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You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been. —Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
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.
“I’m Gen X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.”
Faith Popcorn
“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 were an experiment in crafting a higher-achieving, more fulfilled, more well-rounded version of the American woman. In midlife many of us find that the experiment is largely a failure.
Even women who make much more may feel uneasy about their financial future, stunned by how hard it is just getting through the week, or disappointed by how few opportunities seem to come their way.
We diminish our whole generation when we dismiss these women’s complaints as unreasonable griping. Societal, historical, and economic trends have conspired to make many women’s passage into middle age a crucible of anxieties—and to make us envy one another rather than realize we are all in the same leaky boat.
Yes, women went into the workforce, but without any significant change to gender roles at home, to paid-leave laws, to anything that would make the shift feasible. If you make a new law but don’t enforce or fund it, do you get to call the law misguided?
In 2017, another major study found that the two biggest stressors for women were work and children, with a compounding effect on those having both.
We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising—in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.
in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they
It begins with facing up to our lives as they really are, letting go of the expectations we had for ourselves growing up, and finishes with finding a viable support system and realizing that this stage of life doesn’t last forever.
If you raise children in a culture of economic precariousness while showing them a thousand commercials a week for Sit N’ Spin, Big Wheel, Garanimals, and Hungry Hungry Hippos—not to mention product placements, as in 1982’s E.T. (Reese’s Pieces) and, self-consciously, with a slew of products in 1992’s Wayne’s World—can you blame them for feeling, years later, a deep sense of pleasure in the aisles of a big-box store or a cavalier attitude toward chucking hardcover books, face serums, and children’s pajamas into their Amazon Prime cart?
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,
Yet again, there was no reckoning with the distance between our parents’ ideals and our reality.
Or maybe it’s because we’d been made to worry for so long that anytime we were told we didn’t have to worry anymore, we didn’t know
how to stop. Instead of reveling, we doubled down on world-weariness. When we hit
began: “Like Wile E. Coyote waiting for a twenty-ton Acme anvil to fall on his head, our generation labors in the expanding shadow of monstrous national debt.”
“The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline,” wrote George Packer in his 2013 book, The Unwinding. He cited 1978—a median Gen X birth year—as the approximate turning point in America’s character.69
It’s impossible to say whether childhood trauma was more acute for Gen X.71 (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.
basic needs for caring and affection met. Today, suicide rates are soaring among
busyness of activity and, all too often, the painful memories of one’s own past.”77 Women in particular seem to gravitate to the clutter and the busyness. We work so hard because we have to, for money, and very likely because we’re scared.
killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.
And then looked around at her life thinking, “Is this my reward?” She caught herself
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.
“Don’t get me wrong: I chose my life. I just never thought I’d feel this average.”
“It felt as though if I got up and did one thing, then I was failing with all the other things. Because there was absolutely no way to get through the checklist. No matter what I did that day, I was going to be a failure.”
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.
wondering. Wondering can be so painful. Making decisions, seeing patterns, and imagining the future can be so hard. How soothing to be told that magic is real, providing ready reasons for loss or failure.
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.”
black pants, short hair and statement jewelry, she dispensed “Carla’s
“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.”186 The problem: doing what you love often does not pay.
that what I’m hearing? Fluegge
The ambiguous loss of singleness is the type where the desired partner is psychologically present in a person’s mind but physically absent.”
“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.”285
York Times survey turned up three leading reasons given today for
314 She sees so many women in her practice blaming their partners for what they themselves have failed to accomplish.
Everything is a trade-off, not just marriage. William Doherty, professor of family social
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. So as not to call attention to ourselves as women, we pretend it’s not happening.
“You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.”342 When I felt depressed in my
“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
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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 drinks, and amphetamines in an effort to maintain our unnatural pace.”344
you live long enough you quit chasing the things that
hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.”
“This is the time of life when we learn that we don’t have to be pleasing; the work now is just to become more ourselves.”
You want more medical attention, because you have significant problems. But once we start attracting medical attention, we get more than we asked for. The unintended consequences of medical attention are always complex.”
