Out of Time

P was small, but there was only one of him and he wasn’t at school, so we could warp and weave our lives around him pretty easily. He was difficult but, in hindsight, only in the way that babies are. He didn’t do what I thought he would do (I think I thought he would act like a small child); scarily, he didn’t do what the books said. He cried a lot. In the mornings, after breakfast, we would put him on a play mat and after a while he would cry. So we would try everything to make him stop: play him music, pick him up, jig him about, put him in his chair, dance about in front of him, give him a jangly toy, maybe some food. Nothing worked. And then someone said, ‘Put him back to bed for a nap,’ and that worked.

We were applying hectic solutions to a non-hectic situation, because that was how we’d lived up until then. We were still narcissistic enough to believe that a child was an extension of our personalities (he’ll love staying up late, because we do; he’ll love company for the same reason; he’ll like this music because we played it a lot when I was pregnant; oh, look, he’s a champion burper – it’s a family trait). He lived to our timetable and that timetable remained flexible. Having a child stopped our late nights, mostly; but the major life rhythms, the when and where we were doing what we did, they were still as up and down as we were, as varied as the state of our finances. P seemed to fit in well.

I shared my fortieth birthday do. Two friends and I took over a pub, including the downstairs dance floor. It was a great party. Afterwards, I lay on the pavement outside and stared at the stars, searching out their sparkle between the high rises, looking past the restricted view, out to the enormous sky.

Between 2000 and 2010, I didn’t move house once. I got married, I gave birth to two children. I acquired and held on to a flat, a microwave and a dishwasher, and a mortgage on that flat. How did that happen? Is this the person I am now? God, how dreary.

5. This is a Low (#ulink_e97559e7-9459-5d6c-8eaf-025ee7e1174f)

Here we are now. (Entertain us.)

The dramas of life change when you have children. They expand to the vastness of your terrified imagination. They reduce to the size of a raggedy toy cat.

‘Where’s Kitty?’ wails F.

‘What’s she lost?’ whispers S. ‘That grey rat thing?’

‘Cat, not rat,’ I say. ‘Kitty.’

These dramas take up time, and mind-space. They don’t leave much room for your own. This can be a good thing – gone are the hours spent worrying about what you said at a party, mostly because you don’t go to parties – but also frustrating, when your own drama is about trying to work out where you’re at. And how to go on from there.

I am fitting my drama into specified time slots. I have read that this is one of the best ways to approach unmanageable concerns, to contain the things in the day that keep you awake at night. In the mornings, you consider your anxieties, examine them properly for twenty minutes, then you store them and get on with your day. I contemplate my fears. I’m unsure how deep I should go, how dark and twisted, how specific (unemployment, divorce, the loss of The Point). Or should I be grateful for them, tell them I’m happy they’ve come into my life? Hold them in my virtual hand, before rolling them up like socks and putting them away tidily in their drawer – the virtual drama drawer (next to the wardrobe of worries)?

The next hour is spent frantically opening real-life drawers and boxes, untidying rooms, checking pockets, under sofas, trying to find a grey toy cat.

In the British Library, I am researching my drama.

In 1965, Canadian psychoanalyst and psychologist Elliot Jaques coined the now much-used epithet ‘midlife crisis’. Jaques interviewed a group of successful people and realized that many were feeling the effects of reaching a central point in their working lives. They were confused, disappointed. They’d arrived at their central point to find it was not a high spot, but a dip. Maybe even a spiral. He defined this new crisis as what happened when high achievers hit middle age and feel tortured because of ‘unrealized goals, lack of self-determination or physical changes’. It being the 60s, the midlife point was assumed to be between 30 and 35, and the high achievers Jaques surveyed were men.

Though Jaques named it, and nicely, the idea of a critical moment of change at life’s central age had been knocking around for quite a while. Literature loves the idea of a failing, flailing fellow in his middle years, and Carl Jung, through his work in the 1930s, believed that the midlife stage was vital to human development. ‘The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion,’ wrote Jung. We want this, he said, even though it can’t happen: ‘We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.’

Jung believed there should be colleges for 40-year-olds, institutions of learning to help us get through the painful transition to full maturity. I like this idea. The Middle-aged University. A place to study your navel, if you can still locate it, Chunky.

When I type ‘midlife crisis’ into the British Library search engine, I get 359 returns. Some are songs – ‘Midlife Crisis Blues’ by Jon Scott Cree, ‘Mid Life Crisis All The Time’ by the Cowboy Killers, ‘Mid Life Crisis’ by Faith No More. There are blogs and websites (midlifecyclist.com (http://www.midlifecyclist.com)). There are research papers.

