Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 351

 

 Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis," by Ada Calhoun.

 

Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. The rest of my tour was canceled. In quarantine, I started hearing from one woman after another who saw the pandemic as almost an inevitable next chapter for this generation. We’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop since childhood. Here it was, the other shoe. Everything that was bad suddenly got much, much worse: more caregiving, less job stability, more isolation, less financial security. Readers told me that they now saw the book as a kind of prequel to the pandemic horror—an explanation not just of why midlife can be rough for us but also for why our generation was at once so logistically vulnerable to and yet also so psychologically prepared for the devastation.

Deborah Luepnitz, a Boomer psychotherapist practicing in Philadelphia, said, “What I see in my Gen X patients is total exhaustion. They feel guilty for complaining, because it’s wonderful to have had choices that our mothers didn’t have, but choices don’t make life easier. Possibilities create pressure.”

Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.

More than one unhappily married woman I spoke with said a variation on: “I do it all. What is he even here for?”