By George Chesterton
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An author once wrote, “Do you know what adult life is? It’s 50 years of crisis management. If you’re lucky.”
Actually, the author was me, and I was pretty happy with that line. It was a quote from a novel I wrote that I struggled to get published for a couple of years. I had one agent after another, but it never quite happened.
That experience helped me understand that as you approach middle age, almost everything, even the things you love doing, can contribute to the sense that life is merely a set of problems to be fought or held at bay. Although they didn’t set out to, my children helped me escape this trap, not by being angelic, but by being rude and demanding.
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Back to my novel. Even though I loved writing it—I traveled, had some adventures, and the process itself was rewarding—for a while, not getting it published only added to my worries. To the London literary scene, I was demographic kryptonite, so the cards were stacked against me anyway.
My luxury anxieties piled on top of all the everyday ones. I felt like the captain of one of those massive “garbage barge” ships that traveled hopelessly around the world’s oceans because no port would let it dock.
In middle age, you become a funnel into which all of life’s little problems tumble, plus some big ones too.
Men and women have to think about health differently as they approach their late forties. If they’ve been fortunate enough to make it that far without any serious concerns, men face much higher risks of prostate cancer and heart disease, while women face breast cancer and a range of gynecological problems. And then there’s the menopause. The list goes on and on.
You find problems in having too much money or too little (though too much is preferable). You can find problems in having enough money. In other words, even comfort can feel uncomfortable. You can love your job but still feel the weight of all that responsibility in ways that never seemed possible when you were 25.
If you are married or in a long-term relationship, you somehow end up taking each other for granted as the years roll by. Drifting apart is easier than not. Constant vigilance is required. More exhaustion. More anxiety. Surely it doesn’t have to be like this?
I found help when I noticed I was competing with my children over who had it worst. In my experience, teenage girls fervently believe they suffer more than anyone who has ever existed. That’s their lived experience. A breakout of pimples. A boyfriend who hasn’t answered a message. Being left out of a school clique. A request for another set of ear piercings turned down. In their minds, they are the victims of systemic parental oppression.
Sometimes a father’s response is to point out that his daughters, to be blunt, don’t know how lucky they are. But reminding a 12-year-old or 15-year-old girl that her problems are insignificant compared to paying bills or rushing an elderly relative to the hospital is, well, incredibly childish. Not that it stopped me.
The more I used my problems as a bargaining tool to negotiate with my daughters, the less effective it became. In the heat of a family feud, telling a child they don’t understand how hard it is to be an adult is like trying to convince an Ivy League student of the value of free speech. They can’t judge what they’ve never experienced.
How could I expect my children to get some perspective about life’s problems if I didn’t apply the same logic to myself?
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My daughters never backed down. They never conceded that my endless disasters were real and theirs were not, even if it just came down to a missing lip gloss.
By dismissing me, they liberated me. The message was, “So what if adult life is one crisis after another. What’s that got to do with us?”
Most of my problems were of my own making. Overreacting, feeling sorry for myself or comparing my life with others achieved nothing. Nothing good anyway.
I even managed to turn something as rewarding as writing a novel into a negative (The Runaways is available now, if you were wondering).
It’s true that my children are—by the standards of most of the world—incredibly privileged, but that’s no reason to offset that against my problems or use it to make them feel guilty. Because I am incredibly privileged too. And fighting them helped me see privilege as a good thing rather than a cross to bear.
Feel lucky, midlifers. You probably are.
George Chesterton is Newsweek’s Director, Publishing & Subscription Strategy.
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