More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
midlife, we must reconcile the two primary messages of our childhood: One: “Reach for the stars.” Two: “You’re on your own.” Marketers have taken
One Gen X woman told me that the motto of the elite women’s college she attended was: “Educating women of promise for lives of distinction.”
Brené Brown, professor of social work at the University
“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.”50
Bryn Chafin,51 a therapist with Brookwood Center for Psychotherapy in Atlanta.
“When women feel shame,” said Chafin, referencing Brené Brown’s work on “shame shields,” “they often either overfunction, shrink back, or lash out.”
“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.”
In so many women’s stories I heard variations on: We were supposed to have solved this by now.
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.’”
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.7
In a Pew Research Center study, more than half of Millennial mothers surveyed said they thought they were
An article in Live Science, “Why Supermoms Should Chill,” is one example.15 Lead sentence: “Trying to have it all could be bad for your mental health.” In my experience, there is only one thing worse for a woman’s mental health than trying to be a superhero, and that is being told to “chill”—especially since any efforts to do so incur swift blowback.
Isabel Sawhill and Richard V. Reeves, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, wrote in the New York Times.
“Women who earn more than their husbands,” Sawhill told me, “actually do more housework in an effort to compensate for their higher earnings and the psychological drama involved.”
2010, the ratio of possible caregivers for a person over the age of eighty was 7–1. By 2030, it’s predicted to be 4–1; by 2050, just 3–1.29
Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,38 “that
mother. “I could start thinking again,”
Today, Lee encourages others to keep doing whatever they feel called to do that isn’t taking care of other people.
You know how to do this already: love when it’s difficult. It’s a superpower. You just need to use it for yourself, too.”
Internalizing the idea that it’s within your power to climb the mountain if only you believe in yourself enough and do the work has led us to the logical conclusion: if you haven’t made it to the mountaintop, what’s wrong with you?
The more we talk about what women should do, the study’s authors said, the more women tend to be blamed for not fixing it.
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.
Catherine Collinson, president of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies.
Raj Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard—found that rising in the US class structure is less and less possible, with middle-class families seeing the sharpest decline in opportunity.
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.
In a 2018 book called The Happiness Curve, Jonathan Rauch described research on a “U-curve” dip in well-being that occurs in midlife everywhere in the world, including among great apes.4
Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has said in a study and a TED talk that the increase in the human life span is good news, because stress, worry, and anger all decrease with age. This is known as the “paradox of aging,” because, technically, being older is more difficult—health and energy usually decline, for starters—but people tend to be happier toward the end of life than they are in their forties.8
At least back then wives were spared lachrymose conversations about monogamy when they’d rather be watching television.
Heather Boushey
In other words, they didn’t “opt out” so much as “surrender.” If
According to research on decision fatigue: “An excess of choices often leads us to be less, not more, satisfied once we actually decide,” as one New York Times story puts it.22 “There’s often that nagging feeling we could have done better.” Choosing where to live and where to work and how to spend your money is daunting enough, but making such high-stakes choices at your weariest—it’s like trying to have an intimate conversation in a sports bar during the Super Bowl.
“ambiguous loss.”
Generation X women are told incessantly that they should do—or should have done—things differently in order to get what they want.
“Ambiguous losses are a particular type of loss that is hard to define and lacks closure,” says Dr. Haer.
In June 1986, Newsweek
1985 demographic study called “Marriage Patterns in the United States”
In 2002, the incendiary book Creating a Life by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Women blame themselves, ignoring the fact that their decisions are not being made in a vacuum.
Divorce is significantly more normalized for Millennials and younger people and thus far less associated with failure. But for Gen X,
Susan Gregory Thomas writes that if a Gen X woman does divorce, she will often go to great lengths to make it amicable—doing anything “to spare children the horrors of the Kramer v. Kramer bloodbaths of their own childhoods.”2 They are also more likely to keep plugging away at a difficult marriage, hiding their feelings from fear that rocking the boat will sink it.
can be hard in this phase of life to see the difference between a fundamentally good marriage going through a bad patch, like hers, and a toxic marriage that should probably end.
psychologist Daphne de Marneffe in her book The Rough Patch.6 She sees so many women in her practice blaming their partners for what they themselves have failed to accomplish. “It’s not just that marriage makes you give things up,” she told me.7 “Life makes you give things up.” It’s sort of depressing and sort of consoling: Everything is a trade-off, not just marriage.
Gen X seems focused on healthy divorcing, as advised in Constance Ahrons’s book The Good Divorce or Wendy Paris’s Splitopia, and our generation does seem to be doing it better than our parents did, with far more involvement from divorced fathers. But there is also, among many women of this generation, a huge sense of shame associated with divorce.
In The Change, her book about menopause, feminist scholar Germaine Greer says that women’s midlife suffering comes in two forms: “One I have called misery, which has no useful function and should be avoided, and the other grief, which is wholesome, though painful, and must be recognized.”4 According to Greer, misery is “a grey and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.”
But grief is something else. It’s the
“How well your ovaries function depends on your cycle and your mental and emotional state,” said Dr. Pinkerton. “It’s all tied together. Women need to recognize that it’s a time of vulnerability, and there are some things that they can do to help.”
Women also benefit exponentially from sleeping more, Dr.
exercise
Then, stress reduction.14
The Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, an observational study, found that the median white woman’s experience of perimenopausal symptoms, including hot flashes and night sweats, is nearly seven years; for Japanese and Chinese women, about five years; African American women, about ten; and Hispanic women, nine.15
