Why We Can't Sleep Read online

  Also by Ada Calhoun

  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give

  St. Marks Is Dead

  WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP

  Women’s New Midlife Crisis

  ADA CALHOUN

  Copyright © 2020 by Ada Calhoun

  Cover design by Becca Fox Design

  Cover illustrations: night sky © alexkoral/Shutterstock;

  faces © essl/123rf

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in The United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic edition: January 2020

  This book is set in 12-point Dante MT

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4785-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4786-8

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  20 21 22 23 24 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the middle-aged women of America.

  You’re not imagining it, and it’s not just you.

  About the Author

  Award-winning journalist Ada Calhoun is the author of Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, named one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month and one of W magazine’s top ten memoirs of 2017; and St. Marks Is Dead, one of the best books of 2015, according to Kirkus Reviews, the Village Voice, and the Boston Globe. She has written for O Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, and the New York Times.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Ada Calhoun

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1: Possibilities Create Pressure

  2: The Doldrums

  3: The Caregiving Rack

  4: Job Instability

  5: Money Panic

  6: Decision Fatigue

  7: Single, Childless

  8: After the Divorce

  9: Perimenopause

  10: The Very Filtered Profile Picture

  11: New Narritives

  Appendix: A Midlife Crisis Mixtape

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Back Cover

  Author’s Note

  Most of the women in this book appear here by first name or anonymously. I wanted to help them feel safe speaking with candor about their marriages, their bank accounts, and their night sweats. However, because they are members of Generation X, I can reveal that quite a few are named Jenny, Amy, or Melissa.¹

  Except where relevant, I do not call attention in the book to these women’s race, sexuality, or other demographic markers, though they do mirror the makeup of the country. They are single and partnered, mothers and childless, black and white and Asian and Latina, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, evangelical and atheist, and they hail from nearly every state, including Alaska.

  I found them through friends, calls sent out from O Magazine’s social media accounts, experts in a variety of fields, and online message boards, as well as at professional conferences, playgrounds, doctors’ waiting rooms, churches, and bars.

  They live in the country, the city, and the suburbs. They work, don’t work, did work, will work, and have careers that include photographer, priest, tech executive, lawyer, doctor, teacher, and telephone company manager. They range in dress size from 0 to 28+. Some are having an okay time of middle age; many are struggling in one way or another. Some feel on the verge of, as one said, “blowing it all up.”

  I did limit my reporting in two ways: first by age, of course. Second: by class. Very poor women in this country bear burdens that are beyond the scope of a book this size. Very rich women have plenty of reality TV shows about them already. I focused on women who, by virtue of being middle class, grew up with reasonable expectations of opportunity and success.

  Each chapter opens with a keynote quote. These were lines spoken to me by eleven different women whom I found representative of many others. In this polarized era, I found it reassuring, if also a little depressing, to discover how much we have in common at this age. Regardless of politics, race, and region, American Generation X women share a host of cultural touchstones—from the theme songs for shows like The Facts of Life—“When the world never seems / to be living up to your dreams!”—to memories of where we were when the Challenger exploded. And we share a daunting set of similar circumstances.

  It was an honor to conduct these interviews, which often turned emotional as women discussed their fears and regrets. One woman started crying the moment I asked if I could speak with her about her experience of midlife. I was afraid I’d said something wrong. Was she mad that I’d implied she was middle-aged? No, the tears came from shock, because she’d been feeling so invisible. She said, “No one ever asks about me.”

  Introduction

  You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.

  —Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

  One woman I know had everything she’d ever wanted—a loving partner, two children, a career she cared about, even the freedom to make her own schedule—but she still couldn’t shake a feeling of profound despair. She spent months getting a babysitter for her toddler daughter in the middle of the day, using the time to go alone to noon movies, where she sat in the dark and cried.

  A former coworker told me that her impressive LinkedIn profile was misleading. In truth, she was underemployed and for years since her last layoff had been taking one low-paying gig after another. She’s unmarried, never had kids, and while that part is okay with her, she has started dreading her upcoming fiftieth birthday, having realized that she will probably never own her own home and has saved nowhere near enough for retirement.

