Ruminating on Midlife

Last week I posted on facebook about my upcoming birthday. I’m turning forty-five at the end of the month and finding myself unusually bothered about it. Really that I am bothered at all is unusual. I didn’t blink when I turned thirty or when I turned forty. It’s not even that forty-five feels old, exactly, it just feels … something I can’t quite place. Weird. Uncomfortable. Different.

In my facebook post I quipped that maybe it was time for a midlife crisis, but that I couldn’t go for the stereotypical kind. No sports cars or affairs for me. Instead, I joked, I had thought about getting a goat to clean up the chaos of my garden weeds, but of course a goat would eat everything in short order and leave me with a hungry goat just waiting to eat everything new I plant. I acknowledged that thinking through the consequences of one’s decisions wasn’t quite the material of a midlife crisis. The post seemed to resonate with a lot of people, many of whom came down in favor of getting the goat. My friends are nothing if not supportive.

As is the case with most of my humor, the post was crafted to be funny but is also true. I am feeling weirder about this birthday than any birthday I remember. I’m not a person who is particularly enthusiastic about birthdays to begin with. I’ve definitely had some that I enjoyed. Usually I find myself disappointed because it’s just another day. All of that is tied to my problems with connection and has nothing to do with my feelings about numbers. This year feels different. As I steel myself for the usual feelings of mild disappointment and loneliness I also find myself worrying about my own aging in a way I never have before.

It is also true that I have, over the past year or two, become increasingly restless. I am craving some sort of break from my day-to-day normal.  The goat was a joke but, even though I was never seriously considering a goat, the goat highlights a problem. The stereotype of the midlife crisis involves first, a man and second, an abdication of responsibility. Despite having upended the typical gendered division of labor in my household, I am not a man. More importantly, I seem to be constitutionally incapable of intentionally walking away from responsibility.  This is not to say that I’m not flakey. It’s just that when I fail to live up to expectations or drop the ball on things it is usually rooted in anxiety, not selfish desires. I suppose it is entirely possible that the same may be true of people who appear from the outside to be making choices that seem self-absorbed and irresponsible. Still, as the household breadwinner and mother of a six year old, my options for shaking life up without actually upending it seem limited. What is the model of a mother’s midlife crisis? 

I recently read the novel Lech by Sara Lippmann, where one of the main characters is a mother spinning off the rails. Aside from drinking excessively around her kid, she is largely responsible in her irresponsibility, dropping her son off at daycare before engaging in anonymous sex. Even so, I found her character off-putting. To be clear I don’t object to either her drunkenness or her promiscuity. I appreciate the appeal of both. It’s the fact that she didn’t seem to enjoy any of it that bothered me. In the context of the novel I think that was the point. I suppose many cultural portrayals of the sportscar-buying, affair-having, middle-age man also allude to a deep underlying misery, but at least the men give off the appearance of having fun.

I’d like to think that if I chose the paths of heavy drinking and/or casual sex that I could at least manage to have fun with it. Though my inner practical voice reminds me that I am prone to miserable hangovers that make regularly being drunk on weeknights entirely incompatible with employment in a cognitively demanding job. Even the things that I don’t immediately rule out as too irresponsible end up seeming too impractical to squeeze into my schedule. At the end of the day, I’m staying up past my usual bedtime just to write this post. I don’t have time to take care of a goat and it’s been a few years since I tried to seduce a stranger, but if memory serves correctly that takes even longer than feeding livestock.

So how do I sate my desire for novelty without actually being irresponsible and while still getting a full night’s sleep? I have no earthly clue.