Midlife Crisis Queen: The Weblog

or, if you’re not over 50, this is what you have to look forward to.

1. Kidnappers are not very interested in you.

2. In a hostage situation you are likely to be released first.

3. No one expects you to run–anywhere.

4. People call at 9 pm and ask, ‘Did I wake you???’

5. People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.

6. There is nothing left to learn the hard way.

7. Things you buy now won’t wear out.

8. You eat dinner at 4 pm.

9. You can live without sex but not your glasses.

10. You get into heated arguments about pension plans.

11. You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.

12. You quit trying to hold your stomach in no matter who walks into the room.

13. You sing along with elevator music.

14. Your eyes won’t get much worse.

15. Your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off.

16. Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the national weather service.

17. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can’t remember them either.

18. Your supply of brain cells is finally down to manageable size.

19. You can’t remember who sent you this list!

And you notice these are all in Big Print for your convenience.

You should forward this to anyone you can remember!

I know many of you are happily single. I just heard that officially 51% of adult American women are now single and believe me, I understand why! I was also happily single and never would have married again if I hadn’t met someone who I thought I would never meet. I checked him out very carefully. I wasn’t going to be fooled this time! And I wasn’t.

Now I am surprised daily to experience the advantages of a caring, loving relationship. The bottom line for me is the fantastic feeling that someone is watching over me with care and concern 24-hours a day, and he loves just me. It makes such a difference that there is one person in this world who is there, and truly cares in a day-to-day way. Dr. Phil is correct on this one. Mike truly is my “soft place to fall.”

This is all new to me, so I appreciate it daily. But there are other advantages to marriage I hadn’t even thought of! I read an article by Thomas Creek, a clinical psychologist recently. He has found that he and his wife stimulate the growth of fresh neural networks for each other by sharing information and knowledge everyday. They even make a point to remember their “ah-ha” moments to share later with each other.

When we first meet and are in the euphoric first stages of love, we are so distracted that we often cannot concentrate on anything, but the presence of our loved one. I remember this stage. We are simply obsessed with their looks, their smell and that amazing feeling of being in their arms!

But even then, Mike and I had lots of intellectual discussions on every subject imaginable: string theory, parallel dimensions of life, the housing market, how things work, how our brains work…you know, everything. And we would often observe how we would think about something together, and then come to the same conclusions at exactly the same time! It was amazing to experience!

Dr. Crook suggests that there are a number of activities couples can do together to further stimulate neural network growth while also strengthening your marriage in the process:

• Take dancing lessons: the combined physical and mental challenge is a great brain workout
• Watch movies together and then discuss them: Men and women use different areas of the brain when viewing movies resulting in varying perspectives and insights
• Learn a language together: gradually incorporate new words into your discussions or sign up for Merriam-Webster’s “word of the day” at m-w.com
• Learn each other’s skills: There is no reason you can’t develop new parts of your brain. Learn something new from a master!
• Play games together: Try to outsmart each other with fun and challenging games

You get the idea! Now think up other ways you can enjoy each others’ company while also stimulating each others’ brain!

Don’t miss my new release in e-book format: Midlife Magic: Becoming the person you are inside!

This is a 52 page compilation of some of my best original posts, for sale NOW for only $9.99 at my business webpage: www.lauraleecarter.com

Written as a personal narrative, I reveal my own journey through midlife crisis (divorce, job loss, starting my own matchmaking business, finding love again, etc.), interwoven with key psychological insights, and the lessons we can all integrate as we transition into our new, best self. To get a feel for the vignettes in this volume, here are just a few of the chapter titles below:

“What is Midlife?”

“Is this a midlife crisis?”

“Divorce: The fine art of knowing when to leave”

“Dealing with anger”

“I said I’m divorced, not contagious!”

“How to fight midlife depression”

“Dealing with anger”

“Self-Discovery 101″

“Selflessness vs. Self-respect”

“Getting beyond mediocrity”

“Celebrate Self-Responsibility”

“Love and Hope”

“Midlife and Gratitude”

To win a free copy of my e-book, be one of the first to tell me what this is a photo of by commenting below!

Perhaps we should stop calling what we are going through a “midlife crisis,” and start calling it something more honorable like a “life-saving midlife rebellion.” After all, to quote Marx: “Language is practical consciousness.” A big fat midlife crisis don’t get no respect these days!

I believe midlife crisis has traditionally been identified by a man in his late 40’s or 50’s, who decides he feels trapped by his marriage and/or career, so he then goes and does something outrageous like buy a little red sports car, and maybe a hot new trophy wife to go with it. Those were the good old days! I only wish my crisis could have been so simple!!!

