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

by Ada Calhoun

“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 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.

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.

Financially, divorce devastated many Gen X children and their mothers.8 When a couple divorced in the 1980s, children almost always went to live with their mother, and a child’s household income dropped dramatically—according to one study, by an average of 42 percent.9 While some female-led households eventually came back strong, many never recovered anything like their former wealth.10

Psychological studies in the 1980s found that the threat of nuclear war led to high anxiety in children. The silver lining, according to one journal article, was that we didn’t stew for long, because: “cynicism and apathy set in rapidly.”14

According to the Gen X “mind-set list,” “The higher their parents’ educational level, the more likely they were to come home at 4 p.m. to an empty house—except for the microwave and MTV.”

Gen X has been described as both repulsed by materialism and deeply materialistic, and there may be something to that.

In the 1990s, third-wave feminism filled in some sex-educational gaps. Many Gen X women gradually embraced sex positivity as a way to counteract the anxiety instilled in us by AIDS. There was Sassy magazine, and there were often photocopied, stapled zines by women at record stores and bookstores. Writers and artists like Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, bell hooks, and members of the Riot Grrrl movement offered more interesting approaches to sex in all its risk and promise. Liz Phair’s vital 1993 album, Exile in Guyville, was a refreshing and relevant combination of sexual enthusiasm and romantic disillusionment.

Gen X girls grew up aware that we were vulnerable while being told that we were infinitely powerful. Meanwhile, Gen X boys and girls both learned early that whatever hurts we suffered, we would need to soothe ourselves.

That woman—that mom—whom they’d taught us to love and root for, had just been blown up, along with other people whose faces we’d come to know. The grown-ups had made us watch. And now they were using weird language like “major malfunction.” Twenty-five seconds of silence. And silence after that, too.

There was little “hunkering down” with family in the 1970s and ’80s. Back then, it was not seen as the adults’ job to help children understand and process their fears, disappointments, and sorrows. Fitness buffs did calisthenics, not yoga. Teachers in many states spanked students.

Our generation is mocked for helicopter parenting our children. We hear that we don’t let them fail enough, that our swaddling them in protective gear has left them unprepared for life. This may be true. But, if so, it may well stem from traumas like that morning of January 28, 1986.

Not knowing how to handle the horror, we found ways to pretend we didn’t mind so much. It would become a penchant of ours, and a style: self-soothing through dark humor. Garbage Pail Kids. Mad magazine. Gremlins. (Only now does a telling detail of that kid’s Challenger joke occur to me: he was playing with matches at school.) We came by our defense mechanisms honestly. The murder rate reached a new nationwide high in 1974 and continued to break new records until the early 1990s.28 The number of substantiated child sexual abuse claims rose steadily from 1977 through 1992.

Nearly every Gen X woman I know has a story of being groped, flashed, sexually assaulted, or outright raped.30

For members of Generation X, once again, there was a stark contrast between what we were taught (racism was defeated by the Freedom Riders) and what we witnessed (rampant racism in society, racial tension in our schools). Yet again, there was no reckoning with the distance between our parents’ ideals and our reality.

No studies to date compare ACEs between the generations. It’s impossible to say whether childhood trauma was more acute for Gen X.38 (And frankly it feels a little creepy to engage in a competition about who was more neglected and abused.) Still, I find compelling the idea that some of our problems now may be connected with the damage we incurred back then.

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.”

“aloneness” as “the term that best describes the emotional, attitudinal and spiritual space Generation X occupies … 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

we must reconcile the two primary messages of our childhood: One: “Reach for the stars.” Two: “You’re on your own.”

When tragedy struck, Mister Rogers advised children, “look for the helpers.”46 At the 1969 Senate hearing about public television he said his show aimed to teach children that “feelings are mentionable and manageable.”47 He never condescended. He leveled with us but without saying too much.

Mister Rogers, by contrast, advised parents to have clear, honest conversations with children when bad things happened: “When children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it … What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything, and that we will do all we can to keep them safe, in any scary time.”48

“I’m forty-four,” Valarie says. “And I feel like, What did I do? Have I made any impact? I certainly haven’t done everything that I thought I was going to do when I was a kid.

She’s trying to look on the positive side, to see her parents’ divorce and her lifelong financial struggles as something that ultimately gave her strength and resilience.

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.

