A midlife crisis is when you feel like you haven’t done much in your life and you might never do anything important ever, right? I’ve been starting to think about things along these lines – and wonder if I shouldn’t start doing something important. What? If I haven’t really done anything that mattered so far, why would I know how to do it now? So I’ve decided to sit at a computer and start typing something – ah, that will make this midlife crisis wash away in a shower of sparkly shimmer and blow away to Neverland. The most useful thing I have to say to you, reader, is, “I haven’t figured it out.” Hope that helps!
While that sounded like the end of this little blog, there’s an itchy scratchy feeling in the center of my chest that compels me to write more. (I acknowledge I may be completely wrong about this diagnosis: I might actually have heart disease or some skin irritation between my boo-boos.)…
So despite the itchy scratchies and the need to write, I just ran around doing a zillion other things: finished up a load of laundry, watered the plants, swept the kitchen floor after finishing the dinner dishes. It’s like Pharaoh himself directed me to do these chores: it’s like I must do them now or he might have me thrown into a miserable dungeon to sleep on straw I had soiled myself and to eat McDonald’s forever. Clearly the plants will rat me out, it would seem, if I fail to water them immediately. They’ll droop, see, and everyone will know I had failed in another part of life. This is similar to the carpet. So as I walk a heaping basket of laundry from the back room to the den, I have to stop, put down the basket, and on my hands and knees, pick pieces of dog hair and construction paper scrap from the carpet. Don’t want the carpet to report me.
Actually, it might be BECAUSE of the itchy scratchies that I end up on my hands and knees picking almost imperceptible pieces of junk from the dark brown carpet. Avoidance. I know how to do this picking up tiny things with my forefinger and thumb; writing something relevant and important is another story. At least, I chose these shit jobs, not Pharaoh. If they reflect my neurosis, at least it’s MY neurosis.
My fear is, what if I actually discover that I’m right about being unimportant and irrelevant? What if the writing reveals that I haven’t done anything important with my life to date and that this awful performance predicts only continued irrelevance and worthlessness? Ah, I might well be right. In that case, you’d be wise to turn to a different source of content to satisfy yourself right now.
Ha! You kept reading.
(That was an ancient female tactic intended to tease out whether a suitor is serious or not. Tell him “I’m sure I’m not worth anything” and see if he denies it. While the logic is problematic, you have to understand it has been shown to work, and when you are trying to see if your self-deprecation and insecurity are perceptible to others, it can really do the trick.)
So, with renewed energy and confidence, I will continue.
Here’s what I need to tell you:
First, I want to tell you about being a woman in a professional job. The injustice is real. I wouldn’t believe it for a long time but then tripped over situations where I swear to goodness, men and the people they influenced would not support me and my work despite all evidence that I could do it very, very well. If these men were in control of the situation, I have chocked that job up to experience and got the hell out of there. (My other choice was to try to build a case against them. I have always chosen not to do that, despite my big talk of justice. This is a topic for another day.)
Second, I want to tell you about being a mother in a professional job and realizing that I truly don’t care about my career more than my children. There is certainly part of me that can’t imagine life without the self-affirming reality of having 22,000 emails in my inbox, deadlines with timelines, budgets with consequences, and a title that says, “I’m important – how about you?” And I also know that my partner in life is willing to do a lot more than be the stereotypical Man Dad who plans on his weekends around beer with his Man Guys and who expects a loving, sparkling clean and luscious wife to return to daily. My best friend and husband carries his weight in child care load, laundry, dishes, lawn care, household maintenance, doing puzzles, brushing hair. That fact does not diminish the fact that I (I would capitalize “I” if it weren’t already capitalized) want to be a certain kind of mother to my children that involves being present. This dream, this identity is my own. I want to feel I know my children well and that they trust me.
Third, as a working mother in midlife crisis, I want to stop feeling the following:
- The constant feeling that I should be somewhere else. If I’m at my desk, I should be with the kids. If I’m with the kids, I should be at my desk. (Example: My daughter participates in her first gymnastics event and I am not there because I’m in the Honolulu airport on my way to a meeting. Another example: I’m reading a book with my daughter before bed and my mind is overrun by the need to answer That Email.) This feeling of doing the wrong thing all the time starts to take over my brain. It makes it almost impossible to be smart – and I guess that follows. How could you be smart doing Thing A if you are obsessed with doing Thing B? Once you get to do Thing B, you now think obsessively about Thing A. It really doesn’t serve.
- The feeling that, at any moment, my intricate and carefully constructed schedule could come tumbling down. All it takes is a babysitter to get caught in traffic or a meeting to run over. Or the cat to throw up on the carpet and make you slip on your way out the door so you drop your cell phone and its display shatters so you can’t dial into the conference call at the same time as dropping your daughter at school so you miss the first ten minutes when the team decides to give the project to your nemesis because he was there and “stepped up” and because you missed the first ten minutes of another meeting years ago so you’re not a team player and really not the go-to person anyway since you might be picking your child up from preschool next time. “Well, she’s got kids…” you hear them say in your head.
- Feeling like I need to take care of all the shit jobs AND the substantive work I’d signed up for. At least in most jobs, it’s considered rude to ask the woman of rank to get the coffee. But there are plenty of other tasks that I’d consider “shit work,” wouldn’t you? How about the request to convert a document from Word to a pdf or schedule a meeting for the group? Or how about getting “promoted” into the lead on a losing project everyone hates and the company wants out of? Another goodie is when my boss asked me to select a hotel and make room reservations for a group going to a conference. As a technical subject matter expert with years of experience in our field, it was not my area of expertise to do travel arrangements, but hey! When I completed my technical report and presentation to the client, I just loved waiting on hold for 12 minutes and then getting a tired receptionist in Phoenix to book rooms for a dozen people in Chicago and then passing all the paperwork on to our admin to learn I’d done everything wrong. Fun times.
Having only whined about my insecurities, lack of contribution, and frustrations with the world, I will now turn to solutions:
- I’m going to live my life right where I am doing what I’m doing. So there.
- Schedules will have to include allowances for reality. If reality didn’t include motherhood in the past, it does now – so take it or leave it.
- I will decide what shit jobs I’ll take on.
Which leads me to my final revelation: if this is a midlife crisis, I like it so far.
annehdavidson 