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

by Ada Calhoun

Context is the other piece, and the context for Gen X women is this: 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.

Maybe now that the traditional dream of picket fences and endless prosperity is over, we will find a way to dream new and even better dreams.

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.

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.”

“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.”

She caught herself spiraling: I don’t want to do this job anymore. I don’t want to be a mom anymore. Definitely don’t want to be a wife anymore. I want to run for the hills. Holly chimed in: “I remember hearing my own mom say those words in our house. She was coming so unglued that she opened the door and said, ‘I’m going to Mexico, and I’m not coming back!’ She slammed the door and took off in the car.” “Did she go to Mexico?” I asked. “No,” said Holly. “Of course not,” said Annie. “She went to the grocery store by herself.”

If today’s social norms were applied to any of the generations of parents who preceded us, there wouldn’t be enough Child Protective Services agents in the world to handle it. The stack of neglect reports would reach to the moon. That goes for all parents before us. Boomers were practically feral as children, just like us. The difference: we were far more likely to grow up in divorced homes, among neighbors we didn’t know, and in places with high crime rates.

Independence evangelizers like Lenore Skenazy of the movement Free-Range Kids are entirely correct that we should give our kids more freedom. I have a theory about why we don’t: Gen Xers helicopter over our kids because we have too-vivid memories of what happened—or could have happened—to us when our parents didn’t hover. That visceral sense of danger is hard to reason with.

There is still a presumption that men are the heads of household, even when they earn less and do less.

Part of the problem may be that women have moved into formerly “male” work without the reverse being true. “the jobs that many men used to do are gone or going fast,” Isabel Sawhill and Richard V. Reeves, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, wrote in the New York Times.111 “And families need two engaged parents to share the task of raising children. As painful as it may be, men need to adapt to what a modern economy and family life demand.”

As a nation, we are still in name religious (71 percent Christian), but the number of people checking “none” on religious-affiliation surveys keeps rising.125 Americans in their twenties and thirties are less likely to regularly attend services now than at any time in recent US history.126 Middle-aged women may opt instead for individualized practice of yoga or Buddhism.127 Astrology is booming.128

Astrology and psychics offer breaks from 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. Also: crystals don’t require preauthorization. Across the country, there is an alarming shortage of mental health professionals, particularly those who take insurance.130 A psychotherapy session might help more than a gong bath, but which is cheaper?

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?

What I, personally, wouldn’t give for my very own American Wife. She would cook my meals and clean my bathtub and make my appointments and enforce my son’s screen-time limits and drop by to visit my 101-year-old grandmother at the retirement home every week. I would get so much work done. My home would be spotless. I would sleep eight hours a night—heck, maybe nine.

Then Heather Boushey pointed out that data wasn’t actually there to suggest that women with children were opting out of the labor market in growing numbers. According to her, “The main reason for declining labor force participation rates among women over the last four years appears to be the weakness of the labor market.”263 In other words, they didn’t “opt out” so much as “surrender.” If you say, “Would you prefer the fish or the chicken,” but the chicken is on top of a mountain and it’s raining, while the fish is right in front of you under a tent, can that meaningfully be described as a choice? Do you really get to say that the woman choosing fish opted out of chicken consumption—that she must be biologically hardwired to prefer fish?

When Kristi Coulter quit drinking, she had an epiphany: “I realize that everyone around me is tanked. But it also dawns on me that the women are super double tanked. I see that booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise.”

Johann Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections argues that our culture has come to medicate depression first and ask questions later, without recognizing that some discomforts are not medical emergencies. He tells the story of how when he begged for antinausea medication in a jungle hospital in Vietnam, the doctors said, “You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.”

“I’m sure men are in the same boat as far as having to be on antidepressants because of outside circumstances,” said a midwestern woman I talked to. “But looking at it from a woman’s perspective, it makes me even more angry. We give so much of our bodies to others already.” So much of womanhood just hurts: cramps, childbirth, mammograms, Pap smears, breastfeeding—not to mention eyebrow threading. “There’s so much wear and tear on us, yet we’re all expected to look younger than we are. Now we’re also fucking with our brains so that we can live in this world. It’s just so much.”

Maybe we should refuse to play the #winning social media game. It’s exhausting to maintain the facade, and bragging all the time alienates others. There’s another, perhaps even more destructive, drawback to telling our stories in short bursts on social media: it could be keeping us from contemplating our lives’ broader plotlines.

The world’s toilet stalls, airplane seats, and restaurant chairs are not built to cope with this reality. The fashion industry caters to the thin, though the average American woman now wears size 16–18.381 In the Washington Post, Project Runway host Tim Gunn writes,382 “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.

“I remember after my second kid was born,” said one friend of mine, “and putting on three pounds every year, and thinking, Huh, this isn’t that great . . . Okay, these are the things I’m going to do to work out and blah, blah, blah, and then at some point being like, Can I actually just be a mom? Can I not have to be a MILF? I’m just about to hit forty, so I’m solid MILF material, but also could I just be a squishy mom? Do we ever get permission to look forty rather than twenty, to just be old? And not even old, but ‘Yeah, I popped a couple out, give me a break.’ I don’t want to have to go to Pilates. I don’t remember all our moms looking that good at forty.”

“There’s this idea that women have to be superpowers, basically. On the one hand: ‘Of course we can do that.’ On the other: ‘Why? It’s ridiculous.’’’

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.

“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.”

“The minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces,” wrote Taffy Brodesser-Akner in a story about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.398 “Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness . . . SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase ‘mind-body,’ meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked.” After spending months steeped in Goopiana, Brodesser-Akner had an epiphany: “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.”

Middle-aged women have perspective enough to see what’s important and what isn’t. “If you are young and you are reading this,” says writer Mary Ruefle, “perhaps you will understand the gleam in the eye of any woman who is sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety: they cannot take you seriously (sorry) for you are just a girl to them, despite your babies and shoes and lovemaking and all of that. You are just a girl playing at life.”

In the years 2004–2025, they wrote, the Gen X demographic would be “entering midlife in a crisis era.” Gen X would look at the graying Boomers in charge and “appreciate that whatever bad hand history dealt them, they at least grew up with clear heads.”

In Harry Potter’s world, one of the most prized magical tools is an invisibility cloak. There are great advantages to being underestimated.