“When women feel shame,” said Chafin, referencing Brené Brown’s work on “shame shields,” “they often either overfunction, shrink back, or lash out.” Those who overfunction may become type A, anxious women who are always trying to fit it all in and usually “with a tinge of self-judgment that they are failing to do everything well. It becomes a vicious cycle, where they work harder to escape the shame and then they fail and feel more shame, and so on.”

Chafin has these women ask themselves questions designed to give them a sense of freedom from obligation: “Can you do anything to change this situation? Can you look at it a different way? Can you accept it for how it is? And just let it go?”

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,” Chafi...

“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.

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.

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.”

But the pressure on younger Gen Xers when it comes to caregiving is especially intense. The sandwich metaphor feels far too tame. I prefer to think of it as being on a rack, wrists and ankles tied to opposite ends, with the two pulls ever strengthening.

If today’s social norms were applied to any of the generations of parents who preceded us, there wouldn’t be enough Child Protective Services agents in the world to handle it. The stack of neglect reports would reach to the moon. That goes for all parents before us. Boomers were practically feral as children, just like us. The difference: we were far more likely to grow up in divorced homes, among neighbors we didn’t know, and in places with high crime rates.

according to a 2018 report from the US Census Bureau, both men and women in a heterosexual couple tend to misrepresent—even to census takers—their incomes if the woman earns more. Women understated their income by 1.5 percent and men exaggerated theirs by 2.9 percent.

According to the 2018 Women in the Workplace report from Leanin.org and McKinsey and Company, corporate America has made almost no progress on gender diversity in the past four years.19 Women’s presence as a percentage in computer occupations has actually declined since the 1990s.20

Between 1979 and 1995, some forty-three million jobs were lost through corporate downsizing. Newly created jobs paid less and offered fewer benefits.”

Gen X the “wrong place, wrong time” generation: “thwarted by boomers who can’t afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging Millennials.”32

Michelle Obama put it more bluntly on her 2018 book tour, telling a New York crowd: “That whole ‘so you can have it all.’ Nope, not at the same time. That’s a lie. And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time.”43

Many women like the ones I met at that conference, having left corporate America for the gig economy, found themselves working twice as hard for a quarter of the money.

Gen X women undergo a bone-deep, almost hallucinatory panic about money. The worst part: it’s a fear based on experience and complicated by a sense that we shouldn’t be having this problem. We are some of the best-educated human beings ever and among the first adults in recent American history in worse financial shape than our parents.

According to a 2017 national survey by CareerBuilder, 78 percent of US workers live paycheck-to-paycheck; nearly three in four say they are in debt.

Graduating into a strong economy versus a weak one could amount to as much as a 20 percent difference in wages over time.14

“Gen X has had quite a tough time,” says Hugo Scott-Gall, of Goldman Sachs Research, who remarked that the 2001 and 2008 downturns17 were “scarring and very important events, and they have changed the attitude towards how they save and how they invest.” In plenty of cases, they do neither.

According to Pew, Gen Xers lost almost half of their wealth between 2007 and 2010.31 Despite their bouncing back on that front,32 high debt lingers, and so does a sense of fragility.

Gen X “took most of the hit from the housing bust,” according to a Harvard report. Home ownership rates for our demographic “have fallen further than those of any other age group.”38

The Wall Street Journal reported that Gen X “has suffered more than any other age cohort from the housing bust, according to an analysis of federal data, suggesting homeownership rates for that group could remain depressed for years to come.”41

Then there is student loan debt, which can kneecap a family for generations. Gen X graduated with plenty of debt, and it’s getting worse.46 I know people who have paid off their own student loans just in time to start paying for their children’s education. The average yearly cost of a four-year public college is now 81 percent of an American woman’s median annual income.

The size of the inheritance is, of course, contingent on many factors, such as how much of their fortunes Boomers will need for long-term care. The average cost of a private room in a nursing home is $7,698 a month.61

According to Cohen, Gen Xers are “the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.”

Not necessarily a good thing.....

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.

One of the only purely delightful movies I recall from my teenage years was 1995’s Clueless. The enthusiasm, the money, the non-neurotic reaction to mistakes—upon sideswiping a parked car during her driving test: “Ooh! Should I write them a note?”—it all felt more exotic to me than a foreign film. It still did not counteract the gross tonnage of despair to which we were subjected.