My So-Called Middle Life, Part 1
An exploration of what it means to be in mid-life
Seeking Wisdom and Someone to Do the Laundry.
Turning 40 this year got me thinking more about aging. So, I decided to explore middle life through books, and I read seven books on finding meaning it the latter half of life. (Books listed at the end.)
This post is a background on the questions and feelings I brought to my readings, and I’ll continue in subsequent posts to discuss the specific books I read and their takeaways.
Here is a poem by me also related to these feelings.
Now, let’s start this load of laundry.
The Stretchy Years
Ahh, the Middle Ages… I’m not talking medieval, or whenever that was. I’m talking about our middle years, the 35-55s, or should I say 40-70s? Or even 45-75? This is the middle part of our lives when most of us stop having kids, but we’re also not frail, or “elderly,” or in a nursing home.
Let me stop right here and say that it’s hard to write about this topic without coming off as ageist, though I’ll try my best because I love older folks, their stories, their wisdom, and even their occasional gold-bond scented farts, and because of course not all of us will be toothless and in adult diapers at age 85, but for sure, some of us will, that is if we’re even still around then…
In the words of Bonnie Raitt, “Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.”
The fence around the middle-age mark is porous and shifting. When does middle age start and old age begin? When does youth end and middle age begin? It’s seemingly different for every individual and generally different for every generation.
From a mathematical standpoint, middle age is logically correlated to the halfway mark between your birth and death. La vie demi. Ok, I made that French phrase up to sound fancy, but middle ages really sounds depressing like we’re going to be in a cold, sexless, stone monastery eating gruel. Or how about La Vie Midi? The midday life? That sounds sexier and more fun. Everything is better when you say it in French… But wait, what do the French actually call a mid-life crisis? La Crise de la quarantaine. Dear. God.
NO.
Forget I even googled that.
In many places, France included, the timeline between birth and death is lengthening like a billionaire’s telomere. Humans are living longer with improvements in medical care (though not as long as they used to live if you believe the ages in the Bible.) The world’s wealthy entrepreneurs are dumping loads of cash into finding the end to aging, even the end of death, and the anti-aging beauty industry is thriving and turning high-tech like never before. And in reality, the French more commonly refer to the middle ages as the mature age, or “of ripe age,” d’âge mûr, like a peach, ready to eat.
However, all of life doesn’t extend. Being a little baby is the same length of time it’s always been (no, we haven’t started messing with that, YET). Nor is the period that marks the final descent into the unknown, the time in a hospital bed, the elderly times. Nor has puberty extended.
Rather, like our waistlines as a nation, it’s the middle that’s expanding. For women, we are living longer and better in our non-reproductive adult years. We haven’t found a way to stop the arrival of menopause, but we’ve made so many medical advancements that even as we age, we can get many of our broken body parts fixed and look remarkably younger than our real age.
And men, well their 30’s seem to go to infinity.
To estimate your own middle age, you can tabulate it online with a “death calculator,” which, developed by insurance companies, takes your health habits, family history, weight, etc, and puts the data into an algorithm to shoot out your estimated TOFD. Time of final departure.
Mine calculated me outta here at the ripe old age of 94, which is a far later death than both my grandmothers. If it’s true, it means my vie-demi is not 40, (which I turned this week) it’s 47. Can you imagine? I’ll still have HALF my life after 47? What am I meant to do with all that time?
Here is an AI image generated from a selfie taken today of me as “Old.”
Vs. Younger:
And the original, middle-aged me with no makeup.
Looks about right.
Every Generation is Another’s Trash
When I was much younger, I had a relationship with an older man, a 33-year-old to be exact, and as a barely-legal-year-old, I thought 33 was sooo old. When he turned 35, I remember thinking, God, he’s so old, soon he’ll be 45. Then 55! I can’t keep dating this guy! He’s always talking about how his back hurts. Next thing I know, he’ll be having a stroke, and I’ll still be young!
Seriously. I used to think like this. Haha. How naive.
Then when I was turning 33, I distinctly remember my boss, who was 45, telling me, “Oh 33, that’s when the wheels start to fall off.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, when your knees hurt and your back aches, and the wrinkles set in, and your skin changes.”
Changes? Um. No.
But of course, he was right. Around 33-34, my skin really began to change for the worse, and it grew harder to keep weight off my mid-section.
Age is always relative. We tend to think younger people are immature babies and people older than us are about to go blind and die. (Sorry anyone older than me, I’m just being dramatic. But think about someone you love who is older than you, don’t you worry about them…?)
Generations do this relative/ageist thinking too as a group.
Depression-era folks thought Boomers were lazy, dirty hippies who smoked too much pot and didn’t work hard enough.
Boomers thought GenXers were lazy thrift-store-sweater-wearing losers who listened to junkies sing about Nirvana or some shit.
GenXers think Millennials are lazy latte-drinking babies who need safe spaces for their Pokémon dolls.
Millennials think GenZ are timid, entitled ADHD Tik Toker cyber geeks who only speak in emojis, sighs, and ugly cries.
And so on and so on, with each generation thinking the next one is lazier and each one having a shorter attention span, but a longer lifespan than the one that came before.
Who are we becoming as a species if we think faster and live longer?
According to neuroscience, your perception of time is linked to the speed and intervals of your blinks. The longer and slower you blink, the faster time goes. The faster you blink, the longer time goes.
It’s very confusing, but this explains why sleep feels so short (it’s a long blink) and why time moves slower when you’re younger because your body blinks faster. As you age, your blink speed slows, which makes time go faster.
And with everything in the world going faster than ever before, maybe life feels sped up even for teens these days. It’s hard to say.
