How to Curate Your Own Midlife Crisis

And how mine saved my life.

Brene Brown says it’s not a crisis but an unraveling. She writes that it’s the part of life when “the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around.” I recently heard Cheryl Strayed from Dear Sugar answer a listener question on a podcast. The caller was in her mid-forties, her kids were growing up, she wasn’t crazy about her current career, and she wondered if maybe she was having a midlife crisis. Cheryl told her, “In your twenties, you ask yourself the question, “Who am I?” But when we get to midlife, we ask ourselves, “But who am I really?”

We’ve all heard and read myriad quotes about what midlife means to women. In 2017, almost every Gen X woman I knew had a major epiphany after reading Ada Calhoun’s O Magazine piece, “The New Midlife Crisis For Women,” which inspired her 2020 book, Why We Can’t Sleep. When Calhoun wrote about how different midlife looks for men than women, and in particular, what it looks like now, for Gen X women, many of us sat up a little straighter. We were paying attention. I was only 38 when I read that essay—my children were five and ten years old. I was a different person then.

I had no idea what the next seven years would bring. I once jokingly referred to a rough patch in my mid-thirties as a “2/5 life crisis,” but at 45, it seems both optimistic and realistic to assert that perhaps this is the true halfway point. (Knocking on wood, god help me, I live in fear of inadvertently typing words that would read tragically ironic upon my untimely demise three hours later.) Making it to 90 seems like a good life goal. Fully embracing, really living, and truly enjoying the next 45 years? Even fucking better.

Is this a midlife crisis? In 2019, my family began the slow slide into a Series of Unfortunate Events, as we merrily, and without irony, binged that same delightful Netflix series as the backdrop for the disaster of our life. My youngest grotesquely broke her arm in an accident that traumatized us all. One month to the day later, our house flooded and left the girls and I displaced for months. Upon recovering our home and transitioning from cast to brace, our family therapist passed away unexpectedly, I choked on a piece of chocolate and got pneumonia, then bronchitis, then the flu. We regained our footing sometime around February 2020. And the rest, as they say, is history.

As pandemic life stabilized, I had a major surgery for my swallowing disorder, leaving me unable to teach music classes for months, which was only a slight departure from my inability to be in the classroom during the height of COVID. Everything felt surreal. And then the next year, I kept losing my voice. Eight times. When I arrived at the doorstep of 45, I was greeted by a collision of midlife crisis flags that I couldn’t ignore. As I’d dealt with them one at a time over the past years, I didn’t realize the magnitude of all the breadcrumb trail clues leading me to this moment.

I low-key quit my job. I lost a dear family friend. We had another flood. I got a divorce. I was on the cusp of an ADHD diagnosis that was 40 years in the making.

I look back at the 38-year-old woman who read—with a combined sense of looming dread and quiet anticipation—an article about a midlife crisis lurking around the corner. I was the married mother of two still-little girls. I worked part-time as an early childhood music teacher, and I wrote and produced shows about motherhood on the side, fueled by subversive guilt and barely reined-in ecstasy.

In hindsight, as I read Calhoun’s essay, I suspect there was a frisson of excitement about what may lie ahead: I had a macabre fascination with metaphorical forest fires, and I wondered if maybe my life needed one. It got a flood. And then another one.

Now I am a 45-year-old single mother of tween/teen girls. I teach very few music classes and instead teach adolescent girls to find their voices, and guide women my own age to do the same. I wrote a book. I will publish it this year. I produce shows that fill me with joy and purpose, and I started doing stand-up comedy. I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, and everything came into sharp focus after decades of feeling “not quite right.” My life is barely recognizable to the one I inhabited seven years ago. But is this a crisis? It surely feels like a fucking shake-up, to say the least.

While many days I feel like it’s fairly obvious that I’m operating in a crisis mode of sorts, sometimes, dare I say often?, I feel quite fantastic.

I realize the headline of this column promised you an answer with the dangling carrot of “How to.” Of course I also realize that if you know me, offering solutions and quick fixes and life hacks isn’t really my bag. And I’m sure you can recognize clickbait by now when you read it. But this time, I’m not screwing around. I have the answer for you. Because, crisis or not, you deserve to craft a midlife for yourself that means something, even if it hurts. So here you go—here is the answer to revolutionizing your own midlife. Ready? GAZE AT YOUR NAVEL.

