is it a midWIFE crisis?

all signs point to please no

Continuing the midlife crisis theme this week, because it’s just so good. Check out the previous two week’s memoirs for the beginning of my musings on this topic. I’ve been texting and emailing a bunch of ladies to share little non-crisis anecdotes here, and spend a bunch of time putting these together every week. If you actually care and want to support me, consider becoming a paid or free subscriber. Both are food for my soul. Cheers!

Today was a day of toughness and indecision. I was paralyzed by choice and option, muddled by all that I could do and should do, and so thusly did not much of anything. I wrote something else to be published today but it was - not “too emotional,” which is what I was about to type, but it was moody and borne of my unhappiness with how the day went, as opposed to emotional due to passion or something else that means something to me. I didn’t love it.

So I went for a walk - after all the domestic bullshit that evenings bring here, listened to an Irish love story told by someone with an Irish accent and lost myself a little bit in the story. There’s dragons and magic and a handsome Irish man who doesn’t know how to talk about his feelings so he grumbles a lot (a common romance trope, if you aren’t familiar, apparently something women love in fiction but not in real life) and it’s very sexy even though the person who is reading the story and doing the voices is a woman. I can’t explain how it’s ok but it is, and somehow her voice just works for him.¹

not from today’s walk nor from Ireland, though maybe it COULD be.

Midway through my walk, my mood shifted a bit. I was MOODY AF today and for no particular reason that I can figure. It’s been all very uncomfortable. I’ve been fidgety. I’ve been staring out the window in a wistful manner. I’ve been making up stories about the men I watched all day installing solar panels on my neighbor’s roof, and more about the men finishing my other neighbor’s pool. Which of course led me to the very-unproductive-train of “everyone is doing things for their houses, maybe I should buy that rug and new curtains I’ve been saving.” If you follow me on instagram, you saw me post about how I started another painting project today, to busy my hands and prevent me from purchasing a rug without consent of the man with whom I share the funds (I’m not some kind of subservient wife ok but we are partners and partnerships have rules and rules are to be followed, so I’m told lolol). It’s hard to be emotional, not know why, and NOT spend a shit ton of money and/or eat everything in sight.

ANYWAY. Bottom line: the mood was SHIFTY, the mood was restless, the mood was listless, the mood was WHAT CAN I DO TO FEEL SOMETHING, HAVE SOME FUN, GET OUT OF THIS FUNK. 

The answer, for me, today, was: sit with it! Sit with the discomfort, feel whatever the feelings are, cook the brisket tacos so you don’t have to throw food away and feel even more bad about waste and failed wifely duties. Do the next right thing: feed baby, clean baby, keep baby from climbing onto and then falling off of the kitchen table, give baby a bottle, put baby to bed, go for a walk and smell all of the goddamn flowers. 

And when I felt my mood shift a little bit, I had a thought about my mood as relates to midlife crises: I wonder if these moods are what leads to what we know of and see as those extreme midlife crises? [I really want plural of crisis to be crisises, pronounced "crisis-ees," but instead it’s crises, pronounced “cry-sees,” and it’s just less satisfying, isn’t it?] What if the thing (a factor, at least) that leads people to take extreme escapist action is not dealing with shitty moods or perhaps even inability to deal with shitty moods, and eventually instead of journaling, going for a walk, or channeling the hard in some healthy way, those moods go into a bottle. Over and over, we shove those moods and hard feelings into that same bottle, which can’t be more than a 2 liter because that’s basically the biggest bottle I can think of. I was originally going with a glass bottle, because duh, glass shattering is such an excellent visual. But now that it’s a 2 liter bottle, it's definitely plastic and held closed by a weakened plastic twist-on cap, which has bent over time with us opening and closing it all those times to shove all our feelings inside it. And if you were a child in America, you know what happens when a carbonated 2 liter bottle is filled too much and shaken around a bunch. IT EXPLODES. It explodes into cheating on a man you love, too much lip filler, going on benders repeatedly, and I want to stop listing things now. 

Are we better at dealing with these feelings now? Focusing on just women because that’s how I show up in the world, are we less shoehorned into our roles than we used to be? So we have more freedom to be who we want, show up how we want? So there’s less build-up of the pressure? So there’s less of us shoving down feelings of “is this all there is”-ness?

So now, if we are leaving our husbands, is it because we want to or need to (or have to)? Not because we’re sabotaging something? 

