we are now. (Entertain us.)
The dramas of life change when you have children. They expand to the vastness of your terrified imagination. They reduce to the size of a raggedy toy cat.
‘Where’s Kitty?’ wails F.
‘What’s she lost?’ whispers S. ‘That grey rat thing?’
‘Cat, not rat,’ I say. ‘Kitty.’
These dramas take up time, and mind-space. They don’t leave much room for your own. This can be a good thing – gone are the hours spent worrying about what you said at a party, mostly because you don’t go to parties – but also frustrating, when your own drama is about trying to work out where you’re at. And how to go on from there.
I am fitting my drama into specified time slots. I have read that this is one of the best ways to approach unmanageable concerns, to contain the things in the day that keep you awake at night. In the mornings, you consider your anxieties, examine them properly for twenty minutes, then you store them and get on with your day. I contemplate my fears. I’m unsure how deep I should go, how dark and twisted, how specific (unemployment, divorce, the loss of The Point). Or should I be grateful for them, tell them I’m happy they’ve come into my life? Hold them in my virtual hand, before rolling them up like socks and putting them away tidily in their drawer – the virtual drama drawer (next to the wardrobe of worries)?
The next hour is spent frantically opening real-life drawers and boxes, untidying rooms, checking pockets, under sofas, trying to find a grey toy cat.
In the British Library, I am researching my drama.
In 1965, Canadian psychoanalyst and psychologist Elliot Jaques coined the now much-used epithet ‘midlife crisis’. Jaques interviewed a group of successful people and realized that many were feeling the effects of reaching a central point in their working lives. They were confused, disappointed. They’d arrived at their central point to find it was not a high spot, but a dip. Maybe even a spiral. He defined this new crisis as what happened when high achievers hit middle age and feel tortured because of ‘unrealized goals, lack of self-determination or physical changes’. It being the 60s, the midlife point was assumed to be between 30 and 35, and the high achievers Jaques surveyed were men.
Though Jaques named it, and nicely, the idea of a critical moment of change at life’s central age had been knocking around for quite a while. Literature loves the idea of a failing, flailing fellow in his middle years, and Carl Jung, through his work in the 1930s, believed that the midlife stage was vital to human development. ‘The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion,’ wrote Jung. We want this, he said, even though it can’t happen: ‘We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.’
Jung believed there should be colleges for 40-year-olds, institutions of learning to help us get through the painful transition to full maturity. I like this idea. The Middle-aged University. A place to study your navel, if you can still locate it, Chunky.
When I type ‘midlife crisis’ into the British Library search engine, I get 359 returns. Some are songs – ‘Midlife Crisis Blues’ by Jon Scott Cree, ‘Mid Life Crisis All The Time’ by the Cowboy Killers, ‘Mid Life Crisis’ by Faith No More. There are blogs and websites (midlifecyclist.com). There are research papers.
It’s noticeable that references to midlife crisis seem to increase exponentially as the dates become more recent. There is a handful of books and publications in the 60s, a few more in the 70s and 80s. But from the 90s onwards, midlife crisis is so widely understood that it’s used to apply to almost anything. Articles examine the MLC of the Bush administration, the World Health Organization, Indian technology firms, North West Syria. Even outer space: ‘The Ultimate Mid-Life Crisis: Active Accretion of Gas and Dust and Planet-formation Around Old Stars’. Middle age means that once-twinkly stars get weighed down by too much stuff, by family closing in on them.
As the decades progress, not only do midlife books become more numerous, they change in tone. After 2000, they are almost always funny, extended merriment concerning trousers with elasticated waistbands and grumpiness about modern music. These books are about men, and often written by someone called Mike. There’s The Full English, Pedalling Through England, Midlife Crisis and Truly Rampant Man Flu by Mike Carden, out in 2007. Uneasy Rider: Travels Through A Midlife Crisis, Mike Carter, 2008. So You’re Having a Midlife Crisis! Mike Haskins and Clive Whichelow, 2009.
In the 70s and 80s, books about the angst of the middle years took the topic seriously. These days, the idea of midlife crisis is no longer serious at all.
Jung preferred ‘transition’ to crisis, but after Jaques, midlife crisis became the most common phrase to describe the tribulations of the middle years, and the term was quickly expanded to include women.
Female writers tackled the subject. One of the most influential books was Passages, by Gail Sheehy, a journalist who was moved to write about the different stages of life when she covered Bloody Sunday and a young lad was shot dead right next to her. It triggered a sort of breakdown, a ‘whither life and what does it mean’ epiphany – a reasonable reaction, let’s face it – and she interviewed a lot of couples at different stages of their lives in order to work out a pattern for living. Much later, she wrote an updated version, a whole new book, called New Passages.
She wrote this version because in her original book, and other middle-ish books of the time, the assumptions around a woman’s life were very different from today’s. Then, marriage happened in your early twenties, kids followed soon after and you stayed at home to look after them and your husband. The midlife crisis of a woman in the 70s and 80s was assumed to happen after her children stopped needing her, and she was left to dust a lonely house for thirty to forty years.
Prime Time, by Helen Franks, which came out in 1981, looks at women between their mid-thirties and mid-fifties. In it, she describes a woman ‘no longer burdened by domesticity and childrearing’ who has the time ‘for emotional stock-taking, a re-examining of beliefs’. She tentatively suggests that such a woman might want to take on some paid work of her own. But many of her subjects are held back from entering employment by their lack of experience, their years of wife-and-mother work. And, shockingly, by their husbands, who want to keep their wives at home, making hot meals and organizing the ornaments, even though they’re out all day and the kids have left. Franks writes about a New York psychologist who held workshops for middle-aged women. Not to help them cope with their own midlife crisis but to learn how to cope with their husbands’.
Also in the 80s, Jim Conway, a US pastor, wrote several books about midlife crisis, including one on the midlife crisis of men, and another, with his wife Sally, on the female version. The books are great at pinpointing the feelings of intense inadequacy in men in their forties, the desire to jack everything in – family, work, house – and go driving across the country … But they are not so hot on their wives.
In Women In Midlife Crisis, Conway (Jim) writes this: ‘When I was going through my midlife crisis, Sally was teaching school Monday through Friday. My day off was Monday. In order to be available to be with me, Sally resigned from teaching so that we could get away more frequently for the recuperation and reflection time that I needed.’ Good old Sally, eh? Must have loved those jolly Mondays.
Pauline Bart made a study of 533 American
