The Female Gen X Midlife Crisis

As I was scrolling through the Medium Daily Digest that finds its way into my Gmail account at exactly 7:00 am every morning, I stumbled upon a story by Addie Page.

She mentions that

We haven’t heard about the midlife crisis since then. Gen X, as a smaller generation, didn’t get all the hoopla and fanfare as they passed into middle age.

This comment got me to thinking about my own midlife crisis (I actually had two) and whether I passed into the first without a cabaret song and dance. I kinda did.

I decided to go to university for the first time. I was thirty-seven years old, and my mind was bored. I had been on a spiritual and personal development bender for a year and felt good about my progress. I was working for a sporting organization in the business development area, and I was bored. I was bored, bored, B-O-R-E-D! I needed intellectual stimulation, so I applied as a middle-aged student to the University of Western Australia, got accepted, and began my college career.

There was no trumpet, no fanfare, just an application and a course catalogue.

Addie also references an article by Ada Calhoun, where she states:

Part of the reason we don’t know much about women’s midlife experience is that the focus has often been on men.

What else is new for Gen X women? Raised by Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, the male figure was embedded in everything we did. We were taught to feel safe in masculine company — even when they touched what they shouldn't — we worked for male bosses, had a heavy male presence in our religions, and were generally expected to revere the masculine of the species.

Men were raised on the simple formula of getting an education, getting married, having a couple of kids, working forty years until retirement, taking your golden handshake, do some retirement travel as an empty nester, play with your grandchildren, and then die.

Women were raised on much the same, bar the forty years of work with the golden handshake. We were expected to lay any promising career down to stay home and raise our kids the way our mothers and grandmothers did.

However, something strange happened on the way to heaven — the rhetoric changed slightly as women started to take a little more of their power back. Unfortunately, it came with the caveat of, "you still need to do your motherly and spousely duties!"

Ada quotes Deborah Luepnitz, a psychotherapist in Philadelphia, a boomer, and author of Schopenhauer's Porcupines.

The message Gen X women got was ‘You can have it all.’

In midlife, what I see in my Gen X patients is total exhaustion. That’s what brings them to treatment. 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.

We were entering the work environment as women's empowerment was taking center stage — much to the chagrin of most white privileged men who tried to frame us as the devil's spawn.

The pay gap, however, remained cavernously wide! After all, women were bound to leave to push out some little ingrates. Surely, women’s empowerment didn’t extend to unmonitored babies?

But it did, and we didn't.

We broke some of the moulds hammered into us despite the foundation of "normal." We wanted to have full-time careers and climb that corporate ladder and have a family with the white picket fence and two-story house. Some of us even had the audacity to not want children, but society said, "oh no! Not acceptable!" So, some of us caved into the normative cultural pressure, but some of us stood firm in our resolves and brushed off the looks of pity for being childless.

We were also the generation that had to bridge the technology gap.

As I write this article, I'm forty-nine years old. Being born in 1973, I'm slap-bang in the middle of the Gen X cycle. It was me who brought the first computer into my family home. My father (the silent generation) retired before he had to use computers in his job. My mother (a baby boomer) did her duty and stayed home with her children, having a few crafty endeavors that she ran from the garage.

We Gen Xers had to learn systems and technology that were foreign to us. The Boomers were firmly in charge and were able to delegate the tech tasks to us minions.

We didn't grow up playing on smartphones or tablets. We didn't grow up using computers, the closest we ever got was arcade games and handheld Nintendo and Atari consoles. But we had to learn… and we had to learn fast.

When my father came home from work, he came home from work. Although he was a manager and had a lot of responsibilities, he was rarely contacted after hours, only for emergencies on the home landline. When he wasn't home, he wasn't home, and the office couldn't get hold of him. Every day he came home, stripped off his work clothes, poured himself a beer, and interacted with the family or did his little odd jobs around the house.

When we came home, there was often an expectation to check work emails, answer messages and calls from a usually demanding "empty-nester" boss who had nothing else to do but obsess about getting their worker to do more.

We were expected to be everything to everyone. Loving and devoted children who respected our parents and spent time with them as they aged. Loving and devoted parents who raised our children to respect others and had all the attention they needed in the home. Devoted workers who put 110% effort into jobs that would cut us in the blink of an eye if profits dipped and who could now be contacted 24/7 due to the marvel of mobile and internet technologies.

When I dived into my first midlife crisis, it was with zero fanfare. I studied for six years, juggled work and volunteering commitments, maintained a home, and remained a good friend and confident. Thankfully, I was one of the rebels who didn't add to the world's population, but I did it all alone. I had no partner and very little support, emotionally and financially.

My second midlife crisis crippled me, and I'm still pulling myself out of the glorious hole I've dug. This one I've also weathered pretty much alone.

So why did Gen X women slide into their midlife crises without blowing the bugles that our Baby Boomer predecessors did so well?

• Maybe it's because we were meant to be everything to everyone and simply didn't have the time.
• Maybe it's because we had to bridge the technology gap, and leaping into the future took too much of our mental space to blow our trumpets.
• Maybe it's because we also bridged the gap to the integration of women's rights, gay rights, immigrant's rights, race equality, and any other minority groups that were previously ignored and discriminated against.
• Maybe it's because we were raised to be quiet about our struggles. Pride reigned supreme in many families, and even indicating that one needed help was a strict no-no.
• Maybe it was a combination of it all.

I'm not discounting the work done before us by the women that protested and fought for our rights, but it was us that had to be spanked for this "bad behaviour" as straight white males got their feelings hurt, indulged in their fears of losing their privileges, and pushed back.

It was a lot — still is, but as many of us pass through the midlife stage, let's keep an eye on our younger generations and do better for them than our elders did for us.

. . .

Please have a read (and possibly a laugh) at my "middle-aged woman gone mad" mid-life crises.