It’s Not a Crisis

Andrea Rinard
Sep 1, 2018 · 4 min read

It’s a Reckoning

Photo by Anna Sullivan on Unsplash

Part of the American narrative includes a “midlife crisis.” You know the stereotype. It’s the forty-something man who ditches his wife, gets a tattoo of a Chinese character, an earring, or a ridiculously impractical sports car (or all of the above), and starts dating someone in her twenties. It’s the perimenopausal woman who gets obsessed with a weird hobby, develops a disturbingly aggressive shopping habit, starts getting really serious about her wine drinking, or starts a new career. These, of course, are the stereotypes, the clichés, the caricatures. But there’s something about this time of life that seems to tempt people to get a little dramatic and do things that are unexpected or even shocking.

When my sweet husband and I entered our forties, we were both downright pillowy. We ate too much rich food and didn’t exercise enough. Jason decided to take up running. At first it was 5k races, but then he decided to train for a marathon. After he’d accomplished his marathon, he turned to triathlons and the Iron Man. He completed a half Iron Man, dazed and shaky afterwards. Most recently, he took on the coaching of my school’s cross-country team.

“Well, at least it’s not some stupid, expensive car,” a friend told me, as if it was a phase that he’d move through and past.

I tried to join in on his exercising, and I made it through one 5k before admitting that running, for me, was simply no fun. I hated the impact of my feet on the road, the sweat pooling in my sports bra, and the feeling that I was going to die if I didn’t go lie in the shade immediately. I genuinely love being a teacher, so a new career wasn’t something I was interested in. And I’m just not a shopper or a drinker. So I started writing and just kept writing (and I also got a little tattoo).

I started wondering if I was having my own midlife whatever, so I did some research into this idea of a crisis and learned about a study by Margaret Mead in which different cultural expectations yielded different results: if a society doesn’t expect people to act a certain way at a certain age, they just don’t. This self-fulfilling prophecy of a midlife crisis fascinated me, so I revisited some movies: The Big Chill, Kramer vs. Kramer, City Slickers, It’s Complicated, The Bridges of Madison County, and American Beauty. Clearly Americans have considered the midlife crisis trope as a matter of course (and made Meryl Streep its spokesperson).

As I closed in on the end of my forties, I looked around and started really seeing the people in my life who were likewise in this space of life, and I noticed that there are some major life events that seem to cluster within the span of ten or so years from mid-forties to early-fifties. Careers either go to the next level or don’t. Kids become teenagers and develop whole separate lives and then leave. Health issues crop up. Parents get sick and die. It’s all big existential stuff that makes you face your own mortality and ask huge questions like, “Am I living the life that I really want to be living?”

My conclusion, then, is that what I see in my own life and in that of those people I know is that this phenomenon isn’t really a crisis but rather a reckoning. For those of us who are parents whose kids are off to college or are starting their own lives separate from ours, it’s the first time in a long time that we can start thinking about what we want for dinner, what we want to do on Friday night, where we want to go on vacation without defaulting to Chick Fil’A, pizza and a teen action movie on the couch, or Disney World.

For those of us whose parents’ health begins to fail, it’s a time when we shift roles and become the caretakers, sometimes in a torturous juxtaposition that takes a huge emotional toll, and we need to find a way to take care of ourselves and make life more bearable as we watch our parents’ lives unwind.

For those of us whose own health takes a turn, it’s a time when we decide if we’re going to fight or surrender, and we define the battle lines or dictate the terms while figuring out a way to check off the top items on our bucket lists.

If a crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger, then I’m not in crisis. I’m in flux, in motion, in transition, in modification, in development. This is the time when I get to celebrate the fact that my kids are or are becoming adults and moving into a new phase of their lives that exists parallel to Jason and me. I get to look at myself in the mirror and think that maybe this month I won’t dye my roots. I get to be a little more selfish and do more things that I want to do because I don’t have to divide or share my time as much as I used to. And I get to explore all the wonderful things that made me fall in love with Jason back when it was just us, relieved and grateful that of all the things that are changing, that is one thing that stays the same.

Andrea Rinard

Written by

I'm a wife, mother of three, high school English teacher, writer of things, and native Floridian.

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