What if those women of yore were doing the best they knew how to do with the tools they had? I firmly believe this is true almost universally for women of the past: they did their best to raise us, to cook for us, to build us into good people, to do right by their families, and to do right by themselves. If “doing right by themselves” took a backseat until one day they just snap and run away with a man with a ponytail and a motorcycle *gasp* or cut off all their hair, or whatever: that’s them doing what they could with the tools they had access to.

you'd never leave these babies, but you've also never been THAT desperate.

NOW. Now, 1 in 5 women see a therapist of some flavor. More than that have read a self-help book or two, and implement a thing or five from it into her life. Women are more likely to KNOW that bro is toxic and leave his ass before accidentally procreating and being stuck with his nonsense forever. 

This is still only a half-developed thought, I think. But we have and are learning from the past, and in many cases we’re choosing better - for us. Not better, objectively, because maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe “better” IS running away with a ponytail’d motorcycle man, who are you to judge? I think we’re just getting better all the time at seeing what’s best for ourselves, our families, our relationships. And choosing that thing before the toxic lime green carbonated bottle bursts inside us. 

So it’s not a midlife crisis anymore, it’s just DOING YOU. Pink hair, crop tops, tattoos, working for yourself, quitting church, going back to work after raising 4 kids. WHAT THE FUCK EVER. We do we. YOU DO YOU, boo. 

Millie, 42, mom of 4, currently full-time mom, formerly photographer, formerly something impressive with political campaigns, and busiest person I know (hi, 4 kids!? a husband who travels!? a saint!!) :: the Thing She’s Doing is getting her nose pierced! 4 kids has led Millie down a twisty path of self-dom. Her kids are 3 to 4 years apart in age, and she breastfed every single kid for over a year. 

let’s math, y’all

9 months pregnant + 15 months breastfeeding = 24 months. 24 months is 2 years, times 4 kids: that’s 8 years. 15 months is a conservative guesstimate on my part of the amount of time each kid spent breastfeeding - a time in which mothers use and sacrifice their own bodies and any desires or wants they may have regarding their bodies. Millie’s oldest turns 16 in September so that means she has spent - again, conservatively - over half of the past 16 years using her body to grow and sustain life. And she plans to get her nose pierced!

I’ve mentioned Millie before in the context of always doing what she advises and now we can see the above math makes it obvious why I do what she says. SHE KNOWS THINGS. “I think when I became a mom, I got scared to do things for me. I have felt this enormous tacit pressure to adhere to some social norm of my perceived expectation of what a mom looks like, acts like, talks like, votes like. As I age - as my kids age - I am finding strength that I didn’t realize I lost to uncover a little more of me.”

POWERFUL. There’s more: “Sure, having a nose piercing at 42, with a husband, 4 kids, a dog, a white picket fence hasn’t always fit what I thought “mom” should look like, but at 42 years old and having done everything the way it was “supposed” to be done - who gives a shit.” WELL SAID, MILLIE. 

I’m in the middle of watching Love & Death on HBO, a story about a white suburban Christian Texas housewife (that’s a lot of adjectives without commas, sorry) in 1980, so I’m in that headspace and timeframe right now. Let’s pretend Millie was entering this phase of motherhood in 1980 instead of this year-of-our-modern-lort 2023. A white suburban Texas housewife in 1980 WOULD NEVER get her nose pierced, can we all agree on that? Instead, she suppresses that desire (and many others, I bet) and the “pressure to adhere',” as Millie put it, builds and builds. And builds! And she watches her husband go off to work day after day, using his brain to build a spaceship or something, and she feeds her 4 kids, takes them to all the sporting nonsense and the bible school whatever, and wonders how many different ways she can make the popovers before she keels over from the banality of it all!!!!! ²

I’m not sure how to conclude this now (do I say that every week?). I can’t wait to see Millie get her nose pierced. She has a hella cute nose, it’s gonna look great, even though that is absolutely beside the point. My walk tonight and writing this worked wonders for my mood, so I’m happy to report I will not be leaving my children behind to tend bar in Costa Rica. It was a hard day, but I know enough now to know how to work through shit: therapy! Journaling. Walks. Text friends. Read an escapist novel with a very appealing Irish book boyfriend. Scottish would probably be better because - ahem - I’d fancy it if he called me “lass.”

And now we’ll be done, eh? kbye!

1. No, I will not be sharing the author or the title - somehow it’s both way too and even more vulnerable than I normally get here, so I’ll not be sharing. But you can definitely tell I’ve been taking in the speech, can you not? “I’ll not be sharing,” good grief.

2. Coulda made this a MUCH better analogy but not going to spoil the show if y’all haven’t watched it. It’s based on a true story but still.