The ABCs of midlife

Wisdom you can lean on in this strange phase of life

I wrote a lot of this piece while sitting here.

I did not think a lot about adolescence while I was going through it. The import and magnitude of it all was lost on me in the moment. But the farther I got from it, the more I understood it as both a time of massive upheaval and necessary evolution. Today I’m 53. By all actuarial accounts, I passed the midlife mark some time ago. And now that I’m past that stage — and all of its attending hormonal changes— is also in the rearview mirror, I see that it, too, was a time of upheavel and evolution. A change that I couldn’t understand while I was swimming in its waters. But now that I’ve got a bit of distance, I thought I’d share a primer of sorts — the ABCs of midlife for women. Years ago, I wrote the “ABCs of Pregnancy” for Fit Pregnancy magazine (RIP) and for the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking about how it might be fun to do the same for this much less glamorous phase of life.

I’ve gleaned much of the wisdom I carried out of midlife from other women — mostly other writers, but friends and strangers, too. Here’s what I’ve learned, from A to Z. A lot of it is very practical, but some of it leans toward the profound.

I’ve pulled some bits of this from old essays, so if something sounds familiar, you’re not crazy, you’re attentive. Also, this list is long, so I’m not doing a “10 Things” this week. And, I know: I haven’t been publishing regularly. I’m trying to get back on schedule.

Happy Father’s Day to my 20-ish male subscribers. One of you stopped me on the street recently to tell me how much you enjoy reading this newsletter. You said it helps you be more vulnerable and that made my day.

For you dads, I share these two fabulous Father’s Day pieces I worked on at Cog (my day job) this week:

• I’m taking piano lessons with my son (please revisit this link later today after we add the audio version of this story — it’s just beautiful)

• Life is too serious to take seriously. That’s what I’ll teach my granddaughter
  

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A is for adolescence, as in a second adolescence. I didn’t love the first half of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic, “Gifts from the Sea,” which was first published in 1955. But I found her thinking around middle age fascinating. Lindbergh writes that middle age is often tragically misunderstood, and that instead of thinking of it as the “afternoon” of life, we should look at it as a kind of second adolescence:

[In middle age] the signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs, one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. . . But in middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these lifesigns, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death. Instead of facing them, one runs away, one escapes—into depression, nervous breakdowns, drink, love affairs or frantic, thoughtless, fruitless overwork. Anything, rather than facing them. Anything, rather than stand still and learn from them.

Now look, you couldn’t pay me to revisit puberty. But there is something about this idea of a second adolescence that I love. As teens, it is our necessary work to push back, to make mistakes, to experiment and grow. The more I thought about it, the more I saw the parallels with midlife, and the more positively I viewed this habit of standing still to learn from my discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair and longing, to see them as signs of growth instead of decay. LIke a prickly teenager, middle-aged you is going through a stage and will eventually come out the other side.

B is for boobs. In my first adolescence, I spent a lot of time thinking about how one of my boobs was bigger than the other (this, all the books assured me, is perfectly normal). Now, I spend a lot of time thinking about one is lower than the other. I’m not into the idea of implants, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of a breast lift. As Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in this lovely piece for The Atlantic, “I don’t want to look like one of those shiny-faced grandmas trying to be immune to time, but I still live in a world where J.Lo exists.” Sigh.

C is for career. I returned to full-time work when my kids were 13, 10 and 7. In those days, anything could happen. One Halloween, the caboose broke both arms. One day — just a few days before state champs — my high schooler called me at work to tell me he thought he had the flu and ringworm. I eventually left a consulting company to go out on my own, in large part, so I’d have more time to deal with the brain surgery my daughter needed. Women are the default parent more often than not. Which can mean having to deal with lots of kid shit — of both the emergent and everyday varieties — which can make work tough. Not impossible, but tough. But eventually, you get to a place where your kids can all stay home on their own if they have a fever, where they can drive themselves back and forth to practice, where they’re away at college and you don’t hear about their sinus infection until they’ve already finished a course of antibiotics. And before you know it, you’re the old lady at the office who is incredibly dependable. The most flexible and predictable person on the team. Where you can focus on your career in a way you couldn’t at life’s earlier (and more labor-intensive phases).

D is for divorce. The divorce rate in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been in decades, but 40% of first marriages end in divorce. Interestingly, 70% of those divorces are initiated by women, and women are far less likely to remarry after divorce than men are. Still, some policymakers seem stumped about why more women aren’t marrying and having babies. Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-wife, explains it succinctly: marriage isn’t working for women. “If 40 percent of Honda CR-Vs had engine failures, Honda would issue a recall,” she writes.

