Moms Don’t Really Have Midlife Crises — Their 50s And 60s Are When Life Finally Opens Up
Julia Zavalishina | Shutterstock The midlife crisis is a male invention. It’s a term that was coined by a man to describe an experience some men were having, and like so many male experiences, it has been generalized to apply to all of us.
When I hear “midlife crisis,” I’m often reminded of the early ’90s movie City Slickers, in which three crisis-suffering middle-aged men embark on a cattle drive adventure in the Wild Wild West and discover the meaning of life.
When I think of this movie, what immediately comes to mind is the scene in which one of these men’s wives tells him about all the dirty things she’s going to do to him on his birthday, unaware that she’s on speaker phone in an office conference room. I was in my early teens when I first saw the movie, but during a subsequent viewing, I remember thinking, “Wait, what? He has a wife who’s so physically adventurous and attentive, and he’s still having a midlife crisis?”
We have no idea whether or not the wife was in any sort of crisis. The movie wasn’t about her. The movie is so rarely about the wife. The midlife crisis, as we’ve mythologized it, is generally a story we tell about men who are bored with the tedium of their daily lives.
Moms don't really have midlife crises — their 50s and 60s are when life finally opens up
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The years ahead no longer offer a sense of possibility or a spirit of adventure. They attempt to cope by buying sports cars, having affairs with younger women, or rounding up cattle in New Mexico.
Up until their midlife crises, these men were the heroes of their own lives. Now their best years are behind them, and they’re left with receding hairlines, tiresome wives, and Dad bods.
The midlife crisis was first given a name in 1957 at a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, where psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques argued that adults in their mid-30s (then considered middle-aged) experience a period of depression as they begin to grapple with their own mortality. Life, he said, no longer seems like an “endless upward slope,” but instead a steady decline toward death.
Academia didn’t initially take to the concept, but when Jaques published his paper, “Death and the Mid-life Crisis” in 1965, he found a much more receptive audience in the broader American public. Before long, the midlife crisis was widely accepted as an inevitable life phase.
Popular ’90s movies and legions of self-help books aside, subsequent research has revealed that the midlife crisis is not, in fact, the widespread social phenomenon we believe it to be. Rather, it’s largely a cultural myth, affecting 10-20% of Americans, at most. And when a crisis in midlife does occur, it’s typically triggered by specific life stressors, like job loss or illness.
Even though Jaques’ theory has been largely debunked for the better part of three decades, it persists in our popular imagination.
And because the male experience has historically become understood as the human experience, we assume that women also experience crises in midlife. If a middle-aged woman “acts crazy” by engaging in socially deviant behavior, she is probably in the throes of a midlife crisis, poor thing. (All those perimenopausal hormones can’t be helping, either.)
As I shared in my most popular story on Substack to date, I myself went crazy on April 20, 2024, which happened to coincide with the day that I asked my husband for a separation.
It’s accurate to say that I was in a state of crisis at the time. It’s also accurate to say that I was in midlife. But my crisis had nothing to do with tedium, or fear of mortality, or nostalgia for the heroic adventures of my youth.
My midlife crisis was instead born from coming into my own and finding that I no longer fit the shapes that society had carved out for me.
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According to my husband and many men on the Internet, I clearly wasn’t in my right mind. Only someone experiencing an existential crisis would blow up her family for no good reason. I guess I should have tried rounding up some cattle.
If I ever had what we think of as a more “typical” midlife crisis, it was way back in my early 30s (now considered young), shortly after giving birth to my first child. That was when the ground seismically shifted under my feet. That was when the heroic adventures of my youth became a fast-fading memory, when my career flatlined, when the tedium and disillusionment set in.
I had gotten married, and I had procreated. I had already reached the pinnacle of womanhood, and the rest of my life would be spent in the service of my husband and children.
It wasn’t until I reached my 40s — when my children were old enough to dress themselves, buckle their own seatbelts, and walk to school — that I felt able to reclaim any semblance of my life. But what was the life I was reclaiming? I’d spent my teens and 20s mostly buying into it all, believing I could succeed both academically and professionally if I just applied myself and followed the rules. Those rules included a husband and children because all good rule-following women get married and have kids.
