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

by Ada Calhoun

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.

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?

One in four middle-aged American women is on antidepressants.

It used to be that each generation could expect to do better than their parents.

New research confirms that Generation X won’t.

Many of us have delayed marriage and children into our thirties and forties.30 This means that we are likely to find ourselves taking care of parents in decline at the same time that we are caring for little children—and, by...

She’s given her daughter the gift of lower expectations,

Why is it a lower expectation to not have children? While no one doubts the difficulty of raising children, you can have challenging lives without it.

“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.”

Did they really have choices? Or were they expected to do all the household chores? Were they truly sexually liberated or free from heteronormative expectations? Did they not have unfair body image standards to meet? And severe anti aging sentiment? Did they get raises and positions of power?

There was an “infinite tolerance” policy when it came to bullying and a conviction that kids should fight their own battles.

At my middle school, the boys made a sport out of snapping girls’ bras in the hallway. Plenty of times that happened in front of teachers, and no one ever did anything about it.

We played without realizing what peril we were in.

Financially, divorce devastated many Gen X children and their mothers.

Psychological studies in the 1980s found that the threat of nuclear war led to high anxiety in children.

According to the Gen X “mind-set list,” “The higher their parents’ educational level, the more likely they were to come home at 4 p.m. to an empty house—except for the microwave and MTV.”

Until I die, my bologna will bear the first name O-S-C-A-R.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) formed in 1980. Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) was founded in 1983. In 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act encouraged states to adopt a uniform minimum drinking age of twenty-one. IDs became harder to forge. Drunk driving laws became stricter.

Older members of Generation X were adults by the time they knew about AIDS, which meant they faced a retroactive rather than an anticipatory panic. For younger Gen Xers, AIDS destroyed any hope of sexual liberty without danger, just in time for us to become sexually active.

I gathered from Dirty Dancing that I should only be so lucky, when I turned seventeen, to meet a twenty-five-year-old dance instructor who would school me in both sex and the merengue.

Many Gen X women gradually embraced sex positivity as a way to counteract the anxiety instilled in us by AIDS.

Gen X girls grew up aware that we were vulnerable while being told that we were infinitely powerful. Meanwhile, Gen X boys and girls both learned early that whatever hurts we suffered, we would need to soothe ourselves.

Back then, it was not seen as the adults’ job to help children understand and process their fears, disappointments, and sorrows. Fitness buffs did calisthenics, not yoga. Teachers in many states spanked students.27

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, 1986.

The number of substantiated child sexual abuse claims rose steadily from 1977 through 1992. This may have had more to do with the rise in reporting thanks to the 1977 Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act and the expansion of Child Protective Services.

Reactive attachment disorder—also known by the ironic acronym RAD—involves trouble forming loving relationships as a result of not having had basic needs for caring and affection met.

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.

When Melissa was forty she was pregnant—and taking care of her ailing father, plus three children, and working full-time.

Today, parents are far more likely to see their children’s needs and desires as paramount, their own and their spouse’s as secondary.

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.

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.”

Because the truth is that this is how things get done, especially at public schools—how the funds get raised, how the volunteers are wrangled, how the teachers receive their gift certificates and their oversized greeting cards signed by the cast of the school musical.

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.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, working women with children under the age of six still spend an average of 1.1 hours of each workday physically taking care of them. Men? Twenty-six minutes.

Family caregivers spend about $7,000 per year on out-of-pocket costs relating to caregiving; for women, that’s an average of 21 percent of their income.32

Religious communities once played a significant part in American life—offering fellowship, advice, and material help, from child care to casseroles, not to mention a unifying concept of universal order and purpose.

Across the country, there is an alarming shortage of mental health professionals, particularly those who take insurance.44 A psychotherapy session might help more than a gong bath, but which is cheaper?

Teaching fiction down the hall was the novelist Min Jin Lee, who had recently won fame with her book Pachinko.

At one point, she’d gone to a writers’ colony, paying $2,000 she couldn’t really afford in order to do the residency,

love when it’s difficult. It’s a superpower. You just need to use it for yourself, too.”

The report found that women who take just one year off make 39 percent less than women who stayed in the workforce for the full fifteen years.

In fact, as you may have heard, fewer women run large companies than men named John.12

Gen X employees were notable for having “less enthusiasm for purpose in the workplace than other generations.”17

A recent New York Times–Pro Publica investigation found that Facebook job ads were not showing up on the pages of people over a certain age, because the site let potential employees target younger demographics for their ads.

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.

In her book Reset, the diversity activist Ellen Pao says that she once tried to take the advice of Lean In and to claim a seat at the table.

According to a 2017 national survey by CareerBuilder, 78 percent of US workers live paycheck-to-paycheck; nearly three in four say they are in debt.

Graduating into a strong economy versus a weak one could amount to as much as a 20 percent difference in wages over time.14

More than half of Gen Xers plan to work past age sixty-five or expect not to retire at all.18

Forty-five percent of our generation have already withdrawn money from retirement savings,

Nearly half of Gen Xers carry a credit card balance month to month.

The average yearly cost of a four-year public college is now 81 percent of an American woman’s median annual income.