “the singles treatment”: “No matter how fabulously happy and successful you may be,” she writes,28 “you can still get the singles treatment. In fact, some people who dole out the treatment sometimes seem especially miffed by singles who are not whining about their singlehood or pining for coupledom.”

envy.

That seems to have been gospel for 1959. But many happily single women hear it even now. In a 2018 New York Times op-ed called “I’m in My 40s, Child-Free and Happy. Why Won’t Anyone Believe Me?”29 writer Glynnis MacNicol told the story of meeting an older man she admired at a dinner party. He told her she had a terrible life and had his leftover steak wrapped up for her to take home.

It also doesn’t always work, as a few couples I know discovered after several rough, expensive years. In 2016, just 22 percent of assisted reproductive technology procedures with the woman’s own eggs resulted in a live birth.

The reasons why women don’t wind up with the families they wanted, taken one by one, may seem random or like bad luck. But there are patterns. Women blame themselves, ignoring the fact that their decisions are not being made in a vacuum. Wanting a career you love isn’t bad. Wanting to be stable financially before you have a child isn’t bad. Wanting to have the right partner isn’t bad. Unfortunately, sorting all these things out takes time. And women have many fewer fertile years than men, who can father children well into their fifties.

Note higher risk of autism / other health issues in children of older fathers.

We talk about what’s really going on—the worry that we’re self-medicating too much with wine or Xanax, the anger that seems to creep up more and more. Is it hormones? Perimenopause?

“The fact that we are widening and softening where we don’t want to and don’t know if it makes us shallow or not feminists to do something about it; the fear that we don’t know how to monitor our children’s screen time; the fact that we don’t really like or need sex very often anymore; our worry that we are losing time to try our ‘dream’ job …

I can’t even count how many women have confessed to me that they’ve flung something against a wall—their phone, a book, a plate—though it seems telling that in nearly every case, once the fit was over, the woman who threw the object then cleaned it up.

When Kristi Coulter quit drinking, she had an epiphany: “I realize that everyone around me is tanked. But it also dawns on me that the women are super double tanked. I see that booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise.”

Women also benefit exponentially from sleeping more, Dr. Pinkerton said. “How many women get seven hours of sleep a night? How many women keep their exercise going when they’re mentally or physically stressed? It’s often the first thing to go, but it’s absolutely one of the things that can help you navigate this time. Then, stress reduction.

“In my clinic, we draw a circle, and I turn it into a wheel. As I listen to perimenopausal women I put a dot in the center, and I draw a line, and I say, ‘Okay, now, let’s give a percentage to how much time you’re spending at work.’ And then I’ll say, ‘Okay, how about caretaking for children? You get extra credit if it’s teenagers.’ ‘How about your parents and your in-laws? How much caregiving are you providing?’” Dr. Pinkerton said that looking at that wheel helps women understand why they might be feeling the way they are. If she hears a woman say, “Why am I irritable at work?” she says, “Well, you don’t just have work. You have work at work and work at home and work in the family and work in the community.”

This.

Johann Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections argues that our culture has come to medicate depression first and ask questions later, without recognizing that some discomforts are not medical emergencies. He tells the story of how when he begged for antinausea medication in a jungle hospital in Vietnam, the doctors said, “You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.”

When I felt depressed in my thirties, I was prescribed an antidepressant. I wish that I had also done more to explore why I was depressed. Now I can see it more clearly: I was working more than full-time for people whose values I didn’t share. I had a young child at home whom I missed horribly when I was at work. I had the pressure of being the breadwinner. Dreams of doing something meaningful with my life felt out of reach.

One of my oldest friends, Asia Wong, now a clinical social worker in New Orleans, told me: “When I, as a clinician, talk to people about depression, we talk about how three things contribute: your biology; your inner landscape or psychology, which we can work on in therapy; and then your life circumstances. If your life circumstances really suck, you are going to be sad most of the time. You’re going to feel anxious and overwhelmed. If you say, ‘I’m taking care of my aging parents, and I’m working full-time, and I have these little kids, and my husband still has some traditional gender-role stuff,’ you’re going to be sad. Not because you ‘have depression,’ bu...

In her 2015 book Moody Bitches, psychiatrist Julie Holland says our moods are “our body’s own amazing feedback system” and that we are using “comfort foods, lattes, alcohol, and an expanding array of neuromodulators like antidepressants, painkillers, energy d...

“I’m sure men are in the same boat as far as having to be on antidepressants because of outside circumstances,” said a midwestern woman I talked to. “But looking at it from a woman’s perspective, it makes me even more angry. We give so much of our bodies to others already.” So much of womanhood just hurts: cramps, childbirth, mammograms, Pap smears, breastfeeding—not to mention eyebrow threading. “There’s so much wear and tear on us, yet we’re all expected to...