My 30s marked my Decade of Semi-Consciousness, during which I stumbled around in the fog of other people’s needs. When I emerged, nothing added up anymore. The rules, I realized, were never really made for her.
The bored and disillusioned midlife men we mythologize never experienced this decade. Sure, most of them had kids, but that didn’t stop them from continuing on their heroes’ quests, from striving professionally, from claiming their identities.
When you spend your 30s drowning in martyrdom, midlife represents not so much a fencing in as a vast expansion of opportunity. Substack author Tia Levings posits that modern motherhood contains four seasons: Mother, Maiden, Queen, and Crone. This is an expansion of the pagan “Triple Goddess” archetype, which leaves out “Queen.” Tia points out: “Patriarchy takes us pretty much from mother to crone. Once you’re not having babies anymore, you’re an invisible old lady. Relevance is tied to fertility.”
But as women have fought to shape identities that may include motherhood but don’t revolve entirely around it, the Queen era has emerged. According to feminine shaman Wind Hughs:
[The Queen] is a woman owning her own power and authority within herself and in the world. If she had children, they are now older, allowing her greater focus on her other creations… She has much to teach and remains actively engaged in society, either directly or through her teachings. She is renegotiating the all-encompassing giving of the mother and creating clearer boundaries around herself, her time, and her expenditure of energies. She reaps the benefits personally of all she has done and directs more of her power and attention to her own needs and creations. This can be a powerful personal, spiritual, and political stage of her life.
If all this woo makes you a little squirmy, suffice to say this is the first time I’ve ever quoted a feminine shaman in a Substack essay. To be clear, I have absolutely nothing against feminine shamans, but I wouldn’t define myself as someone who has proactively explored the feminine divine or sought pagan spiritual guidance. Up until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of The Triple Goddess, let alone the Quadruple one.
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But this definition of the Queen resonated so strongly with me that I had to include it in its entirety. I already know it resonates strongly with most of my middle-aged female friends, and I predict that it will resonate strongly with many of my readers, too.
Google takes a different view of things. My research led me to multiple provocative news stories from the aughts about a 2008 study that drew from decades of national data to prove that women’s happiness actually decreases in midlife, while men’s happiness increases.
ABC News concludes: Women start as happy young adults but by midlife wind up with sadder intimacy… early in adult life, women are more likely than men to fulfill their aspirations for material goods and family life, but later, they may be divorced or separated and less financially secure. Meanwhile, men’s finances and family life improve, making them “the happier of the two genders,” the study says.
Interestingly, the latest data Google can seem to drum up regarding middle-aged women’s happiness is from nearly 20 years ago, and even more interestingly, this data suggests divorce is a key driver of female midlife misery.
Of course, as I explored in a previous story about marriage and happiness, so much depends on our socially dictated definitions of happiness. If your aspirations revolve around material goods, and if your sense of self-worth revolves around wifedom and motherhood, you are unlikely to feel “happy” as a less financially secure divorcée.
I would also venture to suggest that quite a lot has changed in the last few decades. There is a rising tide of middle-aged mothers who, much like me, are saying: Forget all that. Yes, we want some degree of financial security. But we don’t need the white picket fence. Yes, we take pride in our caretaking roles. But we also prioritize autonomy. Yes, we value family.
Midlife moms are actively redefining what family can be, seeking friendship and community beyond the confines of marriage and other patriarchal social structures.
Popular culture works diligently to render us irrelevant, to foment our insecurities, to instill deep shame for our aging faces. But there are more and more of us who wouldn’t rewind the clock for all the collagen in the world. We look back on other decades and see versions of ourselves that deferred to boys and men, that were all-too-eager to please, that diligently strove for perfection, that quietly accepted the mother-as-martyr status quo. Who were we to complain?
Now I have zero patience for male bluster; I can sniff it out from a mile away. I’ve become a far superior mother since I let go of the fruitless quest for perfection and began to prioritize my own needs. Some people don’t like me, and that’s okay. Their loss!
In other words, I am becoming a Queen. Unlike the popularly mythologized midlife crisis, I am not grappling with a sense of stagnation or fear of my own mortality. Instead, I am taking the second half of my life by the reins, claiming my wisdom, my power, and my infinite worth.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