  A neighbor with a small army of adorable young children was doing part-time work she enjoyed. Her kids’ father was a friendly, hardworking man. She was baffled by the rage she had come to feel toward him. She’d begun to imagine that divorced she might have a better shot at happiness. “I’d leave,” she said to me one day when I asked how things were going, “if I had more money.”

  Another woman told me she had started to fear that she would die alone. Just like her married friends, she’d gotten a good education and had a good job, had made a nice home and was staying in shape. But somehow she’d never found a partner or had children. She woke up in the middle of the night wondering if she should have married her college boyfriend, if she should freeze her eggs, if she should have a baby alone, if she should do more or less
online dating, and just how much more she could take of her friends’ sons and daughters smiling on social media before she threw her laptop out the window.

  An acquaintance told me she’d been having a rough time, working at three jobs as a single mother since her husband left her. Determined to cheer up her family, she planned a weekend trip. After a long week, she started packing at 10:00 p.m., figuring she could catch a few hours of sleep before their 5:00 a.m. departure. She asked her eleven-year-old son to start gathering his stuff. He didn’t move. She asked again. Nothing.

  “If you don’t help,” she told him, “I’m going to smash your iPad.”

  He still didn’t move.

  As if possessed, she grabbed a hammer and whacked the iPad to pieces.

  When she told me this, I thought of how many parents I know who have fantasized or threatened this very thing, and here she had actually done it. I laughed.

  “Yeah, my friends think it’s a hilarious story, too,” she said. “But in reality, it was dark and awful.” Her first thought as she stood over the broken glass: “I have to find a good therapist … right … now.”

  Since turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with women my age and their—our—struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair.

  Looking for more women to talk to for this book, I called my friend Tara, a successful reporter a few years older than me who grew up in Kansas City. Divorced about a decade ago, she has three mostly grown children and lives on a quiet, leafy street in Washington, DC, with her boyfriend. They recently adopted a rescue dog.

  “Hey,” I said, happy to have caught her on a rare break from her demanding job. “Do you know anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?”

  The phone was silent.

  Finally, she said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.”

  * * *

  Today’s middle-aged women belong to Generation X and the end of the Baby Boom, which lasted from 1946 to 1964. The Gen X birth years are identified by the Pew Research Center as 1965 to 1980.¹ The name—or anti-name—was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Prior to that, it was the name of an excellent 1970s British punk band featuring Billy Idol. The band itself was named after a 1964 book containing interviews with British teenagers—on the cover: “What’s behind the rebellious anger of Britain’s untamed youth? Here—in their own words—is how they really feel about Drugs, Drink, God, Sex, Class, Color and Kicks.”

  The term “Generation X” came to signify a hazy, as-yet-to-be-determined identity. Over time, that lack of a clear identity became the story. No one knew quite what was up with us, and so we were deemed unknowable. For a while, some experts tried dubbing us “13th Gen,” because we were the thirteenth generation post–founding fathers.² But after some “Who Is Generation X?” cover stories in the 1990s, the culture more or less shrugged and turned away.

  In the words of the Pew Research Center, Generation X is “America’s neglected ‘middle child’ … a low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths.”³ We are the Jan Brady of generations—overshadowed by the older Boomers (our parents, aunts, uncles) and the younger Millennials (the kids we babysat). By one count, at 55 million, we’re a smaller group than Boomers (76 million) or Millennials (62 million),⁴ and we will never be the largest cohort in the country. Any day now, when Millennials surpass Boomers, Gen X will still be millions smaller than either.⁵ A CBSN report on the generations in January 2019 left out Gen X entirely. That same week, a Saturday Night Live game-show skit pitting Millennials against Boomers gave Keenan Thompson this line: “I’m Gen X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.”⁶

  Gen X has arrived in middle age to almost no notice, largely unaware, itself, of being a uniquely star-crossed cohort. “Gen Xers are in ‘the prime of their lives’ at a particularly divisive and dangerous moment,” Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me.⁷ “They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They’re squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they’re exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.”

