Sue Shellenbarger - The Breaking Point: How Todays Women Are Navigating Midlife Crisis

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To my children:

Margaret, Rich, Lucas,

Cristin, and James

Careening down a mountain on an all-terrain vehicle, I struggle for control as my ATV bounces off ruts and roots. A teenage friend leading the way on his dirt bike waves his hand in a Slow down! signal.

I ignore him. At 51, I am hell-bent on adventure.

Grazing the trunk of a Douglas fir big enough to halt a speeding Humvee, I make a turn on two wheels and hit the throttle. I am invincible. Ageless. Mindless, I might add, of the fact that with scant experience on mountainous terrain, I am like a grenade with the pin pulled, moments from certain disaster.

For twenty-five years, I have been a working mother, juggling home, family, kids, job, and suburban community life with intensity. In middle age, I have become somebody no one knows, a wild woman with graying hair under a full-face helmet, a hand too heavy on the throttle and an adventure lust so consuming that I lie awake nights.

Camping in Oregons Coastal Range with a hard-riding crowd of off-road adventurers, I am flattered to be invited to join three of the biggest daredevils on the trail. As I gain speed, exhilaration renders gas fumes sweet in my lungs. The trees fly by in a blur, the roar of my engine fills the air. Speed rivets my senses on the moment. I lean into a sharp turn.

Then, in a heartbeat, the ground heaves upward, earthquakelike. A berm erupts and lifts my two right tires. My ATV bucks and starts to roll. Reflexively, I hit the throttle. The earth tilts. My body flies off the seat. Deep-green treetops spin crazily.

My back slams hard onto the dusty red clay of the trail. The sky goes dark as the 375-pound Honda 400EX flips and lands sideways the full length of my body.

When I regain consciousness, three pairs of eyes behind full-face helmets circle the sky overhead, peering down at me like curious aliens landed to search for signs of life. Can you breathe? asks one. Can you move? comes another voice from beneath a fiberglass face shield.

I move my neck slightly, then my spine, and say a prayer of thanks that I am not paralyzed. She has the balls of a gorilla, doesnt she? murmurs one of my companions, thinking I cannot hear.

Their quick-witted rush to hoist the ATV off my body saved me from a worse fate, I later learn. The damage: a collarbone knocked so far out of whack that it looks like some demon battling to escape my skin. A bruise the shape of an ATV extends the length of my torso. I creep painfully onto the back of a friends ATV and we ride back to camp. My worried children, 12 and 15, and the rest of our campmates circle me, marveling that a collarbone could go so far AWOL, and my friend shuttles me to the nearest emergency room forty miles away.

What was I thinking?

The answer, of course, is that I wasnt thinking. I was only feeling. I had plunged deep into the dark comedy of a midlife crisis.

A series of losses in middle age had left me reelingthe death of my father, the end of my twenty-year marriage in divorce, and the approach of the empty nest as my children grew more independent. Values that had helped guide my life for decadesachievement, frugality, respectability, career success, exceeding other peoples expectationsdid not matter to me anymore. Beset by an emotional deadness, I felt the truth of Joseph Campbells quote, Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall. For a time, it seemed, repressing my deepest dreams and desiresfor adventure, for a simpler, more rustic life, and for closeness with nature and with other people who valued it, toowas no longer worth the sacrifice.

Like most people, I had never taken the notion of midlife crisis seriously. I thought of it as a fleeting, laughable period of adolescent regression that leads middle-aged men to buy red sports cars and take trophy wives. Typing with my arm in a sling after the ATV accident, I attempted to make light of the subject in my Work & Family column in The Wall Street Journal. Lampooning myself for having one of the stupidest accidents of my life, I wrote, The midlife crisis is a clichuntil you have one.

I quickly learned I was not alone. The column drew one of the biggest reader responses I had received in twelve years as a columnist. While some readers of both sexes were startled by the notion that a female could even have a midlife crisis (I had no idea that women got this, too, wrote a Texas man), a far larger number of women readers experienced a shock of self-recognition. Dozens told heartfelt tales of pain, upheaval, rebirth, and transformation in middle age, and said they had no idea other women were experiencing the same thing. My comic tale had touched a hidden nerve. Clearly, millions of midlife women had reached a crisis stagea time when old values and goals no longer made sense to them.

I began gathering more stories. Through newspaper ads, networking, and e-mail, I identified fifty women who had undergone midlife turmoil, each of whom generously agreed to share her life experience. In thirty years as a journalist, I have not experienced interviews as moving as these. Many agreed to talk for an hour, then went on for four or five. Some shared their artwork, their writings, photos of their gardens, their children, their dogs. Powerful themes of frustration or despair, the resurgence of unsettling passions and desires, self-discovery, and renewal ran through all their stories. From each one, I learned much about the gifts and challenges of midlife.

Shedding Old Selves. Not all women in midlife transition experience such explosive feelingsor bouts of foolishnessas I. There are many paths through this turbulent time. Many women remain calmer and wiser, taking stock of renascent dreams and desires, expressing them in new pursuits and integrating them into their lives. While they undergo a profound change in life direction, these women make changes more smoothly. Others spend a lot of energy repressing midlife desires, only to learn, too late, that stifled dreams have turned to bile in their souls.

Nevertheless, there is a common thread: In all cases, midlife crisis brings traits, needs, or desires that have been ignored or repressed roaring back on center stage in ones personality. We strive at midlife to integrate the pieces of ourselves that we have been missingto become whole. In the process, we pass two of lifes most important milestones, according to psychoanalyst Murray Stein, who has written extensively on midlife: We gain a new understanding of our limits. And we develop a new sense of meaning and direction to guide us through the rest of our lives.

These themes bind together all the stories in my fifty-woman study. A California saleswoman wrote that, at age 50, she was overcome by such a powerful yearning for the intimate love she had never known that she could not bear to watch romantic scenes on TV or in the movies. She soon plunged headlong into the most passionate and transformative love affair of her life, learning for the first time to be truly close to a lover.

Struck at age 48 by a powerful recognition that she had not been true to herself, or authentic, in her choices, a midwestern homemaker and community volunteer ended her marriage and poured everything she had into a long-standing dream of founding her own company. Soon, she was CEO of her own successful consulting firm, expressing her vision and talents in the world at large.