Reflections on Identity

Is This a Crisis or Just Midlife?

Rethinking the notion of the midlife crisis

Which comes first, midlife or the crisis? Is it that finding oneself in midlife causes the crisis or do a series of crises make us acknowledge our midlife status? What I find most shocking about being past the fifty threshold is not my age or how much of my life is behind me, but how much happens by and in midlife that causes serious re-examination of who we are and forces us to ask: what’s the point of all this anyway?

This morning, I awaken to a text from an old friend, telling me that she and her husband have separated. Together for 27 years, she writes, just like you. She and I met fifteen years ago, when we used to sit by the community pool while the kids splashed around. I remember the first time I saw her, straight hair down to her waist, a smattering of tattoos on her arms, a tiny bikini at a pool of moms in one-pieces and cover-ups. We were young and busy: serving grapes and Goldfish, breaking up fights, running for cover when the skies opened up.

An hour later, I run into a friend on the street. I ask how she is and she pauses, then says ok but with a question mark. I furrow my brows, she takes a deep breath: her husband has brain cancer and is in a wheelchair. Our kids went to the same elementary school, sang together in choir at our synagogue. We often found our way to each other after services when it was time to drink sweet red wine and eat challah. I am dumbfounded, murmuring I’m sorry over and over again until she walks away.

Later that afternoon, a close friend comes by to see my new apartment. I ask about her kids and she pauses, then says she hadn’t want to share bad news as we celebrate my new home. Her son’s roommate’s father has killed himself, one month before the boys’ graduation from college. What should be a celebratory time has become a time of tragedy. I know that my friend is devastated for the friend and his family but also for her own son, for the experience she wanted for him that he will not get.

In recent months, I have attended three funerals for my friends’ parents. I received a phone call from a funeral home to let me know that my father’s ashes were ready for pick up. I signed divorce papers. I’ve awoken night after night drenched from peri-menopausal night sweats, hurling off wet clothes and scooting over for a dry spot in the king-sized bed in which I have slept alone ever since the revelation of my husband’s affair four years ago.

My older daughter will graduate from college in a month, my son will complete his first year of college three thousand miles away, my daughter — the family baby — has become a teenager seemingly overnight. Last week, she got braces; the next day she asked if she could shave her legs, and the day after that she told me she wanted to walk home from school by herself. The whole reason I had her so much later than the other kids was to prolong the period in which I had kids at home, and now even she’s decided to grow up?

Is this what midlife is, not a single crisis in which you awaken one morning and realize life is in the express lane when you had thought you were going local, but a series of crises that batter you, signaling that change is here and is not leaving? The only certainty you can count on is that there will be more bad news tomorrow: sickness, death, divorce.

I can recall a time not so long ago when hearing that a friend my age was seriously ill was rare and shocking. It’s still shocking, but definitely not rare. A friend diagnosed with incurable lung cancer; a friend’s husband with a slow-growing tumor in his thyroid that cannot be removed. The divorces too. First, it was just me and I felt isolated and ashamed. Now it is me who does the soothing, passing along the names of my divorce lawyer and couples therapist.

I understand now this notion of “the sandwich generation,” so named by two social workers in 1981 to describe midlifers who are caught between caring for their kids and aging parents at the same time — and let’s face it, most of these midlife caregivers are women. My own sandwich was brought home to me recently when I made arrangements for my eleven year-old to stay with her dad while I flew out of town to retrieve my eighty year-old mom who had fallen and fractured her knee while visiting my brother.

I keep thinking about this sandwich metaphor. Am I the turkey slapped between two slices of gluten-free bread, or am I the whole enchilada? What happens when I have an empty nest but am still caring for my mother; am I then an open-faced sandwich? Or if my daughter is still at home with me and God forbid my mother passes; am I the sandwich filling then, or simply an orphan?

A sandwich is too neat for the precarious state I’m in. This is more like the taco generation: take one bite and the whole thing falls apart. Or the ice cream sandwich generation: starts out nice and neat, but by halftime it’s melting. Or the pizza generation: go for it with zest and burn the roof of your mouth, ruining the rest of the eating experience; wait too long and be stuck with congealed cheese, forever wishing that you hadn’t been so afraid to enjoy the pizza while it was still hot.

I wouldn’t want to be a teenager again, especially not in the age of social media; nor would I want to be a brand new mother again, walking around like an unkempt zombie leaking fluids while confounded by a fragile object lighter than the weights I now lift to help me stave off osteoporosis. My forties started off with great potential, but by forty-seven I was separated, at forty-nine I found out my birth father was someone other than who I had believed him to be, and just shy of my fiftieth birthday, I was told by my soon-to-be-ex-husband that I had to move from our family home.

I don’t long to go back, nor is my focus solely on moving forward. I want to be here, now, to simply be in this moment, grateful that I am alive and well as long as that may last. The knowledge that this can all be turned upside down without so much as a polite warning — the taco splitting at the seams, the ice cream sandwich growing damp and sticky in my hands, the pizza tempting and then burning, cooling and then disappointing — has changed everything.

When I was younger, normal uneventful days blended together in a haze of school meetings and trips to the grocery store between school drop-off and pick-up and the baby’s nap; I was on the move, all the time, and a bad day was one in which the baby didn’t nap and was scarily cranky. Now a good day is one in which not much happens; a bad day means there has been bad news. A day like today — three separate parcels of heartbreaking updates on the lives of my friends — is sadly not uncommon.

I had always thought a midlife crisis was the moment in which your forty or fiftysomething self rebelled against what was perceived by society as closer to old than young: quick, get a young lover, a sports car, a tattoo. When I told my friends of my husband’s affair, they all believed it to be just this sort of midlife crisis. I’m not saying it’s not — he does, after all, date a woman twenty years his junior and often wears all white clothing, as if he is following a voice telling him to run to the light where perhaps the fountain of youth is.

I have never wholly believed this though. Isn’t a crisis when something happens to you, like your spouse leaves you, you get a life-altering diagnosis or lose a loved one or a home or a job? If you are the one actively making a decision to change your life, is that a crisis or simply a transition? My husband was not having a crisis. He realized the life he had was no longer the one he wanted. He caused a crisis by deciding this and then acting on it, but it wasn’t what propelled him. He was driven by a desire for a different way to live, the same way people change jobs or move.

The blessing and the curse of midlife is that we feel emboldened to live our lives on our own terms. We’ve spent decades building homes and families; the minute we surface from the noise and demands of construction, we may realize what we built no longer suits us. We see, increasingly, that life can turn on a dime and not because of anything we caused or could have stopped. Too much bad news can bury us, or it can wake us up to the realization that we can make changes that may make us happier. The change itself is not the crisis, it is the beginning of the resolution — for the time being, anyway.

When I was in my twenties, already married and with my first baby, I felt certain I had exactly what I wanted. I had single friends who despaired they would never get the partner or the kids, but I don’t recall regarding them as being in a state of crisis. They saw swirls of change around them and they wanted it for themselves too.

This is how I see midlife now and why I reject the concept of the midlife crisis. In our fifties, we are more than twenty years older than those hopeful and often dejected twentysomething selves; we see change around us that looks intriguing and we want in, just like we wanted way back when. Personally, as a true creature of habit, I had not wanted any change at all, but change was forced on me and I decided to embrace it.

So what’s the point? Turns out it’s been the same all along: to grow, to build, to love, to accept change with grace and curiosity.