You AND Your Parents are Old.
Another weird thing about our current situation of stretched-out middle years is our relationship with our parents.
As kids, we have the impression that our parents might die too soon, but also that they might leave us some money, or we might inherit things we’d enjoy, like a lake house or dad’s Corvette. But in reality, most people’s parents live so long, that by the time they die, we’re often old as hell too. If you’re one of the lucky ones whose parents own a lakehouse, you’ll probably be enjoying it with them for many years to come. You’re not going to be owning that lake house while you’re in your Jet-Ski “prime.”
I’m not complaining, I love my parents. I’d rather have them around and they don’t own a lake house.
But it’s a big social change.
If your parents used to die at 65, you might be 40 when you inherited the lake house. Perfect timing. Now, if they live to 95, you’ll be 65 maybe? Maybe even older, perhaps 70+. Will you really enjoy the lake house as much at 80 as you would at 45? Doubtful.
So you better have enough money to buy your own expensive stuff during your middle years or have grandparents that love you more than their own kids.
But who has enough of their own money these days by age 35? Not that many people. Yes, these are millennial problems we’re talking about, but I use this as an example to highlight a broader shift — most of your parents are going to be with you until you’re “elderly.”
The question begs, what do we do with these extended middle years? Embrace our middle essence? Grumble? Feel itchy, hot, and bitchy?
Menopause is Like a Secret.
What is going to happen to me? I asked an older woman (67) this question in regards to aging and menopause, and she said, “You know how you don’t want to do anything when you have a cold? Well, it’s like your vagina gets a permanent cold.”
Yikes. I’m frightened.
Then she added, “But it’s ok, ‘cause you don’t give a shit anyway by then.”
Ok…?
In another conversation, while I was at an adult pool party, a woman in her fifties cornered me and told me I should “have as much sex as possible” because after menopause her vagina had dried up and now “it felt like glass breaking” when her younger husband tried to have sex with her.
Ouch.
I don’t remember learning about that in family life class…
I asked if hormone replacement therapy could fix this, and the answer was, not really. While men have viagra, it seems like women only have cats…?
However, it’s not just women who change sexually.
Manopause is a Thing Too.
My nurse friend told me all kinds of disturbing stories about her older male patients. The little-discussed facts are that, you guessed it—men age too!
Something like 45% of 45-year-old men have experienced erectile dysfunction. Older men are at a higher risk of having autistic kids, and balls get saggy just like tits.
(The photo that comes up when I search for “Old Sacks.”
Not to mention that men are at a higher risk than women for almost every health problem. On trans/non-binary folks and aging; I couldn’t find much, but it’s likely similar. Hormone therapy isn’t magic.
Facetune Your Life
As a woman, I also feel a certain sense of devaluation occurring as I age that I don’t think men experience in an outward-facing way. Once you’re no longer “fertile” you’re sort of invisible to men. It’s like an old iPhone and everyone wants the newer, lighter model.
Gosh, isn’t that an ironic photo that comes up when you search “Old Phone.”
As an “old phone,” no one needs to hear what you have to say. And you just don’t update or upload like you used to. People look through you, not at you. Your social world becomes other mature women.
Turn on the TV and see Hollywood standards to feel even worse. Not only do they cast 45-year-olds as grandmothers, 23-year-olds as the moms of four kids, but they airbrush the crap out of any wrinkle on an older woman’s face, and leave the wrinkles on the men.
In the TV show Grace and Frankie, there is allegedly someone on staff whose only job is to touch up Grace’s skin. We don’t find older women sexy as a species at all. Older men, yes. Older women, no. Call it a social construct, call it evolutionary biology, I don’t know, but there it is.
So, what are we supposed to do as middle-aged women? Work constantly? Take care of kids? Drink chardonnay at 5 pm? Go to cougar bars? Garden? Do we run for office? Teach? Many do.
Look at Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Michelle Obama, and Oprah the queen bees of the long-middle-age badass Big Vagina Botox Energy. They call hot flashes power surges. I’ll def take some power surges over being an “old phone.”
The Middle Part of Motherhood
This is a topic that could go on endlessly, but navigating motherhood in a stretched-out middle life also has a unique flavor.
How do we traverse menopause and deal with kids going through puberty at the same time?
In the middle age, ahem, LA VIE MIDI, we’re too young to be grandmas in many cases, as our kids are having kids later and later and we had our kids later than our parents did, but some of us will be taking care of teenagers or even middle schoolers in our 50’s because we had babies at 43. I recently met a new mom with a two-day-old baby who was 49.
Women in their 50s are raising Tik Tok teens, and then we will all have to deal with whatever comes after Tik Tok… Metatweens?
Ask The Books
To explore these questions and my entry into middle life, this year I’ve read seven books so far on aging and middle age.
In future Substack posts, I’ll discuss each of these books and the lessons they teach.
My So-Called Middle Life Reading List:
A Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
How to Age without Getting Old, by Joyce Meyers
Green Lights, by Matthew McConaughey
Die with Zero, by Bill Perkins
It’s All Downhill from Here, by Terry McMillan
The Age of Miracles, by Marianne Williams
From Strength to Strength, by Arthur C. Brooks
I also follow along and read Oldster Magazine, by Sari Botton, which I highly recommend.
Read Part 2 in the series.
Now You.
How old are you, dear reader? What am I right or wrong about? What is the best book or article you’ve read related to aging? Let me know in the comments.
There so much here! And a lot of it right on target. I offer this little thread of light and hope: hormone therapy can do a lot for that glass vagina and helps a myriad of other issues as well (UTIs, energy levels, brain fog and potential prevention of dementia) and there are safe options for taking/using it.