- At 51, I found myself emotionally raw.
- My feelings resembled those I felt as a vulnerable teen.
Our annual get-together with my family promised leisurely activity and familial communion over buckets of fried chicken and gluten-free brownies, which I accidentally underbaked. The day was otherwise fault-free: I chatted with my mother while spreading out food on a picnic table, swam with my younger sister, and conversed with my older sister on a swinging bench as our father slept beneath the shade of a tree with his hat tipped over his face.
A week later, I found myself in bed fighting uncontrollable sobs. My husband was having a nightcap with a neighbor, our college-age daughter was upstairs, and I was back in time, emotionally, to my younger years of late-night sob fests. Life felt overwhelmingly hard.
I didn't recognize myself
At 51, I felt behind in career goals and ahead in age. My daughter's cold shoulder had shifted over the course of the summer: from ignorant to icy. After an argument, I watched her leave the house with friends for an activity we had planned to do together.I didn't recognize myself: a boomer child and a mother of a young adult. Insecurity left me feeling more like an ostracized teenager, wanting to hang out with the cool girls, while facing the inevitable truth of aging parents.
After the family gathering, memories of my preadolescent years surfaced. For three summers, my mother attended summer school and my father was at work, leaving me and my two sisters home alone to fend for ourselves, a result of the "free range" parenting styles of the '80s. My self-worth took a hit from the forced self-reliance. The more responsibilities I had, the more my insecurities grew. The more my insecurities grew, the more unlovable I felt.
Decades later, the same emotions surged but with different circumstances. Was this normal? I had heard about hot flashes, but did familiar emotions reveal a deeper meaning about a woman's midlife distress?
Through therapy, I'd come to be better at coping, better at forgiveness, and better at self-understanding than my younger self. So why was I emoting like a child? Was it unprocessed grief, or was it possible that midlife stress had reignited the tumult of youth — but with higher stakes?
I don't want to lose my parents or my daughter
The future promises the death of my aging parents and a household without children. The sense of abandonment pulls from both directions.Being forced to shape my identity around the absence of family feels like the reverse process of individuation. The adults who raised me witnessed a combative teen who argued for use of the car and who fought for independence.
I now want to reject that individuality, to hold on to the ease of deferring responsibility to adults, to have parents who won't abandon me. I also want a daughter who won't abandon me.
What do these sentiments mean? Do I fear abandonment, or am I more afraid of what abandonment will make of me?
A common narrative for girls attributes her goodness and self-worth to her attachments. My definition of self has long been tethered to family, but time is whittling away the excess, exposing the core of my identity.
This vulnerable situation provides a new challenge: to understand my emotional foundations. Shifting my perspective from societal values to personal values has allowed me to recognize the cause of my emotional surge: My belief system demands a change. No longer able to meet society's measurement of worth, I must frame it around who I am in relation to myself.
Like the teenage years, middle age is a time of deep, individualized growth. Vulnerable work often has a payoff of increased self-awareness and courageous individuality. By interrogating the meaning behind a personal crisis, we can illuminate the structures that challenge the truer needs of our humanity.
Yes, I can live with that.