Midlife Crisis? Bring It On! Part 2

By Nancy Gibbs

When Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques coined the term midlife crisis back in 1965, he was not talking about a man who, upon turning 40, wakes up the next morning afraid he is going to die, goes in for hair plugs, buys a Porsche and runs off with a cupcake. He was studying creative genius and found that for many artists productivity began to decline as they reached middle age and wrestled with their own mortality. Never a legitimate clinical diagnosis, it was more like a handy way of describing the perfectly predictable process whereby every so often people looked around at their lives and asked, often in loud and expensive ways, "Is this it?"

Or at least, men did. That was around the time that Betty Friedan was writing about "the problem that has no name," after she surveyed several hundred of her Smith classmates and found that most of them were unhappy in middle age. "If they had a midlife crisis, they didn't talk about it," says Jane Glenn Haas, founder of WomanSage, a nonprofit group that supports midlife women. "Women today realize that their mothers never had a sense of their options." Haas, now 67, shocked her family when she left her first husband 27 years ago. "They said to me, 'Why are you doing this?' I said, 'I'm not happy.' My mother said, 'Who told you you were entitled to be happy?'"

The present generation of women tend to bring different expectations to their middle passage. "To the extent there is any midlife crisis, to women it does not come as an enormous surprise," says Tace Hedrick, a University of Florida associate professor of women's studies. "Men wake up at 45 and realize, 'I'm not 18 anymore.' But women, their biological clock is ticking. They are constantly reminded that they are aging." The regular reminders of fertility are replaced by the insistent signals of menopause. Anthropologists say male status is typically tied to money and power, which explains why the standard male midlife crisis is triggered by a career crack-up. Women's turmoil often reflects events in their personal lives as well as the accumulated stress of years of ladder climbing, multitasking and barrier breaking. Nearly three-quarters of women from 40 to 54 in a Yankelovich Monitor study said life is "much too complicated."

Many feel that along the way, while they were getting their promotion or having their kids or managing their households, they set aside something important that they want to retrieve--their hiking boots, their screenplay, a law degree. "Everybody I know has a version of this," says Susan Reimer-Torn, now a life coach in New York City. "Phase I, you kind of put all the pieces together in your mid- or late 20s, and it almost always involves some kind of trade-off. You figure out what you absolutely must have and end up giving up something else." In Reimer-Torn's case, her priority was a good marriage and raising a family, so 26 years ago, she gave up living in New York City to follow her fiance to Paris. But in Phase II, which generally occurs after 40, many women begin to review the terms of that original trade-off. "For me, my career and where I lived seemed to be a dispensable piece of the puzzle in the first phase," Reimer-Torn says. "But at Phase II, they were not." She and her family moved back from Paris just in time for her to take care of her ailing 84-year-old mother. Says Reimer-Torn: "My mother was ill for the first time in her life, and on a very deeply personal level, I wanted to be there for her, as I had not been for all those years."

If there's a Phase III, it may be taking your life in a whole new direction. Often a collision of the personal and professional triggers the reinvention. For Dr. Lisa Friedman, 52, it started when the internist had breast cancer diagnosed in September 2001. During the course of her treatment, she came to think about what she loved about being a doctor and what she hated. She loved spending time with her patients. She hated being sued by them (three malpractice suits, all of which she won). "It's a total, life-changing experience to go through a malpractice case. It's gut-wrenching," she recalls. So she thought about the possible escape routes, and now finds herself building a second career selling upscale women's clothing at trunk sales in her home in Madison, Wis., to other women like herself who couldn't find what they needed at the local mall. The hours are flexible. Eventually she may start selling clothes exclusively, but she isn't ready to give up her practice yet. "I thought, God, this is really fun," she says, "and no one is going to sue me because they didn't like the color of their skirt."

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