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

by Ada Calhoun

This observation is often cited as proof that second-wave feminism was foolish—that if women had only stayed in the home they would be happier. How reductive that is. The truth is that we’ve never really tried what those feminists proposed. 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?

women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a “she shed” in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.

In my experience, Gen X women spend lots of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”

“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.”

“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.”81

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.

“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.”83

“When women feel shame,” said Chafin, referencing Brené Brown’s work on “shame shields,” “they often either over-function, 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.”

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,” Chafin says, “to radically accept what’s in front of you.”

One of the great ironies of middle-age torpor and invisibility is that they often hit just as our children are in or approaching the most change-filled, attention-getting, self-involved years of their lives.

If our generation has been told for decades that we have so much freedom, so many choices, such opportunities, the question women with young children face is: how free are we to reach for the stars in midlife if we have someone else depending on us? Especially when our concept of good parenting involves so much more brain space and such higher costs than it did for our mothers and grandmothers? And when we expect ourselves to be excellent, highly engaged parents while also being excellent, highly engaged employees?

As painful as it may be, men need to adapt to what a modern economy and family life demand.”

“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.”

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.

During the Q&A, a middle-aged woman in the audience raised her hand. “But I feel guilty taking time away from my family to write,” she said. “I think about all the things they need.” Lee looked the woman in the eye and said, “But what about you?” The question hung in the air.

Many experts have told me that CEOs must commit to building a fair culture, and there must be metrics in place for judging performance in place of a gut feeling about someone being a good guy (in which case you hire an awful lot of guys).

One lawyer who does work on diversity and equal rights in corporate America told me she is often asked what companies should do to improve things for women and other disenfranchised groups. She has a list of recommendations. Then she told me her honest advice, rarely stated quite so directly, for any company that really wants to create equality: “You should burn this shit down and start over.”

1971, Judy Syfers Brady wrote the justly famous essay “I Want a Wife”: “I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me.”261

Humans don’t do uncertainty well.”

College-educated women who wait until thirty or later to marry have higher incomes.282 Delays in marrying have been credited with bringing down the divorce rate.283 Thanks to the decrease in the stigma around singleness, women are better able to chart their own course. Women are no longer dependent on men the way they were in prior generations.

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 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.”

You can go to the NAMS website and plug in your zip code to find NAMS-certified menopause-trained gynecologists near you.

In Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials, Matthew Hennessey delivers a tone poem of sorts about our precomputer world: “We were raised on analog technology—pencils, pens, notepads, books, index cards, the Dewey decimal system, newspapers, magazines, back issues, posters, mail order (sorry, no COD), records and record players, cassette tapes and boom boxes, video stores, landline telephones, answering machines . . .”362 As nonnatives to the internet world, we have no natural immunity to the internet. Our poor 1970s and ’80s brains, formed in the primordial ooze of the Sony Walkman, Columbia House Record and Tape Club, pay phones, and typewriters, must now contend with Instagram Stories.

Don’t ever compare your insides with their outsides. There are people, I guarantee you, who think you have the perfect life because they don’t know what you’re struggling with.”

The last thing women of this generation need to hear is that we have to work harder to get our bodies into line. Step counters like the Fitbit, which so many women of our generation have strapped to their wrists, monitor every move we make. When we were young women, our bodies often inspired admiring comments. Now, they attract a different kind of attention: concerned scrutiny. Our bodies are under constant surveillance—and we are both the guard in the watchtower and the prisoner.

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

Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

Everyone suffers in Shakespeare’s plays, according to Auden. The difference is that in tragedies, suffering leads to “self-blindness, defiance, hatred”; in comedies, it leads to “self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love.”386

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.

What if we’re not failures? What if what we’ve done is good? At any rate, maybe it’s good enough.

“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 take basically good ideas and turn them into something with which to self-flagellate,”

Deliverance from suffering in midlife could come from some outside force, but it could also come from reframing your life as being about something unexpected.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Cheryl Strayed, speak of recasting and rethinking our lives. In a recent op-ed about midlife, Ann Voskamp wrote, “Life doesn’t have to get easier to be good.”400

Maybe the Generation X story need not be: We’re broke. We’re unstable. We’re alone. Maybe it can be: We’ve had a hard row to hoe. We’ve been one big experiment. And yet, look at us: we’ve accomplished so much.

Generation X women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time and without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves—and later we also took responsi...

One of my favorite studies is about how children benefit from hearing an “oscillating family narrative.”402 The researchers found that what helps build resilience in children is a story like this: “Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.” That kind of tale fosters self-confidence—more, even, than one in which the family has been on a steady upward climb.

Some psychologists are exploring the connection between being generative and telling our personal narratives in certain ways.404 The professor Dan McAdams looks at how people recount their lives. The script that “highly generative” adults follow often includes turning points—“redemption sequences”—where negative experiences somehow became meaningful.405 People in midlife who see redemption sequences in their life show more overall well-being.406 Could that be our recourse? To look back and around and say this means that and this thing is over and this other thing is beginning? Writing our stories in midlife calls for identifying the characters in them. Who are our heroes, who are our villains?

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.

The world ignores middle-aged women at its peril.