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My current research is focusing on the very private developments women experience in midlife. For midlife - which I define very broadly, as somewhere between 49 and 65 - is a turning point in our lives, when we realize that though we may have several healthy and productive decades ahead of us, we now have to take account of who we are and what we have done, so that we can make the best possible use of our futures.
The so-called midlife crisis, coined in 1965, is being written about with increasing frequency as feisty and out-spoken baby boomers experience it, but writers and sociologists and psychologists have focused so far on the change of behavior and on hormonal effects rather than on how people reflect on their lives. Often midlife women describe themselves as smarter, wiser, or having better judgement than in their youth. Is this just the accumulation of experience? Or does the increased speed in pattern recognition that has been noted in the midlife brain play a role? If so, how?
My research has been on midlife women, and no one will be surprised to hear that midlife reflection focuses in large part on re-balancing exercises. First, there is the special balance most women face - in various ways at different stages in their lives - between their expansive and affiliative needs. There expansive are needs to develop our own potential and to do see ourselves as having some effect on the world around us. There are also affiliative needs to care for the people who matter to us, to help bring out the best in them, to offer comfort and support. While both men and women have to balance different needs, societies have on the whole given women relatively little help in managing conflicts they face, and men more help. Moreover, women are often impeded in adolescence and early adulthood by female ideals. For all the change there's been, there remain special norms about goodness and selfishness that may skew a woman's personal capacity for reflecting on what she herself wants. Women often describe a "filter" or "veil" or "judge" that comes between their thoughts and wishes on the one hand, and their decisions on the other. They can be about whether to buy or bake a cake for a school party, whether to agree to take a meeting at work even when it will result in overload and fatigue, whether to go on a vacation with a partner, even when you really get no enjoyment from the skiing or dining that your partner enjoys so much. These decisions are often small, minor events, but they can shape one's daily life.
Early on in the interviews I held with midlife women, I noticed a clear difference in the speech of women in their early forties, and in the women who were close to fifty. In the younger women, there were many references to internalized or shadow voices, voices reminding them about norms of the caring woman. This shadow voice is a critic or commentator on their lives, a critic who hovered close as they engaged in balances and decisions about self and other, an overseer of the descriptions others might give of them. But in the speech of the older women - those aged fifty-five and over - these shadow voices largely disappeared. If they did emerge, they were stopped or countered. The pivot of development in midlife - and why midlife women are likely to become more optimistic, assertive, more adept at getting their own way, more adventurous and playful - is around this change in how we process our thoughts and identify our feelings. There is less running interference from others' expectations and standards (real or imagined) as we reflect on what we want to do.
There is no simple ending, and there are many follow-on questions. These include, "What do I want to do, now that I can think about this more clearly," and, more challenging in a culture that offers more opportunities to youth than to age, "How do I go about it?"
