Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  I have friends who will say things like “I’m just a contracts analyst.” But the world needs contracts analysts. The world needs administration. The world needs organization. The world needs money moved around. The world needs teachers and bankers and lawyers and doctors and firefighters and someone to analyze all those people’s contracts.

  Displaying “generativity” means caring about people besides just yourself and your family. That leads to helping guide the next generation, which often leads to a positive legacy. Maybe our legacy is our children. Maybe it’s our work. Maybe it’s our friendships or the house we fixed up.

  Some psychologists are exploring the connection between being generative and telling our personal narratives in certain ways.¹³ 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.¹⁴ People in midlife who see redemption sequences in their life show more overall well-being.¹⁵ 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. That’s been the most important part of my own reckoning: When I start criticizing myself for not having saved enough money or for not having written enough of value or for my son’s bad handwriting, or for not working out or for any other failures small and large, I try to put my finger on the expectation that any of these things would be different.

  I also try to remind myself that if I were in better shape or my son did calligraphy or I had $30,000 in an emergency fund as I’m supposed to, life would not necessarily be any better. Even padded with achievement or glamour or cash, midlife is very likely going to be challenging. Even if you don’t subscribe to the belief in a crisis point, you cannot deny the onset of new physical limitations and stressors.

  Therefore, if the first piece of a solution is getting support and the second is reframing the way we see our life to remove unrealistic expectations, the third might be … waiting. One day, midlife will end. Kids will grow up; relationships will evolve. Women in their fifties and sixties tell me that after menopause they felt so much better—less nervous, more confident, no longer afraid of looking stupid.¹⁶

  One said that menopause gave her clarity, about her life and about her own feelings: “Now I cut to the chase. I say no when I mean no. My husband is like, ‘Who the hell are you?’” And not in a bad way. He’s just getting to know this new, decisive woman he finds himself married to now—the same way she had to get used to being married to someone bald.

  “It cannot be too soon realized that in the lives of women there is capacity for a second youth,” Anna Garlin Spencer wrote long ago, in 1913.¹⁷ My friend Barbara, who grew up in Mexico, said something similar: “The thirties are the adolescence of your adulthood, and when you reach fifty, it’s a restart—empieza de nuevo—a second chance.”

  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.”¹⁸

  Older people tend to be happier, and someday we will be those people.

  Just in the course of writing this book, I saw the lives of many of the women I spoke with change, mostly for the better. They found new jobs or new towns or new partners or figured out how to better enjoy the ones they had. They got on hormones or got off hormones or started exercising or stopped exercising. Time passed. Things were different.

  In their 1991 book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe made some predictions about our generation, which they called 13ers, because we are the thirteenth generation since the founding of the United States—and also because, like the number thirteen, we seem unlucky. In the years 2004–2025, they wrote, the Gen X demographic would be “entering mid-life 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.”¹⁹

  Eerily, Strauss and Howe predicted a 2020 crisis brought about by Boomers, one for which Gen X will “provide able on-site managers and behind-the-scenes facilitators, the ones whose quick decisions could spell the difference between triumph and tragedy … In an age of rising social intolerance, the very incorrigibility of midlife 13ers will at times be a national blessing.”

  One CEO I know, a Gen X woman who grew up in southern Illinois and now oversees huge swaths of American farmland, said she hires Gen X women to do the hardest jobs at her company because they show tremendous resilience.²⁰

  “They are the best,” she said. “They can have six screens open at once and not miss a thing. They’re not crybabies. They’re capable. They will work long and hard for you. They have zero sense of entitlement. They hold people accountable and they speak up.” She pays her most cherished Gen X women managers six figures and lets them work from anywhere. “I’ll do a lot to keep them,” she said. “They’re that valuable.”

  Could we see even our newfound midlife invisibility as a source of power? In Harry Potter’s world, one of the most prized magical tools is an invisibility cloak. There are great advantages to being underestimated. Two of the best reporters I know are women in their fifties. They look so friendly and nonthreatening, if you notice them at all. They can lurk in any room without usually wary people remembering to keep their guard up. Then they write devastating whistle-blowing articles. The world ignores middle-aged women at its peril.²¹

  When we’re driving through East Texas to visit my in-laws, my husband and son and I like to play a car game called School or Prison. Thanks to the region’s austere architecture, it can be hard to tell from afar which is which. So, spotting a massive, institutional-looking building on the horizon, we call out, “Time to play … School or Prison!” Then we each guess. Only when we get close enough to see if there’s barbed wire do we know who’s won.

