You know you’re in your forties when . . .
You are capable of listening without judgment.
You no longer accept one-sided accounts of relationship agonies, or obediently validate friends’ stories. When you recount how someone has wronged you, you now add, “This is from my perspective, of course.”
You no longer need your friends to share your tastes.
You know that among all the people whose company you enjoy, there are some who matter deeply to you. You actually remember the things they say. You treasure them, and will always make time for them.
Sometimes these same people do not treasure you.
You don’t want to be with the cool people anymore; you want to be with your people.
21
how to say no
IT’S GREAT TO FINALLY HAVE CLOSE FRIENDS. I just wish I had time to see them.
If there’s one word that describes the modern forties, it’s “busy.” I’ve never had so many small tasks to accomplish. My current to-do list is eleven pages long and contains tasks ranging from panicky (“insurance renewals!”) to the aspirational (“read Stefan Zweig”) to the paralyzingly daunting (“print and organize family photos”). There are endless emails to return and thank-you notes to write. Friends of friends visiting Paris want to know where to eat and whether we can meet for a leisurely drink. Even the simplest of these tasks requires a twenty-minute slot of time that I don’t have. Oh, and there’s housework.
I know these are privileged problems. I’m grateful to have them. But Dutch economist Lans Bovenberg correctly describes the new “rush hour of life,” when work and child-rearing peaks collide, and some people are looking after aging parents, too. (“My mom thinks she’s pregnant,” a friend from Connecticut reports. “She lives in a retirement home, and she keeps saying, ‘This is going to be a terrible place to raise a child.’”)
Psychological researchers call this busyness “role overload,” and say they have trouble recruiting midlifers for clinical studies (college students and the elderly have far more free time). Never mind having an existential crisis; it’s been years since we’ve even been to the movies.
I can’t claim to be handling all this gracefully. When I chastise my daughter for singing in the kitchen instead of helping me clean up, she says I lack “joy of life” (it’s her English translation of joie de vivre). I’m taken aback, but I get it. It’s hard to conjure joy of life when, in a single morning, I have to arrange for the unclogging of toilets, the selection of an orthodontist and the buying of multiple, appropriate birthday presents, while also submitting work projects on time.
Managing all these tasks requires constant triage. You must decide what to prioritize and—crucially—when to say no. The ability to refuse everything from playdates to freelance assignments is a core skill of the decade, without which you will drown in tedious conversations and what the British call “personal admin.” Just as busyness is the signature predicament of the forties, saying no is its signature defensive move.
I realize I’m no good at this when, on a freezing winter night, I’m standing outside a party thrown by an American food blogger I barely know.
I don’t especially want to attend this party. I’m feeling fluish, and I’ve missed spending the evening with my family. But I don’t want to miss the party, either. What if something excellent happens there? What if I say no and the blogger feels I’ve snubbed her? When there was no door code on the invitation (you need one to get into most Parisian buildings), I figured that she might live in a mansion that opens onto the street. I don’t want to miss seeing that mansion. And surely the food will be fabulous.
I arrive at the address on the invitation to find a typical Parisian apartment building that requires a door code. For forty-five minutes I stand on the street, sniffling and freezing. I can see the party through a window, but the people inside can’t hear me shouting up at them. Because she’s hosting, the blogger doesn’t answer her phone. Why did she even invite me? I’ve only met her once. Then I get it: I’ve become someone else’s aspirational friend.
Finally, a man comes out on her balcony to smoke, and calls down the door code to me. Upstairs, the blogger greets me, gestures to some sad-looking food on paper plates, then walks away. The guests are mostly other middle-aged American expatriates with the depressive air of people whose lives sound glamorous to friends back home, but who are in fact disappointed and underemployed.
One woman describes her son’s speech therapy to me at great length. Another introduces herself aggressively as An-dreh-ah, as if I’m to blame for everyone who’s ever mispronounced it. Then she demands to know, “What’s your story?”
I retrieve my coat and flee, not even saying goodbye to An-dreh-ah or the blogger. The next day I agonize about whether I’ve made things worse by leaving abruptly. Should I email the blogger to apologize?
“You know what I think when I hear these stories?” Simon says. “I think how hard it must be to be you having these interior monologues.”
Chastened, I realize that I need to get better at saying yes to things I want to do, and no to the ones, like this party, that on balance I don’t. But how do I tell the difference in advance? What if I miss brilliant soirées in mansions, or I say no too often and the invitations cease?
I gradually learn some key lessons on how to edit my own life, both in leisure and work:
Know your own habits. If going out to lunch derails your workday, don’t meet anyone for lunch, period. Track your slots of discretionary time. When my kids go to bed at nine o’clock, I have two hours before I need to sleep, too. Spelling this out for myself precisely—instead of being vaguely aware of it—helps me to use this block of time the way I want to.