That’s right—I’m dishing out the unpopular opinion to be a navel-gazing, self-interested person. I’m suggesting that you get really, really fucking curious about yourself. Listen, you may not need to change careers or get a divorce or receive a life-altering diagnosis. For your sake, I hope you don’t. (I mean, some of you do probably need those things, just sayin.)

When I look back at the first domino—or, to use my favorite metaphor of breadcrumbs—that put these events in motion for me, (aside from accidents, unnatural disasters, and global pandemics, of course), it was finding my current therapist. You’ve perhaps seen me write about the impact IFS therapy (Internal Family Systems) has had on my life. When I started following the breadcrumb trails of my own internal system and all the “parts of me” it housed, it led me right back into my past. And all of a sudden, I knew I was ready to write the book that had been tugging at my sleeve and whispering in my ear for ten years.

I had to write it. It was time, and I thought I knew what it was about. But as I began writing it, the book became the breadcrumb clue I needed to write myself into a brand new life. I had been leaving myself a trail all this time, without fully knowing it.

Gazing at my navel—or in the case of IFS therapy, at my system of the different parts that make me ME—and then writing about it, gave me clarity I have never before experienced in my life. And it gave me courage. I advocated for my health and sanity by fiercely pursuing a diagnosis that made my entire life make sense. I learned that I am, in fact, enough to handle this life and stand on my own two feet. I found the strength to live a life that I love.

Maybe all this self-discovery and therapy and soul-searching and memoir writing feels like a narcissistic pile of midlife crisis garbage to some. But it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. The hardest. The scariest. The most real.

Women are terrified of being selfish. We want to be Good. We want to be safe. We want to do the right thing.

The “next right thing” looks different for all of us, but many of us feel a quiet pull, an itchiness under our skin, a creeping up in our veins that we can’t ignore. Maybe it has to do with our careers, our health, our relationships, where we live.

My answers won’t look the same as yours—much to your relief, I suspect, if you prefer to avoid an actual forest fire of your forties and fifties. But I guarantee the map is the same: Gaze. At. Your. Navel. Look deep inside yourself. Listen to the whispering voice. Give yourself—the soft animal of your body as Mary Oliver writes—permission to love what it loves. You deserve it. And you might find that the end result is a midlife reclamation beyond your wildest dreams.

XOXO,
Steph

**Housekeeping!**

You may have noticed that my Substack column appears to have undergone its own midlife rebranding and gotten a facelift of sorts. When I began my blog, Mommy, for Real, in 2012, I had an infant and a kindergartener. While it may or may not be true that my teenage daughters still call me “Mommy” or “Momma,” the purpose of my writing is no longer to swap stories about fishing craisin-speckled feces out of the bathtub while quietly sobbing about our collective life choices. Now it’s to swap stories about picking up Ritalin and driving to therapy while quietly sobbing about our life choices. I kid. But you get the idea: my kids are growing up, and I am, too.

I am in my Reclamation Era: the intersection of midlife, single motherhood, and neurodivergence. Maybe you’re in yours, too, whatever that looks like for you, and I want to be clear that my initial mission of writing about parenting and motherhood has evolved into a new incarnation. We are always allowed to reinvent ourselves, and I’d love it if you stuck around—we can cheer each other on as we reclaim whatever it is that has been lost.

Join me!

• I am SO excited to share that Zoe Rogers and I are producing the first ever Listen To Your Mother Boulder COMEDY night—an evening of motherhood themed stand-up comedy from the storytelling show you love. Tickets are available here—grab them now! I’ll be performing along with 8 other hilarious comics who happen to be moms. Join us Wednesday, April 3rd at 7 pm at the Dairy Center in Boulder!

• Can’t make it that night? We’re bringing you a Comedy Fempire performance on Friday, March 22nd in Boulder. Tickets here.

• Are you following the Mother Plus Podcast’s new series for moms who feel like they are failing motherhood through the lens of ADHD? Subscribe to the podcast, especially if you are one of the moms who, like us, feels like you are simultaneously too much and not enough.