One Woman's Midlife Crisis is Another Woman's Career Goal
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One Woman's Midlife Crisis is Another Woman's Career Goal
The world would be in trouble if Gen X women weren't so damn tired.
For more than a decade, my life’s focus was on simplifying, homesteading, and self-reliance. My world became a bubble of immediate space — house, garden, farm, desk. And then I did some traveling, and I decided to attend grad school. I met amazing people, young and old, rural and urban, black and white, cis and trans, from near and far, all talented and intriguing and special in some way.
My simple life was fractured into a myriad of possibilities and opportunities. I could venture down career paths I missed, I could become an academic, I could be career-oriented again, I could, I could. GenX women were raised to see possibilities.
This might seem like a good thing. But Gen X women know better. We have also lived through multiple generational disappointments. My generation of women was the first to be told that we could do anything, be anything. But what it resulted in was a generation of women who are expected to be everything.
Gen X consists of about 44-50 million people born between 1965-1980. Many grew up without a stay-at-home parent due to changing roles of working women and the drastic rise in divorce rates. We were latchkey kids, responsible for taking care of ourselves between school ending and the end of our parent’s workday. As a result, self-reliance is a strong value of those in Generation X. We’ve got skills.
Gen X’ers carry six times the amount of debt their parents carried, and have spent a lifetime attempting to balance home and work. We’ve weathered two recessions during our careers (so far), multiple wars, the emergence of personal computers and social media, and several additional global crises including AIDS, Covid, 9/11, High Unemployment, etc.. Our generation has basically endured an American existence of “wrong place, wrong time.” Gen X women make up about half the American population, and we’re furious, but exhausted.
We were taught to multitask very early in life. This new life-management skill was presented to us on the Oprah show, in between commercials that told us we could “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, ever let you forget you’re a man.”
American Magazine notes, “American women in their 40s and 50s are so wracked with anxiety and guilt about the state of their lives that they cannot sleep, even though they are exhausted. They are frustrated with the lack of cooperation… overwhelmed with the responsibilities of caring for young children and aging parents at the same time, and guilt-ridden about their failure to achieve all that they dreamed of in the various aspects of their full lives.”
And yet, economists and social scientists note that GenX has now come to the age of mid-life crisis and/or prime opportunity. Finally, they tell us, it’s our turn. But, the average family adult caregiver today is a 49-year-old woman working full-time, and more than a third also have children at home. So while we get a crisis, most men our age face opportunity. Middle-class women now in their forties and fifties are depressed, overwhelmed, and feel like losers.
As I said, GenX women, even now, are expected to be and do everything. There’s a new “term” for what society expects from us, “Multi-hyphenate.” A multi-hyphenate is “a person with several professions or skills someone who does several different jobs.”
Author Emma Gannon, says, “Being a multi-hyphenate is about choosing and strategizing a plan of attack and having the freedom to take on multiple projects, not being backed into a corner. This is about choosing a lifestyle. This is about taking some power back into our own hands.”
Seriously? If that isn’t a Millennial take on a GenX issue, I don’t know what is. That’s a fancy term for mastering the expectations GenX women have been juggling all their lives. You may as well say, “master multitasker.” We have diverse knowledge and skills, we have multiple responsibilities, and we have an abundance of untapped potential buried beneath. I guess a multi-hyphenate is a master performer who can toss these unrealistic expectations into a healthy salad.
“Having it all in one day doesn’t work if a day remains 24 hours and “it all” takes 36,” AM’s article notes. I wholeheartedly agree.
If you, like me, are a Gen X woman (born from 1965 to 1980), I’m here to tell you we’ve been set up. Just because we have the knowledge and skills to do it all, doesn’t mean we have the time or energy.
Gen X women are coming to accept that we aren’t Wonder Women. While we are more educated, more self-reliant, more adaptable, and more privileged than most, we’ve spent a lifetime with our hands constantly stirring air, never holding anything for long before the next thing falls.
Our struggle to balance work, life, home, family (and farm) now has a name, with younger generations dubbing it a “career lifestyle option” of “becoming a multi-hyphenate.”
No wonder today’s middle-aged women are frustrated, tired, and disgruntled. We weren’t given much choice.
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One Woman's Midlife Crisis is Another Woman's Career Goal
Very good read!