Please Don’t Have a Midlife Crisis

Over the long Memorial Day weekend [in 2011], I sat by my mother’s bedside in the hospital’s intensive care unit as Mom floated just at the surface of consciousness, occasionally popping up long enough to look at me mutely, lost in confusion. Were there words in there, trying to elbow their way through the maze of her broken brain, or was her brain an empty room, all thought, all memory, all personality swept clean? This mattered to me, for my mother’s singular gift is insight, her ability to listen carefully to my tales and dilemmas, take a reading from her impeccable moral compass, and suggest a way forward. At her core, Mom’s identity is her thinking. I feared that she had lost her identity, and that I had lost my mom.

A few days later, I stood at our kitchen sink, cleaning lettuce in the spinner. Outside the window, a neighbor trotted up the street with her dog. Another one set the sprinkler just right. It was a soft evening in my favorite time of year, when all of life bursts with the vivid beauty of the adolescent spring, when I could remember, if only for a few seconds, the exhilaration of youth.

I felt nothing. No surge of joy at being alive, no frisson of gratitude for witnessing another annual rebirth. I glanced at my husband, who was slicing tomatoes.

“I think I’m having a midlife crisis,” I announced.

Devin put down the tomato.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Please don’t have a midlife crisis.”

Mom’s stroke provided the spark for a combustible collection of small despairs waiting to ignite: the unremitting daily-ness of work, the minor but scary health issues, the unpalatable fear that this is as good as it gets and that life slopes downward from here.

A few days after Mom’s stroke, I sat at my desk and pondered these suddenly urgent questions: What, exactly, constitutes a “midlife crisis,” and is that what I am experiencing? Is it unswerving destiny, or can I drive around it with the choices I make? So many people I know are struggling through midlife ennui. Yet some people flourish. How do they do it? How can I craft a meaningful middle life? And is there any science that can give me pointers?

As I mulled over these questions, I felt that tremor of elation that signals I have stumbled onto a great story. I decided then to follow my journalistic training and began to research.

****

Copyright Barbara Bradley Hagerty 2016