MIDLIFE CRISES

My midlife crisis hit about 5 years ago, just around the time I distinctly passed 40. At least, I hope that was my midlife crisis, because I’ll be damned if I want to go through that again. I had felt a growing sense of regret, anger, frustration, and most of all, emptiness. All three children were in full time school, I was working at my husband’s office, in his business, for his benefit, and then coming home and doing all the household chores, the kid tending, the errand running, and maintaining all the social contacts for our family. Inch by inch, day by day, I felt myself disappearing again. My identity as “Mother of Small Children” was seeping away, and that was the identity with which I had sustained myself during prior years.

There was nothing of me or for me in my daily life. Sure, I knit, but I knit for others. I gardened, but I did it for the house, the family. All the joy I thought I had gotten out of it was really false – I was just keeping productively busy. I laughed, I had fun, but underneath it was a sense of having lost myself and being only a functioning shell of other people’s needs and expectations. It started to gnaw at me, like a mouse in the insulation, nibbling away in the dark and quiet of the night, creeping up on me in dreams, nightmares, and unfilled moments.

I had a few private crying jags, which always embarrass me, particularly if I can’t pinpoint why I’m crying. I started remembering who I had wanted to be before. Before I had children; before I got married; before life swept me away into a different current.

The biggest item on my agenda was education. I had wanted to finish my bachelor’s degree. Oh, for years, I had worked at it. I quit college when I was 21, got married and started working full time and going to school part time, sporadically. It never seemed to work out, though, between work pressures, my demanding spouse, geographic limitations on where I could actually attend classes, it just didn’t click. I kept trying, all the way up until I had children and off and on while they were small, as well. I amassed a startling number of credit hours, giving up my dream of a degree in Chemistry over time, and trying for anything – German, which I had lots of hours in, Business, any program offered at whatever college I could get to. Something always interfered and made it impossible. Usually, the problem was money.

My anger at myself and my disappointment grew bigger and bigger, and in late March of 2001, it ate me whole. I remember waking up from an upsetting dream, sitting bolt upright in bed, and weeping like my life was over in that very moment. Out loud, which is a thing I never do, being a lifelong silent weeper. I wailed, I cried, I didn’t keep it to myself. Tears gushed down my face, and I howled and beat the covers on the bed with my fists.

Naturally, my husband woke up, and he was scared, having never seen me like that before. He tried comforting me, but there was no way any pat on the back or murmured words were going to help. I just had to howl it out. He was shaking, not knowing if I had suddenly had a nervous breakdown or what, but whatever it was, I was no longer the BoS he had lived with for 20 years.

Eventually I wound down, and with my nose running and tears still pouring down my cheeks, I managed to tell him that I couldn’t go on with a great gaping hole of something so important to me sucking the joy out of my life. That it undermined who I felt I was, what I felt I was supposed to have accomplished, and that it made me ashamed of myself, ashamed of my life, and angrier at myself than I had ever imagined I could be. I asked, I demanded to be given the chance to finish that one thing. I sat there, middle-aged and messy, in the middle of the night, trembling with determination.

He looked at me, took a deep, shaky breath, and said, “OK.” I asked him what he meant by that – did he mean that as “OK, go ahead and do it yourself,” or “OK, whatever, I need my sleep and I’m tired of dealing with this,” or what. Those were the things he had meant before, and I wasn’t willing to settle for them again. He took another deep breath and said, “I mean, OK, we’ll do whatever it takes, take out loans, get a sitter for the kids, whatever, but I’ll do what I can to help on my end. Tell me what you need.”

And, in that moment, I mentally signed on for another 20 years with him. Yeah, it was conditional on his following through on that promise, but those were the right words; that was what I needed to hear. I needed to be seen as myself, with my own needs, with an identity which I defined, which meant something to me, and which was not just a pale reflection of who I was to others, but was solidly who I wanted to be -- to myself.

He did follow through, and so did I. Over the next few months, despite children being children and my parents having a geriatric meltdown, I worked and worked and worked, with a focus on myself that I hadn’t had for years. And he supported me – we did wind up having to take out a small loan, which we repaid almost immediately. He watched the kids while I worked late into the night on my classes and when I went to take care of my parents. He loaned me his office laptop computer to take with me so I could stay on top of my classwork when I had to be gone for two weeks to get my parents into professional care. He helped me deal with my parents, my overbearing sister, my strange stepbrother, and the immense amount of paperwork involved in coping with my parents’ transition. He was, for the first time in a long time, there for me.

I got my first bachelor’s degree, with honors, with accolades, and with sugar on top within 9 months of my midnight crying spree. Surprisingly, much of the background work I had done in getting that degree resulted in my being given a second bachelor’s degree, an international certification, and a small teaching job in an entirely different field. I worked like hell for both of them, and I deserved them both. And I have them now. I have them, and I did what meant so much to me, so I can go ahead and be myself.

My husband has been going through his own midlife crisis over the last year and a half. His is not so well-defined and perhaps not so solvable as mine was. I get angry at him, I get tired of his crap, and some days I feel like packing the kids in the car and driving until I run out of gas and out of range of his bullshit. But I remember. I remember that he was there for me when I went ballistic, when I had had enough of my life, when I needed a chance to become myself, to become reacquainted with myself, to accomplish things that had meaning for me.

I remember that when I needed time and space to remember who I wanted to be and to work towards that, he helped. He has the same needs. We’re not going to take the same path, make the same mistakes, or have the same goals in finding ourselves, and I can’t expect his way to be predictable or agreeable, but I can repay the loyalty and the trust he showed in me by returning it.

And I am.