Post-Backlash Feminism

This week I celebrate my 45th birthday, so I am thinking of middle things: mid-life, mid-ness, being mid-way. The  first time I encountered the notion of a mid-life crisis, I was 13 years old and my father, who was 41at the time and had recently grown a beard, came home one day with a perm. It was 1977 and we lived in a rainy mid-western city where Dad worked as an underwriter for a life insurance company. Somehow that perm had made perfect sense to him. My mother was encouraging, keeping my brother and me quiet and telling Dad he looked "great."

Looking back, I now understand that her behavior was a defense against waking to find Dad long gone (with a new mistress, a new sports car, a new 'life choice') and saving herself the trouble of taking him back when he came to his senses (and changed his hairstyle). The perm didn't last long. Dad returned to parting his thinning hair down the side and combing it tightly across his head in no time. Seems Mom knew what she was doing.

I don't know if Mom went through anything like a mid-life crisis. We didn't talk about her experiences back then. I came to understand that women have lives they feel, experiences and bodies they care very much about, only after I abandoned the plasticine suburbs for higher education.

Now here I am, a middle-aged woman with a child in college, another in high school, a husband, laundry, shopping, a job, three cats, a dog. And I find myself curious about how my mother got through. Whatever she did was invisible to me. My inclination? Today? Run. Fuck housework. I'm going to sell painted shells on some beach wearing next to nothing and reading novels late into every night. My family? They can come find me. They say they can't do without me, but that's a trick. To keep me here. Keep me fretting over their needs first and continually putting my own needs second (or third, or fourth...). They mean no harm; men and children have been trained into this paradigm of family life and it's cruel distributions of labor.

I've not run, of course--does anyone really do that? --but I am leading, these days, a rather rich fantasy life.

When I'm not thinking about the beach, I am thinking about middle things.What exactly am I in the middle of? Not sure. Have learned not to see life as a long, cruel crawl toward failure--that's good, right? But where is it heading? Ugh, OK. That's not the best question; we all know where it's heading. I guess many of us come to this question at this point due to certain circumstances typical of mid-life: kids leaving home, parents aging. We must rethink how to care for both and face that we, too, are growing older.