It’s noticeable that references to midlife crisis seem to increase exponentially as the dates become more recent. There is a handful of books and publications in the 60s, a few more in the 70s and 80s. But from the 90s onwards, midlife crisis is so widely understood that it’s used to apply to almost anything. Articles examine the MLC of the Bush administration, the World Health Organization, Indian technology firms, North West Syria. Even outer space: ‘The Ultimate Mid-Life Crisis: Active Accretion of Gas and Dust and Planet-formation Around Old Stars’. Middle age means that once-twinkly stars get weighed down by too much stuff, by family closing in on them.

As the decades progress, not only do midlife books become more numerous, they change in tone. After 2000, they are almost always funny, extended merriment concerning trousers with elasticated waistbands and grumpiness about modern music. These books are about men, and often written by someone called Mike. There’s The Full English, Pedalling Through England, Midlife Crisis and Truly Rampant Man Flu by Mike Carden, out in 2007. Uneasy Rider: Travels Through A Midlife Crisis, Mike Carter, 2008. So You’re Having a Midlife Crisis! Mike Haskins and Clive Whichelow, 2009.

In the 70s and 80s, books about the angst of the middle years took the topic seriously. These days, the idea of midlife crisis is no longer serious at all.

Jung preferred ‘transition’ to crisis, but after Jaques, midlife crisis became the most common phrase to describe the tribulations of the middle years, and the term was quickly expanded to include women.

Female writers tackled the subject. One of the most influential books was Passages, by Gail Sheehy, a journalist who was moved to write about the different stages of life when she covered Bloody Sunday and a young lad was shot dead right next to her. It triggered a sort of breakdown, a ‘whither life and what does it mean’ epiphany – a reasonable reaction, let’s face it – and she interviewed a lot of couples at different stages of their lives in order to work out a pattern for living. Much later, she wrote an updated version, a whole new book, called New Passages.

She wrote this version because in her original book, and other middle-ish books of the time, the assumptions around a woman’s life were very different from today’s. Then, marriage happened in your early twenties, kids followed soon after and you stayed at home to look after them and your husband. The midlife crisis of a woman in the 70s and 80s was assumed to happen after her children stopped needing her, and she was left to dust a lonely house for thirty to forty years.

Prime Time, by Helen Franks, which came out in 1981, looks at women between their mid-thirties and mid-fifties. In it, she describes a woman ‘no longer burdened by domesticity and childrearing’ who has the time ‘for emotional stock-taking, a re-examining of beliefs’. She tentatively suggests that such a woman might want to take on some paid work of her own. But many of her subjects are held back from entering employment by their lack of experience, their years of wife-and-mother work. And, shockingly, by their husbands, who want to keep their wives at home, making hot meals and organizing the ornaments, even though they’re out all day and the kids have left. Franks writes about a New York psychologist who held workshops for middle-aged women. Not to help them cope with their own midlife crisis but to learn how to cope with their husbands’.

Also in the 80s, Jim Conway, a US pastor, wrote several books about midlife crisis, including one on the midlife crisis of men, and another, with his wife Sally, on the female version. The books are great at pinpointing the feelings of intense inadequacy in men in their forties, the desire to jack everything in – family, work, house – and go driving across the country … But they are not so hot on their wives.

In Women In Midlife Crisis, Conway (Jim) writes this: ‘When I was going through my midlife crisis, Sally was teaching school Monday through Friday. My day off was Monday. In order to be available to be with me, Sally resigned from teaching so that we could get away more frequently for the recuperation and reflection time that I needed.’ Good old Sally, eh? Must have loved those jolly Mondays.

Pauline Bart made a study of 533 American women aged between 40 and 55, who were in psychiatric hospitals for depression but had no history of mental illness. Her conclusion was that the women were depressed because they ‘had lost the companionship of their children, they had fewer people to shop or cook or clean for, they had been brought up to fulfil themselves through their homes and families, they had no qualifications, had gained no work experience for many years, had no confidence, low self-esteem and nothing to look forward to’. It was 1971. At that time, the greatest users of anti-anxiety drugs were women aged between 45 and 54.

I read William Bridges’ Transitions, Making Sense of Life’s Changes. In it, a man says: ‘I feel as though my whole life was built on a frozen lake. We all go on with our activities. We work on the house and play golf and entertain and have our fights. I put in long hours at work and think I’m doing well. Then every once in a while I think, This is ice I’m standing on, and it’s melting – or Was that a crack I heard just then? I try to forget, but I keep thinking, Damn, that ice looks thin!’

I read The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, by James Hollis. He writes, ‘Anyone in midlife has witnessed the collapsing of projections, of hopes and expectations, and has experienced the limitations of talent, intelligence and, often, of courage itself.’

I look up funny quotes. ‘Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall’: Joseph Campbell. ‘The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it’: Doris Day.

I think about how to write this book. I think: Wouldn’t it be great if the book itself had a midlife crisis? If it collapsed in the middle, started doubting itself and the way it had gone about its life so far?

Why are there so many funny midlife books these days? Has midlife crisis become so ingrained as a cultural joke that it’s hard not to mention it without us laughing? It’s like saying ‘farty poo bum’ to a five-year-old, or showing a picture of a dial-phone to a teenager. Ho ho, I know this one. The very concept is hilarious.