E is for exfoliation. As a teenager, I thought exfoliation had to hurt (remember the crushed walnut shells in St. Ives’ Apricot Scrub?!). But now I understand my skin needs a kindler, gentler kind of exfoliation, like vitamin C, which promotes cell turnover — new skin replacing the old. It’s kind of a metaphor for this stage of life, isn’t it?

F is for friends. By the time you reach midlife, you have a collection of friends from all the different phases and stages of your life. And, in mid-life, you get to prioritize those relationships. Want to work side-by-side in a coffee shop? Of course I do. Want to go for a walk after dinner? Yes, please.

The tough part, I have found, is because those friends come from all the different phases and stages of your life, they may not all be local. Luckily, at this stage of life, you have more freedom — so traveling to see those friends is a lot easier, too. Want to meet up in New York for the weekend? Hell yes.

G is for guilt. As in mommy guilt. I don’t struggle with this too much, but I know plenty of women who do, even after their kids are grown and gone. If you’re one of these women, consider these questions from Jessica Grosse, NYT opinion columnist and author of Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood:

Anytime you feel guilty about not meeting some sort of insane, unachieveable demand, ask yourself: Does this help me improve my relationship with my children? And does this help my community? If the answer is neither, push back. Refuse to feel the guilt and failure that plague so many of us when we are just trying to raise our families under this broken system.

H is for homemaking. I love good design and a beautiful home. But in my 50s, decorating and other domestic duties are not how I want to invest my time and effort — especially if I’m doing it alone. So I often remind myself of two ideas from the brilliant K.C. Davis, author of How Keep House While Drowning:

1. “You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.

   Internalizing this belief will help you a) shift your perspective of care tasks from a moral obligation to a functional errand, b) see what changes you actually want to make, and c) weave them into your life with minimal effort, relying not on self-loathing but on self-compassion.

2. “I love a calming visual as much as the next person, but it’s important to remember that not everything has to be aesthetically pleasing to be organized and not everything aesthetically pleasing is functional!”

I is for Imposter syndrome. As a woman of a certain age, I no longer doubt my own bona fides. All it takes is spending a little time with a woman in her 20s or 30s to remind me that I’ve seen some shit, that I know a thing or two about people, and that I have a lot to offer the world. Of course, some women come to this confidence a lot earlier than I did. I’m looking at you, Ilona Maher.

J is for jealousy. Jealousy is a young person’s game. By the time you’re my age, you know that there are pluses and minuses to every choice. Advantages and disadvantages to every decision. I don’t have time to spend time thinking about other people and their lives. I’m too busy thinking about myself and what I want and need — it’s one of the perks of being older.

K is for keep walking. Literally and metaphorically. Walking is great exercise, yes. But also, not every problem can be solved and movement feels like progress. Getting into your body, helps you get out of your head. In her memoir, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, the brilliant and hilarious

Bess Kalb

shares great advice from her grandmother Bobby Bell: “No matter what happens, keep walking. … [I]f the earth is cracking behind you right up to your heels, you put one foot in front of the other. You keep going. Nothing’s as important as moving forward.”

L is for laughing — another coping mechanism. My friend Sara Shukla likes to quote Mel Brooks: “If you can laugh, you can get by.” A sense of humor is a survival skill. Maybe we all owe an apology to the class clowns of our “first” adolescence. I think they were on to something.

M is for Matroyshka dolls, those hollow wooden dolls that nest inside each other. When I think about my past selves and my current regrets, I always come back to this helpful visual from poet and writer

Maggie Smith

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How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves — all of our selves — wherever we go.

Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.

Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”

N is for nest, as in an empty nest. I think we’ve been thinking about this concept all wrong. Writer and friend Meaghan Shields says “This hour of life is magic.” In an essay she wrote for Cog, she says: “In the empty nest articles I read last summer, there was a lot of advice about relationships with other people, but I had no idea that becoming an empty nester would improve my relationship with myself. I had forgotten over the years that I am more than the roles I fulfill in relation to others — mother, wife, sister, colleague. I am also just me.”

O is for ovaries. Scientists who study women’s health and longevity now think that women’s ovaries affect every aspect of our health. Still, says Renee Wegrzyn, the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the ovaries are the only human organ that “we just accept will fail one day.” But why? If we could figure out how to delay menopause, we might be able to delay all the health risks associated with it, including heart disease, stroke and osteoporosis.

