Mid-Life Mourning

I’m 53, which is prime mid-life crisis territory. I remember five or six years ago, a number of my high school friends and some family members expressed envy that I had achieved so many of my life goals. I *knew* who I was. I had a “successful” career as a novelist, had hit the bestseller list and looked as if I had it all together. At the time, I congratulated myself for holding to my dreams, despite the financial difficulties that had meant, and for remaining a writer while also being a full-time mom of five kids.

Ha. Life always has surprises in store, doesn’t it? Or in this case, it wasn’t a surprise. It was just a slightly delayed mid-life crisis that has felt more like mourning. I worked hard to achieve the dreams of my young self. I worked harder than most people. I got a lot less sleep as a young mom because I was determined to write when the baby slept, rather than sleep myself. I got up at 5 am most mornings to get in an extra hour or two of writing time. I cooked and cleaned while holding babies.

And here we are anyway, with me questioning all my life choices. I find myself wondering why it was that I thought that my five-year-old self’s dream of being a writer, implanted by a kindergarten teacher, should have meant anything about my future. I look back on my years in graduate school, when I was offered multiple full-time jobs at big companies I did summer work for. I turned my nose up at those jobs because they were just “work,” not the important “world-changing” ideas I had about my writing.

What if I had taken one of those jobs? Where would I be now? Not starting out again on customer service on the phones in an entirely new business. Not hustling in the midst of a divorce to retrain and requalify for all the positions that are being filled by everyone who is twenty to thirty years younger than I am. Not comparing my salary to every single one of my children’s and thinking that I am as smart and capable as they are, but being paid much less.

I think back to my choice to be a stay-at-home parent. I know many women do not regret this choice, but I sometimes—often—do. When I started graduate school, I didn’t imagine that I would give up full-time work entirely six years later. I had grand dreams of being a writer, yes, but those dreams included putting kids in day-care and writing on the side, at night. Where did all that ambition and drive go? It didn’t disappear, but looking back, it feels like it was eroded by social and religious expectations, and the expectations of my ex. I gave up a lot for other people and, as you might expect, was left with less for me.

I’m keenly aware that I can’t go back and redo my young years, no matter how tempting it is to see what might lie down another one of those paths. I am here, at age 53, and I can only choose future paths from here. But there is a mourning in the losses of those imaginary futures. Just as I carry with me the imagined future of my youngest daughter’s never-lived life, I mourn my own alternate paths. I think this is part of what is mid-life crisis, the might-have-beens, the sense of failing our younger selves, the realization that we traded this for that and now it doesn’t seem worth it, the measuring of our hopes and dreams against what we actually have, and even a comparison with our children, who seem to have brighter futures than we did (which we bought for them at a cost to ourselves).

If you think that you skipped mid-life crisis, I have a little warning for you. It is coming for you. No matter how well you’ve done for yourself, your brain will always have imaginary goals you haven’t met that it will remind you of. It’s a part of realizing that you’ve used up so much of your life, maybe the best and brightest part of it, and that it isn’t enough. It can never be enough. And somehow, it has to be enough.