I say to people, ‘I’m writing a book on midlife crisis,’ to see if they laugh. They do. Some of them say, ‘Hey, interview me!’ Some say, ‘Interview him!’ and point to their friend or husband. But all of them laugh. Then they define themselves against it. They haven’t bought a sports car (they’ve bought a fixed-wheel bike). They’re not leaving their wife for the twenty-something secretary (she’s in PR and she’s 31). They’re not stuck in the same job they’ve always had (they’ve started teaching younger people how to do that job). They’re still in love with their partner (they just don’t have sex). Ha ha ha.

After a while, I realize they’re trying to hide their embarrassment. We are easily shamed in the UK and middle age is so cringe-making that we have to deflect it with a joke. Not only because to admit that you care about it is to admit a reprehensible weakness of character – can’t you go marching gladly into your middle years without making such a fuss? – but also because we will not accept that we have anything to do with the crisis part, that uncool state of being.

And so we all define ourselves against it. I say ‘midlife crisis’ to people and they point at others. Or they pick out the easy parts: the buying of gadgetry, their kids becoming obsessed with their old vinyl. They deny that the truths of middle age, the darker implications, might actually apply.

I wonder, though, if the jokes are getting in the way. They help us skim over the sadness, they mask our bewilderment, and the other option – despair – is hardly appealing. But the MLC jokes remind me of other funnies, the ancient ones, the take-my-mother-in-law gags, the anti-gay or racist one-liners. Comedy shows us where our fears lie.

I have a meeting with a TV commissioning editor. He laughs and says, ‘I don’t believe midlife crisis exists!’ He is wearing an earring, has split up with his wife and is dating someone fifteen years younger. I should have asked him if he had a new bike.

‘Have you had a midlife crisis?’ I ask S, who is a bit older than me. He was married before, and has two older children, who are adults themselves now, married, settled down.

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I had my crisis when I was 21. When D was born. Dad said to me at the time,’ (I know this story), ‘“Ah, the toothpaste’s out of the tube now, son.” You can’t push a baby back inside. You bring a child into the world and your life stops being about you.’

Yes, but that’s part of it, I think. The terror, and the tedium, and the sheer delight of your children. And you, knowing they will go.

I keep reading. It turns out that there are a lot of people – distinguished academics, psychotherapists – who insist that midlife crisis is not a thing. After all, unrealized goals, lack of self-determination and physical changes are not problems exclusive to forty-somethings: you can run up against them at any stage in your life. The academics point out that middle age is tricky, busy, overwhelming, but that doesn’t mean there’s a crisis. Nothing to see here. It’s just middle age.

Also, a crisis tends to be triggered by an event: a parent dying; losing your job; a long-term relationship breaking up; having a child, or the children leaving home. Any one of these upsets can trigger a sudden shift in thinking, a shaking of the foundations of your life. Which is what happened to S, in his early twenties.

But S is becoming an anomaly. These days, more children are born to women of 35 and over than to women under 25. And most of these crisis-triggering events occur around middle age, that busy time.

And, like I say, we make jokes about midlife crisis. This is the greatest evidence for its existence. Jokes are how the British acknowledge anything fundamental. If it wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be laughing about it.

Somewhere inside, I seem to believe that middle age should be the pinnacle of life, the moment when all your previous efforts add up to something meaningful and you find yourself at the top of the mountain. I mention this to a friend, psychotherapist Philippa Perry, and she says: ‘That’s only a metaphor. Why not change it?’

For a while I try to imagine life as a long climb to the ultimate summit. But then I start noticing all the studies that indicate a different shape. Every time I find a piece of empirical research, it insists that, when it comes to our lives, happiness is U-shaped. Across several nations (Australia, Germany, the UK, others) the saddest time is in middle age. We’re full of joy when very young and very old, but struggle badly with the time in the centre. We go through our forties at our lowest psychological ebb. Some of the studies pinpoint 47 as our unhappiest age; some say 44. But it’s always in our forties.

Other research has found that great apes – chimpanzees and orangutans – have a similar life pattern. At the end of 2012, a global team (from Edinburgh, Arizona and Kyoto) studied 508 orangutans and chimpanzees and discovered that they suffer from middle-aged angst. As the apes live to around 55, they have their crisis in their late twenties.

Andrew J. Oswald, an economics professor from the University of Warwick, writes: ‘It seems the curve of happiness should no longer be considered a social and economic phenomenon, the preserve of economists, sociologists, social psychologists, psychiatrists or mysticists. Instead, intriguingly, the U shape appears to be so deep within us that it may need a natural sciences explanation.’ Not a crisis, then, a life condition.

More research. Pile it on. Let the book have its breakdown, with me. Let it look at itself and unpick what it sees. Give us the bad stats.