I Needed Someone to Name My Midlife Crisis
Sometimes it’s by nearing the edge that you see where you are and take a few steps back to safer ground.
I cheered when the acceptance arrived after months of refreshing the online submission queue. The little essay I’d written at my makeshift bedroom workstation would appear in an anthology of women’s pandemic stories. I’d be a part of the permanent record of this unprecedented moment in history.
A week later, the editors announced the title: The Pandemic Midlife Crisis: Gen-X Women on the Brink.
I gasped.
Pandemic, yes.
Midlife, sure.
Gen X Woman, verified.
But I didn’t think my essay implied I was in crisis, or even on the brink.
I’d seen the brink. I held my grandmother as she passed on March 7, 2020. Weeks later, my mom developed COVID. The dread of those days—her poor oxygen levels, the CNN death tallies, the shortage of ventilators that hardly seemed to help—lingered long beyond her recovery.
Lockdown with my three kids and husband was claustrophobic, but we stayed safe, warm and nourished. We doodled with Mo Willems, made thank-you signs for the essential workers and had our first virtual Passover seder.
My anthology submission was about the hours I’d carved from the kindergarten-teaching and the dinner-making and laundry-folding. Sewing masks started as a patriotic, home-front effort to keep my community safe, but ultimately fueled a creativity I’d long neglected amid modern motherhood, marriage and lawyering. When masks became widely available, I used that creative time to take classes, write and workshop with a virtual critique group.
I knew that “brink” didn’t always mean the verge of a nervous breakdown, but the title sounded desperate and fraught. I was struggling, but also thriving, so enlivened after writing class that I’d stay up the whole night plotting new work.
I labored over a lengthy email to the anthology editors explaining my thoughts and my preferred title: At the Corner of Midlife and Pandemic. Then, I deleted it, simply asking “Is the title finalized?”
When they confirmed, I tried the self-talk my daughter practiced in her kindergarten At-Home Learning Plan, Okay, Jodie. Writers don’t always get to pick their titles. You want your work in print in a real book with a cover and pages? Just like you hoped when you pivoted to writing after fifteen years as a real estate lawyer?
My therapist suggested I could consider the title a validation of both my struggle and my survival. Still, I couldn’t sign the contract. What message was I sending to my family if spending so many pandemic hours together drove me into crisis? What would my in-laws think? Why did my struggle matter when others didn’t survive to tell theirs?
I asked for the weekend to take a fresh look at my piece, sharing my concerns in a way I thought very deep-thinker-ish. The editor agreed to the extension. Then, I noticed part of the email chain below, certainly not meant for me.
“What. The. Hell,” she’d written, presumably to her co-editor.
Somehow the slight settled my indecision. In a flash, perhaps panicked they wouldn’t want my clunky chapter after all, I signed the agreement and submitted my bio.
Months later, the anthology arrived; its bold title surrounding a vibrant geometric-printed mask on a bright blue background. Inside its very real pages, I met thirty midlife women like me, bound by the reinvention required of us in uncertain times. Through their stories, I began to understand my own. One writer noticed that “needing to be alone became part of [her] DNA;” another asked whether we women are “designed to fall apart just to re-stitch themselves.” I identified the same thread in my own journey: a crisis that mocked my longing to be alone, independent and productive. Through this lens, I could see it wasn’t that spending so much time with my family that drove me to my own brink but having so little time for myself and my needs. I could have compassion for others who suffered more and still find compassion for myself.
My friend, Rebecca Hendrix, a family therapist, taught me, “the brink is just that, a brink. It’s not over the edge but close to it.” Sometimes it’s by nearing the edge that you see where you are and take a few steps back to safer ground. Once I inched away, thanks to my insightful editors, I recognized that, I’d somehow fashioned a midlife version of myself, stitch by stitch and word by word.
With the pandemic finally (I think?) in the rearview, I proudly display on my bookshelf, one on the local authors’ shelf in my town library and another on my in-laws’ coffee table, each a bright blue and bold reminder of how we survived a crisis and the ways we’ve thrived.