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Sue Shellenbarger was 49, living in Oregon and writing her "Work & Family" column for the Wall Street Journal, when in the space of two years she got divorced, lost her father, drained her bank account and developed a taste for wilderness camping and ATV riding that left her crumpled up on an emergency-room gurney. "People around me thought I'd taken leave of my senses," she says. A few months later, "I was in a sling, trying to type with my broken collarbone, on the phone with one of my editors, and we were laughing about it." At that point, she says, "I realized a midlife crisis is a cliche until you have one."
Fast-forward two years: this spring she published The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today's Women, which suggests that the national conversation is about to have a hot flash. The passage through middle age of so large a clump of women--there are roughly 43 million American women ages 40 to 60--guarantees that some rules may have to be rewritten and boundaries moved to accommodate them. That was part of the inspiration for Shellenbarger's book. "I thought I could help other women see this coming in their lives," Shellenbarger says, "and not only avoid doing damage to others but capitalize on it."
In fact, the very word crisis, while suitably dramatic, seems somehow wrong for this generation's experience. Unlike their mothers and unlike the men in their lives, this cohort of women is creating a new model for what midlife might look like. Researchers have found that the most profound difference in attitude between men and women at middle age is that women are twice as likely to be hopeful about the future. Women get to wrestle their hormones through a Change of Life; but however disruptive menopause may be for some women, the changes that matter most are often more psychic and spiritual than physical.
Talk to women about what happens when they hit midlife hurdles--whether divorce or disease, an empty nest, the loss of a parent--and very often the response is a surprise even to them. They may first turn inward, ask the cosmic questions or retrieve some passion they put aside to make room for a career and family and adult responsibilities. Take a trip. Write a novel. Go back to school. Learn to kiteboard. But then, having done something to help themselves, they have a powerful urge to help others. Best of all is when they can do both at once.
Among the growing ranks of female entrepreneurs are many who have sensed a massive Midlife Marketing Opportunity. Women are natural marketers, even of their worst fears. Their instinct when they get in trouble is to talk about it with other women. So once they have weathered the crisis, they are ready to become crisis managers. The hospice nurse opens a consulting firm to help women handle their aging parents. The escrow officer becomes a personal trainer specializing in older women. The Harvard M.B.A. with three kids opens a temp agency specializing in placing part-time manager moms. Or in the Extreme Makeover version, Martha Stewart emerges from prison kinder, gentler and declaring, "Our passion is and always should be to make life better." More and more people see not a crisis but a challenge--even an opportunity, observes Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University. "How are they going to spend the second half of their life? They know they're going to have lots of healthy years, so I think it's a period of making choices to live out one's dreams that got put on the shelf during younger years."
