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

by Ada Calhoun

From the outside, no one may notice anything amiss. Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone, use CBD edibles to decompress, or cry every afternoon in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie wide awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centered on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.

“Plenty of women saw themselves in Dan Quayle’s description of Murphy as ‘a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman,’” wrote Caryn James in 1992 in the New York Times.39 “They were able to think, ‘Murphy Brown, c’est moi,’ until it occurred to them to ask, ‘Where’s Eldin?’” That could be a bumper sticker for our generation: “Where’s Eldin?”

Gen X childhoods were lived in a haze of secondhand smoke, including in restaurants and on planes. We played without realizing what peril we were in. Some of Valarie’s fondest memories of her childhood are of riding in the back of a pickup truck, biking with no helmet, and lying out in the sun with no sunscreen. (One woman I know said another name for Gen X could be “the Coppertone Generation.”)

Perhaps the era’s insecurity is why so many Gen X girls obsessed over Little House on the Prairie. It was so unlike most 1970s childhoods, with the big, loving family uniting to cope with hardship. That show’s father, played by Michael Landon, was a stoic, nurturing voice. In my memory, there was only one man on television more calming, more trustworthy: Mister Rogers.

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.

Melissa, too, went to see a psychotherapist. She went because she’d found herself obsessing over little things and seeing them as symbolic of massive problems in her marriage. For example:“The bed’s not made. I’ve asked him to make it. Why can’t he just make it? Why doesn’t he love me enough to make the bed?”

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

Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, calls the rhetoric around pursuing work you love “aspirational labor”: “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.

The whole “throw money at the problem” solution is awkward also because it suggests that fixing rich or middle-class women’s problems requires poor women’s work: the manicurist, the takeout delivery person, the night nurse, the Uber driver, the masseuse. Talk about invisible labor.

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.

The two hundred middle-aged women I interviewed for this book mirror the makeup of the country. They are single and partnered, mothers and childless, black and white and Asian and Latina, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, evangelical and atheist, and they hail from nearly every state, including Alaska.

It’s a perfect storm of pressure. And yet, on p. 223 there’s an eerily prescient quote from the authors of a book on generations about how 2020 would bring a world crisis and this generation would save us. Perhaps because a lot of us were latchkey kids, we are extremely resilient and well-equipped to hunker down, stay calm, and keep everybody safe.