Cliff Notes

Treasuring moments, however grand.

"This just in: Mid-life crises aren't for real. 

In a fascinating post on the Scientific American website,Jesse Bering explores the history and mythology of the proverbial mid-life crisis. He notes that despite our commonly held assumption that middle age brings a full on melt-down replete with new girlfriend, new hair style and the requisite red corvette, mid-life crises aren't borne out empirically. 

Indeed, epidemiological studies reveal that midlife is no more or less likely to be associated with career disillusionment, divorce, anxiety, alcoholism, depression or suicide than any other life stage; in fact, the incidence rates of many of these problems peak at other periods of the lifespan."
-- Delia Lloyd, "Is it Time To Retire the Midlife Crisis?"  Huffington Post 10/10/11

"Today the daughters of these runaway moms, having arrived at the shores of middle age, are taking flight, too. But they’re not, by and large, dumping their husbands. They’re not looking to the job market with expectations of liberation. 

Instead, they’re fleeing to yoga, imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day and attain “a more superior, evolved state of being,” as Claire Dederer puts it in her just-published book, “Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses,” the latest installment in the burgeoning literature of postboomer-female midlife crisis. 

...There’s no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world. 

Instead, making a home is re-encoded as a privilege, an accomplishment, even a form of freedom from the burdens and demands of the workplace. Kenison, finding self-liberation in a midlife journey toward “my own quiet center,” finds freedom in fleeing the wider world, not entering it more fully: “to create . . . for all of us,” she wrote of her husband and adolescent sons, “a protected island, a quiet place from which we could hold the world and its busyness at bay for a while.” 

In other words, the new “narrative of liberation,” as Dederer puts it, of the postboomer, “postfeminist” woman, the new incarnation of the ’70s girl who could do anything, appears to lead right back into a performance-enhanced version of “Mad Men”-era domestic fantasy. “In response to my 1970s mom, I had become a 1950s housewife,” Dederer writes. 

...For many women, this inward-turnedness, this seeking of salvation in an ever-greater connection to home, and in a homebound sense of self, is a direct rebellion against the outward-bound trajectory that their own mothers took.