  When the tough things happen—parents get sick, relationships go sour, careers stall—we might ask ourselves if the situation is a prison or a school: a place to escape or one in which to learn.

  This past summer, I broke my big toe slipping on some steps. The doctor looked at the X-ray and said, “Wow, you did a good job breaking that!” (I’ve had this same feeling when researching Gen X’s timing in history: “Wow, it’s really quite impressively bad!”) I wound up on crutches and had to cancel a work trip that was scheduled for the following week.

  Breaking my toe seemed like prison. Then, slowly, it became school. For the weeks I was recovering, I did no weeding of gardens, no cleaning of cabinets, no vacuuming, no errands. My mother brought me groceries and my son gave me his rolling desk chair to scoot around the house on and my husband did all the cooking and cleaning. And I let them.

  My friend Nola came over to keep me company and we got to joking about the incredibly boring book I could write: The Wisdom of the Crutches. It was a gift, in the end. When I sat on the couch all day, the world didn’t spin off its axis. If it weren’t for my accident, I never would have known it.

  On my forty-second birthday, I woke to the sound of my husband and son whispering and the smell of brewing coffee. When I went into the next room, I found it had been decorated with streamers and a “Happy Birthday!” banner. On the table sat presents and a cake. Later, friends—many of whom I’ve now known for decades—came over and laughed and talked at a table full of platters of food and bottles of wine, our kids running into and out of the room.

&
nbsp; That afternoon, I went to the Price Chopper and, standing there in the parking lot, I looked up at the clear, blue sky and had a strange, unfamiliar feeling: joy.

  My choices may have brought me debt and uncertainty and a lot of people depending on me. But they’ve also brought me a family that will wake up early to decorate the house and friends coming over to eat and drink and make jokes and the capacity to appreciate a clear sky on a cold day.

  Assuming we keep living, there will be a next year and another year after that. There will be tears and money stress and caregiving pressure, but also moments when we might walk through a supermarket parking lot and feel the sun on our face and think, out of nowhere, What a lovely day.

  Appendix

  A Midlife Crisis Mixtape

  “19 Somethin’”—Mark Wills

  “1979”—Smashing Pumpkins

  “1985”—Bowling for Soup

  “Better Days”—Bruce Springsteen

  “Changes”—David Bowie

  “Constant Craving”—k. d. lang

  “Divorce Song”—Liz Phair

  “Emotional Rollercoaster”—Vivian Green

  “Fade Away”—Oasis

  “Ghost!”—Kid Cudi

  “Girl of 100 Lists”—Go-Go’s

  “Good Feeling”—Violent Femmes

  “Gypsy”—Fleetwood Mac

  “Heads Carolina, Tails California”—Jo Dee Messina

  “Here”—Pavement

  “Hey Cinderella”—Suzy Bogguss

  “I Did It All”—Tracy Chapman

  “I’m a Woman”—Peggy Lee

  “Just for You”—Lionel Richie (feat. Billy Currington)

  “Let the Mystery Be”—Iris DeMent

  “Life Begins at Forty”—Sophie Tucker

  “Losing My Edge”—LCD Soundsystem

  “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave”—Martha and the Vandellas

  “Montezuma”—Fleet Foxes

  “Old College Try”—Mountain Goats

  “PMS Blues”—Dolly Parton

  “Revival”—Me Phi Me (Reality Bites)

  “Rich”—Maren Morris

  “Save Me”—Aimee Mann

  “She Let Herself Go”—George Strait

  “Strawberry Wine”—Deana Carter

  “Suddenly I See”—KT Tunstall

  “Teenage Talk”—St. Vincent

  “Too Much on My Mind”—Kinks

  “Tossin’ and Turnin’”—Bobby Lewis

  “Unsatisfied”—Replacements

  “Waiting for Somebody”—Paul Westerberg (Singles)

  “We Are Not Alone”—Karla DeVito (The Breakfast Club)

  “When We Were Young”—Adele

  “Work in Progress (Growing Pains)”—Mary J. Blige

  “You Don’t Know How It Feels”—Tom Petty

  “Your Generation”—Generation X

  “Yo Vivré”—Celia Cruz

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