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Some are having an okay time of middle age; many are struggling in one way or another. Some feel on the verge of, as one said, “blowing it all up.”
Since turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with women my age and their—our—struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair.
“Gen Xers are in ‘the prime of their lives’ at a particularly divisive and dangerous moment,” Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me.7 “They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They’re squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they’re exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.”
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.
We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage.
Economist Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, told me that a typical forty-year-old woman in America now makes $36,000 a year working full-time. After child care, rent, food, and taxes, that leaves only about $1,000 for everything else.10
“Every decision you make in life sends you off down a path that could turn out to be a wrong one,” writes the British musician Viv Albertine in her memoir of midlife. “A couple of careless decisions somewhere along the line, that’s all it takes to waste years—but then you can’t creep along being so cautious that you don’t have adventures. It’s difficult to get the balance right.”
The skin under my arms was loose. I’d been hearing “In middle age, you’re more likely to gain weight around the middle of the body” for a while; and now I knew what the magazines were talking about. I had widened, and I did not like it.
Workers in upper management today spend an average of seventy-two hours a week making themselves available to work.31
Being beset with these hard questions while dealing with all of the pressures of midlife is like coming upon an emergency situation for which you’re untrained.
The year I was born, Gail Sheehy published the mega bestseller Passages, which took seriously both men’s and women’s midlife reckoning with their mortality and described predictable phases of life in the manner of the terrible twos, with tags including “Trying 20s” and “Forlorn 40s.”
“cynicism and apathy set in rapidly.”14
The Unwinding.
A Generation Alone,
Convince them that your organization is reliable and will simplify rather than complicate their lives.”
Is it that she envies the friends she sees on Instagram who are able to afford trips and eating out?
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.”50
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.
‘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.
All Joy and No Fun,
Meanwhile, social support for parents has dropped. Childless friends and neighbors offer less help than in the past, though there are many more of them, relatively speaking: the proportion doing any child care at all was down to about 3.7 percent in 2016 (from 4.5 percent in 2004).6 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.
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.
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. Subject to fierce internal pressure to give our children advantages we never had, we are the perfect consumers of baby swings, Gymboree classes, and $200 wooden balance bikes for toddlers—whether or not we can afford them.
Gen X parents often complain that midlife marriage can feel like running a daycare center with someone you used to date.
Still: how much more work could I have done over the past five years if I’d kicked my son out of the house when I had a deadline and told him to be back before dark? The mind boggles.
Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift—which showed that working women came home from the office and did a second shift as homemakers—remains timely.
Fantasies of an equal partnership, in which both partners do equal amounts of work, make equal amounts of money, and each cook dinner three and a half times a week, typically run up against the reality of just how grueling it is to take care of children when both parents work. Often, both parties wind up feeling underappreciated.
America gives middle-aged women little support in their caregiving roles. While the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) has been in place since 1993—the federal law allows eligible employees of public agencies or private companies with fifty or more employees to take off up to twelve weeks for health, pregnancy, newborn, or other family caregiving needs, unpaid, without being fired—US workplaces mostly ignore the needs of working parents, 40 percent of whom aren’t covered at all under FMLA.35
“I bet when your friend is sick, you bring over food,” said Lee. “When your mother needs to go to the doctor, you take her, even when she doesn’t ask nicely. When the school nurse calls, you rush to pick up your child even when you have a lot of work to do. 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.”
Claudia Goldin, former president of the American Economic Association and a widely acknowledged force in the field, has pointed out that by the time college-educated women are forty years old, they earn just seventy-three cents to a man’s dollar. After graduating with an MBA, women earn ninety-two cents. A decade later: fifty-seven cents.
Looking back over a fifteen-year span, the IWPR observed that when you take into account women’s breaks from full-time work, the wage gap widens to forty-nine cents to the typical men’s dollar, significantly less than the eighty cents usually calculated using a single year of census data.
Only 3 percent of venture capital goes to women-run companies.
There seems no end to ways in which the changing economy has been bad for workers who look to settle into management slots in midlife: offshore production, unions losing power, deregulation, automation.
Some women who “have it all” may see their children awake ninety minutes or less per weekday.
In 1950 only 12 percent of married women with children under the age of six worked.
Goldin predicts that the gender gap in pay would be “considerably reduced” and might vanish if firms “did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.” There’s a rare idea: the private sector could do something to help women—that it’s not just up to us to cultivate sponsors, mentors, or advisers and to demand our place at the table.
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?
In a 2018 Harvard Business Review summary of research,41 behavioral scientists wrote that they “fear that Lean In’s main message—which emphasizes individual action as a way to address gender inequality—may lead people to view women as having played a greater role in sustaining and even causing gender inequality.” 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.
Being a fifty-year-old woman out of a job is hard. If you’re a professor, you can be old, but in most other jobs, they don’t want old women. The stats hold that up. They have a much harder time getting into the workplace and lower salaries. And often they’re single parents.”
It’s possible, while depressing, that corporate life is not inherently compatible with life-life. To elude problems with the modern workplace, perhaps women should opt for self-employment via entrepreneurship or the so-called gig economy.
Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, calls the rhetoric around pursuing work you love “aspirational labor”: “Aspirational labor is a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.”55 The problem: doing what you love often does not pay.
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.
The average cost of a private room in a nursing home is $7,698 a month.
“I sometimes secretly wish I’d worked for Goldman Sachs right after Yale,” a forty-nine-year-old executive told me. “I feel like I could have retired by now. Or at least be secure about retirement. Sometimes I’m angry about marrying someone with no assets and a mountain of debt. But I think I’m happier having a loving partner. I think. What do I worry about most? Not having money when I’m old. I’m scared about that. I spend a lot of time wishing I could be more at peace with my choices and with the life I have.”
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.
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.
“ambiguous loss.”
Humans don’t do uncertainty well.