Many of us are getting less help than we should be from our doctors. A 2013 Johns Hopkins survey found that only one in five obstetrics and gynecology residents had received formal training in menopause medicine.22 That’s 20 percent of gynecologists. Forget about general practitioners. Forty-two percent of menopausal women in one survey had never discussed menopa...

So much of the advice older women receive when we express dissatisfaction involves bringing our bodies in line. I look at the women my age on treadmills at the gym—so determined, grinding away. From morning television to the evening news, experts tell us to make chore charts, to save a certain percent of our income, to clean out our closets, to get our BMI under twenty-five. Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves. And yet: “The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable,” as Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

The barrage of advice we receive about how to avoid suffering reinforces an idea that Gen X women don’t need emphasized: that we have to do more, work harder, try ever more classes and cleanses and programs. But the truth is that the most blameless lifestyle won’t necessarily get anywhere near where the trouble is.

“I remember after my second kid was born,” said one friend of mine, “and putting on three pounds every year, and thinking, Huh, this isn’t that great … Okay, these are the things I’m going to do to work out and blah, blah, blah, and then at some point being like, Can I actually just be a mom? Can I not have to be a MILF? I’m just about to hit forty, so I’m solid MILF material, but also could I just be a squishy mom? Do we ever get permission to look forty rather than twenty, to just be old? And not even old, but ‘Yeah, I popped a couple out, give me a break.’ I don’t want to have to go to Pilates. I don’t remember all our moms looking that good at forty.”

Second-wave feminist, activist, and writer Carol Hanisch, best known for popularizing the adage “The personal is political,” told me that in some ways life for women in the 1970s had advantages: “Whether women have it better now is debatable. Certainly, there are more women in professional jobs, but on the ...

Judith Houck thinks that women should cut themselves slack during this phase of life. Self-denial is not inherently a virtue, she told me: “This idea that you get some sort of points for saying no to chocolate—where does that come from?”

My expectations are way lower. I no longer believe that at this age I should have rock-hard abs, a perfectly calm disposition, or a million dollars in the bank. It helps to surround myself with women my age who speak honestly about their lives.

For me, the first step to peace in middle age has been learning that the game is rigged. If we feel that things are tougher now, it could mean only that we’re paying more attention. This is a bumpy stretch in life. We should not expect to feel fine.

I’m not knocking choices, just saying that having so many of them with so little support has led to a great deal of shame. Being a full and equal partner both at work and at home, having a rich social life, contributing to society, staying in shape—doing all that is exponentially harder than doing any one thing. We asked for more, and did we ever get it. I firmly believe it’s fairer. Easier? No.

So many Gen X women have told me that they were raised believing that if you don’t care about everything, you’re squandering opportunity. They felt pressure to take advantage of all the chances their mothers and grandmothers didn’t have. And they’ve worn themselves out in the process.

“The people I know who are happy realize they can’t care about everything,” says Deal. “You have to decide what you care about. If everything matters to you, you’re going to go nuts.”

“The minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces,” wrote Taffy Brodesser-Akner in a story about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.7 “Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness … SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase ‘mind-body,’ meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked.”

Therefore, if the first piece of a solution is getting support and the second is reframing the way we see our life to remove unrealistic expectations, the third might be … waiting. One day, midlife will end. Kids will grow up; relationships will evolve. Women in their fifties and sixties tell me that after menopause they felt so much better—less nervous, more confident, no longer afraid of looking stupid.

One said that menopause gave her clarity, about her life and about her own feelings: “Now I cut to the chase. I say no when I mean no. My husband is like, ‘Who the hell are you?’” And not in a bad way. He’s just getting to know this new, decisive woman he finds himself married to now—the same way she had to get used to being married to someone bald.

One CEO I know, a Gen X woman who grew up in southern Illinois and now oversees huge swaths of American farmland, said she hires Gen X women to do the hardest jobs at her company because they show tremendous resilience.20 “They are the best,” she said. “They can have six screens open at once and not miss a thing. They’re not crybabies. They’re capable. They will work long and hard for you. They have zero sense of entitlement. They hold people accountable and they speak up.” She pays her most cherished Gen X women managers six figures and lets them work from anywhere. “I’ll do a lot to keep them,” she said. “They’re that valuable.”

Could we see even our newfound midlife invisibility as a source of power? In Harry Potter’s world, one of the most prized magical tools is an invisibility cloak. There are great advantages to being underestimated. Two of the best reporters I know are women in their fifties. They look so friendly and nonthreatening, if you notice them at all. They can lurk in any room without usually wary people remembering to keep their guard up. Then they write devastating whistle-blowing articles. The world ignores middle-aged women at its peril.

:)