The Breaking Point - Softcover

Shellenbarger, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805080317 ISBN 13: 9780805080315

Publisher: Holt, 2005

Synopsis

"[The Breaking Point] suggests that the national conversation is about to have a hot flash. The passage through middle age of so large a clump of women . . . guarantees that some rules may have to be rewritten and boundaries moved to accommodate them." ―Time magazine

From the cover of Time to Desperate Housewives, the phenomenon of women in midlife experiencing a period of tumultuous personal upheaval―a breaking point―has reached a peak in our culture. Today, more than 15 million baby boomer women report having a midlife crisis compared to 14 million men. In The Breaking Point, Wall Street Journal columnist Sue Shellenbarger looks beyond the numbers to discover the root of all this angst and examine the ways, both successful and not, that women are navigating this crucial transition period.
Drawing on original research data and interviews with more than fifty women, The Breaking Point uses real-life stories to illustrate the different archetypes and modes the course of reinvention follows. The book also shows women how to avoid the pitfalls of a midlife meltdown―ruined relationships and jettisoned careers―and instead transform this turbulent time into a period of personal growth that will enrich the rest of their lives.
Once every decade or so a book comes along that defines the collective experience of an entire generation. Provocative, insightful, and resonant, The Breaking Point is just such a book.

"Every once in a while you read a book that transforms you. Like the shift of a kaleidoscope, it reconfigures your view of life's journey. This is such a book. It may stimulate you to change directions, perhaps even enable you to find life's greatest joy: fulfillment. An invigorating read."
―Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love

"This catchy work is tailor-made for the 36 percent of women who will eventually have what they regard as midlife crises' . . . an illuminating guide." ―Publishers Weekly

About this title

About the Author

Sue Shellenbarger is the creator and writer of the Wall Street Journal's Work & Family column. The former chief of the Journal's Chicago news bureau, Shellenbarger started the column in 1991 to provide the nation's first regular coverage of the growing conflict between work and family and its implications for the workplace and society.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

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 .r 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 Oregon’s 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, earthquake-like. 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, doesn’t 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 friend’s 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 wasn’t 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 reeling—the 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 decades—achievement, frugality, respectability, career success, exceeding other people’s expectations—did not matter to me anymore. Beset by an emotional deadness, I felt the truth of Joseph Campbell’s 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 desires—for adventure, for a simpler, more rustic life, and for closeness with nature and with other people who valued it, too—was 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 cliché—until 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 stage—a 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 feelings—or bouts of foolishness—as 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 one’s personality. We strive at midlife to integrate the pieces of ourselves that we have been missing—to become whole. In the process, we pass two of life’s 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.1

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.

A San Francisco consultant quit her business after the long illness and death of her partner of twenty-two years. Then, after a time of grieving, she joined a motorcycle club, had a wild transcontinental love affair, finished law school, and met and married a new husband—all after the age of 41.

Like me, all the women who wrote in response to my column believed they were alone in their struggle. “Thanks for giving me a name for it,” wrote a California woman who nearly killed herself at age 40 in a biking accident on the beach. Her midlife transition led her to realize a dream of writing screenplays.

Similar in power to toddlerhood and the teenage years, midlife crisis drives people to shed old selves like a snakeskin. A New York bed-and-breakfast proprietor decides at 50 that life is no longer worth living if she cannot make the artwork she is yearning to create, so she shutters the B&B, ends her marriage, and takes up a career as an artist and art teacher. A 40-year-old homemaker with a lifelong desire to find a spiritual teacher decides after a divorce to make it her top priority, then plunges into a period of such intense personal growth that she winds up as CEO of a fast-growing company. A 43-year-old public-company executive from Colorado quits her job after a divorce, pilots a sailboat across the Mediterranean with a handsome new French lover, then decides to fulfill a long-standing desire to nurture others by training for a career as a counselor.

“Everyone thought I had lost my mind,” she admits.

All this from women with staid past lives and mainstream résumés who, based on the dictates of our culture, should be peacefully adrift by now on the placid seas of middle age.

Such growth comes at a cost. Midlife crisis can be painful and destructive, not only to women but to their loved ones. It can bring “a breathtaking degree of illusion and self-deception,” Stein writes, sparking behavior that seems out of character to others, laughable, or simply bizarre. As one woman wrote in an e-mail, “The brooding that turning 50 can trigger makes for a volatile emotional cocktail.”

I have been breathing the vapors of that cocktail myself for quite some time. Regaining one’s balance during midlife crisis can ta...

Edition details

• Publisher: Holt
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0805080317
• ISBN 13: 9780805080315
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288