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

by Ada Calhoun

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.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo, has said that the rise of single people in America has played a role in revitalizing cities, in part because they tend to go out and socialize more than married people do. He also sees another benefit: “In a moment like this,” Klinenberg told Smithsonian 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.”13

In past generations, an unmarried woman might live in the family home as a “spinster aunt.” Such women had a family role, a financial backstop, and companionship. Now huge numbers of women in this country leave their parents’ house in their late teens. Then, if they don’t partner up, they may live on their own for fifty or sixty years.

A recent New York Times survey turned up three leading reasons given today for not having a child: wanting more leisure time and personal freedom, not having a partner yet, and not being able to afford child care.

Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek had their first babies at forty-one. Halle Berry had her second child at forty-seven. Susan Sarandon had her second at forty-five. Geena Davis had her first baby at forty-six—and then twins(!) at forty-eight.

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.

In order to have a family life and a career, women must move twice as fast to arrive at the same place.

Rather than being assisted with this unlikely feat—say, via paid parental leave, accelerator programs at work, or partners willing to sideline their own careers for a few years—women are scolded, told they should have...

acrimonious

One way to escape the trap is to tell the story in another way. “Being able to narrate our inner experience is one of the most powerful ways we can change how we feel,” writes the psychologist Daphne de Marneffe in her book The Rough Patch

One thing experts have told me is especially valuable for Gen X women is to make sure you have an updated will; know where your money is; and maintain life, health, renter’s, home, car, and whatever other insurance you can afford.

“You know,” Dr. Pinkerton told me, “we tell people who are grieving not to make major changes for a year. I don’t think anybody’s ever said, ‘Don’t make a major decision when you’re perimenopausal.’” Good idea, I think. We can just take it easy until perimenopause ends. “How long is that, anyway?” I asked Dr. Pinkerton. A year, I thought she’d say. Maybe two. “Anywhere from a few months to ten to thirteen years,” Dr. Pinkerton said.

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.

We have had incentives for a long time to pretend we are the same as men in every way. For decades, women have had to argue that they could still work and function through those messy period-, pregnancy-, and menopause-related symptoms, and as a result we’ve minimized them, both to others and to ourselves.

“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,’ but because your life is debilitatingly difficult.

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 drinks, and amphetamines in an effort to maintain our unnatural pace.”21

Get daily exercise, especially weight-bearing exercise; a good diet; and plenty of sleep.

Seeing airbrushed faces all day has brainwashed many of us into believing that we should not have lined faces in our forties.

Our mothers and our grandmothers never spent the busiest phase of life carrying around smartphones—little machines that demand charging and updating and that punch every emotional button.

The internet exacerbates anxiety that was already there, and it heightens the already trying physical self-consciousness of midlife, too.

In the Washington Post, Project Runway host Tim Gunn writes,24 “Many designers—dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk—still refuse to make clothes for [plus-size women].”

Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves.

“It’s not the worst thing in the world,” Houck said, “to be living with a body that’s a little bit out of control.”

“Middle age, especially for women of a generation that stayed young for a long time, is a weird place,” one friend of mine said. She calls the midlife club “a menstruation hut of your choosing.”

“You have to find ways to make adulthood fun.”

I’ve given up on a magic bullet that will make this age easy, but I’ve learned that there are many things that make it harder or easier, and I’ve made changes accordingly.

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.

Note: none of what I’m saying falls under the umbrella of what’s commonly called “self-care.” Short-term perks like spa days or facials are like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. Our problems are beyond the reach of “me-time.” The last thing we need at this stage of life is self-help. Everyone keeps telling us what to do, as if there is a quick fix for the human condition. What we need at this stage isn’t more advice, but solace.

“We didn’t evolve to be constantly content. Contented Homo erectus got eaten before passing on their genes.”

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.

“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.”

“We are doomed to aspire for the rest of our lives. Aspiration is suffering. Wellness is suffering. As soon as you level up, you greet how infinite the possibilities are, and it all becomes too awful to live without.”

So often, she says, we see the task of living well in a negative, self-punishing way: “I should be exercising more!” “I have to be the most mindful yogi ever!” “I have to eat perfectly vegan every second of the day!” “We take basically good ideas and turn them into something with which to self-flagellate,” said Asia. But the driver and the woman in the Uber story “both showed this ability to take that moment when you could have both been embarrassed or grumpy or angry and instead find it hilarious and lovable and adorable.” You could say this attitude comes down to the old cliché about “looking on the bright side,” but I think it’s more profound than that. It’s about telling the story of our mistakes, our life, in a new way, in which we’re heroines worth rooting for.

Ann Voskamp wrote, “Life doesn’t have to get easier to be good.

Maybe our legacy is our children. Maybe it’s our work. Maybe it’s our friendships or the house we fixed up.

Almost every story I’ve heard of a Gen X woman pulling herself out of a midlife crisis has involved, in one way or another, the letting go of expectations. That’s been the most important part of my own reckoning: When I start criticizing myself for not having saved enough money or for not having written enough of value or for my son’s bad handwriting, or for not working out or for any other failures small and large, I try to put my finger on the expectation that any of these things would be different.