P is for perimenoapuse. Which is still a mystery (see “Women’s Health Initiative”). When does it start? When does it end? What even is it?

@cbcgemis it perimenopause? (📺: Baroness von Sketch Show) #baronessvonsketch

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Q is for quick. As in, life seems to go by so much faster as we get older. The experts say this is because our brains “lump time together” when we do the same thing day in and day out. So as we age, and have fewer new experiences, it all kind of blends together. Years seem like months, months seem like days. Maybe it’s our duty to slow things down by trying new things? (See “Viral day trips.”)

R is for role models. In the last decade or so, I have found myself at more crossroads than I ever imagined this stage of life could involve. And at each of those intersections, I’ve found identifying and imitating role models immensely helpful. Now, when I use the term imitating, I don’t mean it in a single white female sense. I try to emulate, not replicate. I’ve found parenting role models, professional role models and personal role models.

When I found myself looking for aging role models, I noticed that I was drawn to women who are, as the media so often describes it, “aging naturally” (or, at the very least, more naturally than others). Brooke Shields who declared, “I don’t want to chase youth. I want to chase now.” Sarah Jessica Parker, who told Vogue, “I know what I look like. I have no choice. What am I going to do about it? Stop aging? Disappear?” Emma Thompson,who said, “If I don’t love my body, who will?”

These women are all celebrities — which is why I can quote them — but there’s another commonality: They’re all badasses. They’re smart and articulate, daring and ambitious. I wouldn’t mind looking young again, but I’d rather be a badass. And maybe the level of badassness I aspire to only comes with age. I had been looking for physical role models, but what I realized was that the women who embrace aging rather than raging against it don’t have faces I want to emulate, they have lives I want to emulate.

S is for shingles. You’re probably aware of the updated guidelines re; mammograms and colonoscopies. But what about the shingles vaccine? The risk of getting this painful disease increases with age. But it’s not just shingles. There are a few vax updates you should get after 50. Take care of yourself, people.

T is for tubing mascara. Apparently, as we get older, we start losing our eyelashes and using tubing mascara is one way to preserve and protect them while we can. I’m still trying to figure this stuff out. If anyone has any great tips or product recommendations, please share them in the comments. Bonus: No matter how hard I try to remove traditional mascara at bedtime, some of it always ends up on my towels and linens. That doesn’t happen with tubing mascara.

U is for uttanasana, a standing forward bend that stretches the back of your body. I used to hate yoga. I tried it a few different times in my 30s and 40s and just couldn’t get into it. But after my back surgery, I tried to be more open-minded about it and ended up finding a yoga studio that offers classes I love. I don’t do it more than twice a week, but it’s a great change of pace and I finally get it. When I told my friend Amanda this, she said someone once told her: “Everyone loves yoga, you just have to find the right one.” So if you’re not yet a convert, keep looking.

V is for the viral day trip trend. I want to do this because I can at this stage of life. This WashPo journalist says the viral day trip trend isn’t worth it, but I think I need to do my own research. Should I write about it? Does someone want to try it with me?

W is for the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). The WHI was started in 1991 (when female subjects weren’t a big part of clinical research) and has contributed to thousands of medical studies that improved the care for and health of women around the globe. After initially being on President Trump’s chopping block, the WHI was spared when the decision to defund it was rescinded, but this is something we should all keep an eye on.

X is for experience. I know, I know. I’m cheating a bit here, but cut me some slack — this isn’t easy. The stereotypical midlife crisis is an identity crisis, a search for the self. Which makes me think of the words of the Austrian poet Hugo Von Hofmannstahl:

Where is your self to be found?

Always in the deepest

enchantment you have

experienced.

Y is for yes. So much of the discourse around middle age is negative. We view it as the end of so many things. We talk about empty nests and estrogen. Downsizing and defying gravity. But there are also so many new beginnings, so many surprises, so many things to say yes to. At this stage of life, I have more free time. More flexibility. More time to read, travel and exercise. (Maybe this is why that magazine for middle-aged women was called More?). It can be hard to say “yes” when you’re so accustomed to saying “no,” but practice makes it easier.

Zzzzzs. Insomnia is one of the first symptoms of perimenopause (it’s caused by a dip in your progesterone levels), but I promise it gets better. And eventually you’re the woman who doesn’t get woken up by little kids who had a nightmare/threw up/need a glass of water or teenagers checking in at curfew. You’re the woman who can crawl into bed for much-deserved rest whenever you want.

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