  A full-fledged Gen Xer, I was born in 1976. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric. When video games came around, I played Moon Patrol on my Atari and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? on my school’s PC. As a teenager, I worked as a printer in a photo lab and wrote hyper-sincere op-eds for the school paper while wearing overalls and Revlon Blackberry lipstick. I had an ur-’90s job, too: I interned at SPIN magazine, back when Nirvana was on the cover. (Fact-checking a writer’s story on a new singer, one “Mary J. Bilge,” I was told by her publicist, “It’s Blige, honey.”)

  Whether to identify as Gen X is a decision every woman must make for herself, but I believe that if, like me, you were a kid in the Reagan years, had a Koosh ball, or know what sound a dial-up modem makes, you count.

  Generation X women tend to marry in our late twenties, thirties, forties, or not at all; to have our first children in our thirties or forties, or never. We’re the first women raised from birth hearing the tired cliché “having it all”⁸—then discovering as adults that it is very hard to have even some of it. That holds true regardless of whether a Generation X woman has a family or not.⁹

  Since the 1990s, when the older members of Gen X began having families, we’ve been pitted against one another by a tedious propaganda campaign about the “mommy wars.” This fake debate conceals the truth: that our choices are only part of the story. Context is the other piece, and the context for Gen X women is this: we were an experiment in crafting a higher-achieving, more fulfilled, more well-rounded version of the American woman. In midlife many of us find that the experiment is largely a failure.

  We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage. Economist Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, told me that a typical forty-year-old woman in America now makes $36,000 a year working full-time. After child care, rent, food, and taxes, that leaves only about $1,000 for everything else.¹⁰ Even women who make much more may feel uneasy about their financial future, stunned by how hard it is just getting through the week, or disappointed by how few opportunities seem to come their way.

  We diminish our whole generation when we dismiss these women’s complaints as unreasonable griping. Societal, historical, and economic trends have conspired to make many women’s passage into middle age a crucible of anxieties—and to make us envy one another rather than realize we are all in the same leaky boat. I hope this book will help us hear women’s concerns not as whining but as a corrective to the misleading rhetoric extolling an American dream that has not come within reach for us—and likely will not for our children.

  Some might argue that American Generation X women have it easy compared with women in other countries or of other generations. Boomers and Millennials may claim their own, perhaps even worse, cases.

  “No, my generation was the first who were told they could have it all!” one Boomer woman said when presented with this book’s premise.

  The concept did emerge in the Boomers’ generation, but it wasn’t until Gen X arrived that it was a mainstream expectation. Boomers deserve full credit for blazing trails while facing unchecked sexism and macroaggression and for trying to raise children without giving up their own dreams. But Gen Xers entered life with “having it all” not as a bright new option but as a mandatory social condition.

  “I’m supposed to have it all, too!” a Millennial woman said. “We have it just as bad!”

  Millennials, certainly, have reached adulthood with crushing student loan debt, unprecedented social and economic inequality, poisonous political polarization, and a rapidly changing world with many industries in flux. But, by the time Millennials were entering the work
force, the illusion of infinite possibility had finally come under broad attack, giving way to more realistic expectations.

  With all due respect to our elders and juniors, when it came to the “having it all” virus we all caught, Gen X was infected with a particularly virulent strain.

  That said, Boomers and Millennials, sadly, are likely to find a lot to relate to in this book. I hope that younger Millennials will absorb useful cautionary tales and that Boomers will not be too dismayed by how far we have not come.

  Put simply: having more options has not necessarily led to greater happiness or satisfaction. “By many objective measures, the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past thirty-five years,” wrote the authors of an analysis of General Social Survey data a decade ago, as Generation X entered middle age. “Yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”¹¹

  This observation is often cited as proof that second-wave feminism was foolish—that if women had only stayed in the home they would be happier. How reductive that is. The truth is that we’ve never really tried what those feminists proposed. Yes, women went into the workforce, but without any significant change to gender roles at home, to paid-leave laws, to anything that would make the shift feasible. If you make a new law but don’t enforce or fund it, do you get to call the law misguided?