Be lucid about the trade-offs you’re making. Economist Tim Harford points out that saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else that you could have done with that time: “Will I write a book review and thus not write a chapter of my own book? Will I give a talk to some students, and therefore not read a bedtime story to my son? Will I participate in the panel discussion instead of having a conversation over dinner with my wife?” He recommends filtering future plans through a simple test: If I had to do this today, would I agree to it?
Follow your verve. When you’re trying to decide between several options, pay attention to which one energizes you and which one makes you feel tired just thinking about it. (I learned this from a life coach, Janet Orth.) This isn’t always feasible; practical factors can intrude and there are things you must do. But it’s worth weighing the “energy” factor, too. Even as a grown-up, it’s okay to choose the option that seems like more fun.
Do small things immediately, if you can. They’ll swell in importance if you let them linger.
People—and even institutions—are usually flexible. “I used to twist my schedule around for people’s invitations,” a fortysomething teacher in Vermont tells me. “But I don’t do that anymore. I’ve realized that there’s much more room for negotiation in things than you think.” If you don’t like someone’s proposal, propose something else that you can do with less stress.
A freelance journalist I know says that when he’s ambivalent about accepting a writing assignment, he asks the editor for double the amount of money she offered. He finds that half the time, the editor agrees to this, so in the end he does half the work for the same amount of money. And he finds out how badly the other party wants him.
Don’t let the internet eat your life. Rules help. A children’s book author tells me that he only returns emails on Thursdays. Another writer tells me he never goes online between nine a.m. and five p.m. (“If I look something up, it’s an hour.”)
Focusing on the long term helps, too. The British writer Zadie Smith got a flip phone and installed internet-blocking software on her computer once she realized that she di
dn’t want to be eighty-six “and think that a large part of the life had been spent on Mr. Jobs, in his universe, on his phone, with his apps. I didn’t want that for my life.”
Prioritize your own project. No one else will. People will come to you with their problems and imply that you’re the only one who can solve them. This is almost never true. Unless the problem is life-threatening or the person is a very close friend, you don’t need to derail your own work to solve it. Don’t volunteer to do someone else’s small, draining tasks out of guilt. You can do favors, but you get to choose which ones.
It’s okay to be a little bit ruthless. When a neighbor wanted me to sell her the little closet attached to my apartment so she could build herself a bathtub, I agonized. I needed the closet, but surely she needed to take a bath. Then I consulted a friend—a man—about my dilemma, and he couldn’t believe I was even debating this. “I’d just say, ‘Sorry, I want my closet,’” he said. And so I did.
Have a plan. This makes it harder for others to derail you, and easier to determine what’s part of your agenda and what isn’t. The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that nothing will ever go according to plan, but if you have no plan you will definitely fail.
Say no nicely. Present your explanation plainly and honestly. “I’d like to, but I’m busy with work” is a perfectly reasonable—and true—explanation. If people don’t like the answer, or they misunderstand your intentions, there’s not much you can do. Sometimes they respect your directness even when you’re turning them down. “Thanks so much, and well done on saying no to things—you’re a beacon of fortitude for us all!” an acquaintance wrote, after I’d told her that I was too busy to help her friend.
Just do what you want more often. At a friend’s fortieth birthday party, there’s a delicious Lebanese buffet. I finish my first plate, then tell my Parisian friend Julien that I’d like to go back for seconds, but that I don’t want to be rude. Not everyone has eaten.
Julien replies with a lesson that applies to more than just the buffet (and makes me realize that he and I are becoming friends). “You must do what you want, what you feel,” he says. “When you do that, everything goes better, everything works.” Obviously, some people don’t need to hear this message. But for those of us who fret about small transgressions, it’s liberating. People aren’t crushed if you don’t go to their party. And when you do go, they’re pleased that you’re enjoying the buffet. Paradoxically, when you stop worrying about whether you’re offending people or breaking rules, occasions take on a more natural flow.
Remember that this, too, shall end. When I ask a Californian in her fifties what has changed since her forties, she says that, for the first time in many years, she actually has free time. One of her children has finished high school and the other is nearly done. She doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
I won’t have that problem ten years from now. I’ll be writing Obama-era thank-you notes and going back for seconds at the buffet.
You’re in your forties when . . .
You know how to disappoint someone.
You’ve stopped spending time with people who make you feel terrible.
You know that if someone wants to spend her leisure time with you, there’s a good chance she genuinely likes you.
You have so little time that you sacrifice sleep, but you need sleep in order to get everything done. This paradox makes you perpetually unproductive.
You know that most marital conflicts are caused by either a lack of sex or a lack of sleep.
You know that making a small change in your life can make a big difference.
22
how to control your family
AS I GET ON IN MY FORTIES, I start to feel that I’ve cracked the code in many parts of my life. But paradoxically—given that I’ve just spent four days lecturing to Russian mothers in Moscow—one realm where I still struggle is parenting.
Now that my kids are older and more autonomous, how much should I try to influence them, and when should I respect their preferences and let go? I face this on smaller questions: Should I insist that my younger son taste scrambled eggs again, even though he finds them revolting? Should I transfer one of the twins into his brother’s class, which seems to have a better teacher, even though his brother wants to be alone?
I also face larger issues: I had planned to move around a lot when my kids were young, including to America. But neither they nor my husband is even willing to change apartments. When I broach the idea of moving to a new country, everyone—including Simon—revolts. I may be the queen of the family, but it’s four against one.
It surely doesn’t help that I’m a hapless immigrant, who can’t even be trusted to help with fourth-grade homework. To bolster my status I take Bean to the Salon du Livre, an enormous annual book fair on the edge of Paris, where my French publisher has a stand. They’ve scheduled a two-hour slot during which I’m supposed to sit and sign books. Surely Bean will be impressed when she meets my fans.
She and I sit at a long, narrow table with a row of authors on one side. There’s a pile of my books on the table, and a folded sign with my name on it.
The Francophone African woman to my left is plugging her memoir. A famous French diet doctor is on my right. Fans wait in long lines to see each of them.
A few people ask me for directions to the toilet. But for two hours, not a single person stops to buy my book or ask for my signature. I don’t mind. I know that some events are like that. But Bean is shocked. It was a big deal for her to have come all this way and to sit alongside me.
“No one wants to read your book?” she whispers. She hadn’t known my status outside the family. Now I can see it registering in her eyes: in the real world, I’m a loser. It seems pointless to try to convince her otherwise.
* * *
—
I’m not alone in feeling powerless over my family. My friend Florence, who has three kids, too, says she thinks of her household as a kind of jellyfish. She can nudge it in a certain direction, but she can’t really push it or order it around.
My kids still haven’t gone to American sleepaway camp. But America has entered their lives in other ways. Through my non-American husband they’ve discovered the Marx Brothers’ movies, which I’d never seen. Now they go around our apartment holding pretend cigars and singing, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”
They may not have embraced all my interests, but I’ve been embracing theirs. I spend quite a lot of time watching professional soccer. I don’t even balk when they call it “football.” When my younger son said he was sad “because Samuel Eto’o is getting old,” I knew he meant the thirtysomething striker for Cameroon.
“What’s the name again of the team that invaded Mozambique?” he asked recently.
“Portugal,” I replied. “And it’s not a team, it’s a country.”
I do have a kind of “soft” power, based on my life experience and presumed wisdom. But even this is often tested. When I’m walking with Bean to take the entrance exam for a bilingual middle school, she’s visibly nervous.
“What if I don’t get in?” she asks me. I realize that it’s my moment to come through as a grown-up. I’m supposed to say something that’s both encouraging and reassuring. And she’s a tough audience, so it also must be true.
“You’re prepared. And if you don’t get in, we’ll cope,” I say.
“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” she says.
“You’re going to get in, you’re going to do great?” I say.
She looks skeptical. That’s not it, either.
“It doesn’t matter whether you get in or not!” I venture.
Bean looks at me with either contempt or disgust. She can tell that these statements are like tosses at a basketball hoop; I keep shooting and hoping that something goes in.
As
we get closer to the school, I suddenly think of a better answer.
“Just be yourself!” I say. “Focus on thinking, ‘I’m okay, I’m me, I’m fine.’”
“You’re just trying to say something to your daughter because you’re the parent,” she says, correctly.
Finally, I just ask her: “Okay, what do you want to hear?”
“That whatever happens, it will be okay,” she says.
“That’s pretty much what I said at the beginning.”
“I know,” she says.
I realize that she’s still nervous, and that she’s looking for what the French call a “technique”—a tested practical solution to her problem. It’s what Americans might call a “life hack.”
“Just focus on your breathing,” I suggest.
“When I think about my breathing, I start to breathe like this,” she says, pretending to hyperventilate.
“If you’re meant to get in, you’ll get in,” I say. She looks dubious. I’m spouting self-help drivel, and she knows it.
When we’re about a block away from the school, she suddenly becomes joyful and starts skipping down the street. I’m reminded that children can change moods in an instant, and this gives me another idea.
“Just enjoy the test, have fun with it,” I say. She likes this technique, but she knew it already. And she’s not about to take pointers on joie de vivre from me.
When we arrive at the school, a gaggle of anxious children and their parents are milling around outside. I consider telling Bean that she’s going to crush them. Instead, I make a final suggestion: “Trust yourself.” She looks at me, and for the first time says nothing. Then someone calls her name, and she walks inside the school without looking back.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 17