First of all, who can afford a sports car when they’re going through a divorce anyway? A sports car was the furthest thing from my mind when my income was cut by 75%. A couple years later I lost my job. This was when the true meaning of “crisis” set in. This was when I knew I wasn’t just going through a midlife “process” anymore. (Thank you very much, Marianne Williamson & Oprah!)

Nope, this was the real thing. This was the beginning of that disturbing certainty that I was on the edge of reaching that magical point of “nothing left to lose.” Of course I still had lots left to lose in reality, most notable my own self-respect. As I kept searching for jobs and found nothing, I began to wonder if I would lose my house next. I had visions of becoming one of the most over-educated bag ladies in my town!

But I also had the valuable commodities of solitude and time to sit and think about it all. Let’s hear it for my last regular job, the first one that ever gave me both severance and unemployment checks! These allowed me the luxury of time, to simply sit and think about ALL OF MY OPTIONS, not just the automatic or obvious ones.

How many academic librarians have you known that switched to providing matchmaking services in lieu of answering reference questions and regularly saying “SHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Yes, it’s been a wild ride for me in the past few years…a profound and life-saving rebellion.

The defining moment of my midlife crisis was when I decided to become fully myself in all that I do. I took complete ownership of my life, quit blaming others, and took 100% self-responsibility. I finally realized that I knew better than anyone in this world, what I was worth! And if I didn’t value myself, how could anyone else?

“I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.”

- May Sarton

Thanks to “catmegg” for the interesting comment this AM. Here’s an excerpt:

“If I don’t ’seize the day’ each and every day, simply moved by my very human state, I will just be waiting for a life that may never come, and remain frustrated with the only one that I really have!”

This immediately reminded me of one of my favorite sayings from May Sarton:

One must think like a hero, to behave like a merely decent human being.

There is our challenge, every single day. We cannot wait for our life to arrive. We will wait forever. We must seize the day, or at least the moment to make our life what we desire it to be! To quote Thoreau:

“When it is time to die, let us not discover that we never lived.

Here’s an interesting perspective on life & death:

A current article at MSNBC asks: “What does middle age mean these days?” and answers that question with a rosy review of a new book called: Redesigning 50 by Oz Garcia.

There’s a lot of truth here, in my opinion. The part I relate to the most is about how we deal mentally with the aging process:

“Do we even know what middle age means anymore? If you’re anywhere near the age of fifty, you probably remember that the mantra of the 1960s was “Don’t trust anyone over the age of thirty.” When we were teenagers, we thought that thirty marked the beginning of middle age. I know I did. But now, having passed the thirty-year marker many years ago, I’m no longer sure how to define middle age. Old definitions no longer apply. Middle-aged women are now having babies. Men and women in their sixties and seventies are climbing mountains, traveling into outer space, and making greater achievements than are many of their more youthful counterparts. In today’s world, middle age is no longer a stage of life to be dreaded or feared, but one that we can fully enjoy and embrace.

Aging takes most of us by surprise. We look in the mirror one day, or get up out of a chair, or try to do something we used to do effortlessly — and suddenly we realize that we’ve actually gotten older. That’s what happened to me. Even though I don’t always want to admit it, I have started to experience the universal signs of reaching a certain … maturity. I need reading glasses. I can’t run at the same pace or with the same stamina I used to. It’s become a little more difficult to regulate my weight.

I’ve started to ask myself questions. What can I do now and for the rest of my life to make the coming years as good as those that have passed? Do I need to worry about health concerns that some have called the diseases of aging? And how do I not only remain healthy but feel good — and look good, too?”

I find most of what is said in this article to be true. For example, many midlifers do suffer from adrenal exhaustion and the detriments of too much caffeine and alcohol. etc., especially if you are dealing with a chronic illness like CFS. I can also highly recommend the Life Extension Foundation and their magazine (www.lef.org) for useful, cutting edge research on ways to enjoy the second half of life more. I wrote an extensive research report for them on CFS (which they never published!)

The only problem I see with this kind of information, is the tone of it, which can suggest to those of us who struggle with chronic pain or illness, that we are just a bunch of stupid slobs who haven’t seen the light yet, and “fixed” ourselves.

I salute people like Mike Wallace from “60 Minutes” who will turn 90 this week, and is still working hard. My own father is going to be 80 next year, and still shows great dedication to researching and writing books on botany. (Trees and Shrubs of Colorado)

Aging is obviously a very individual experience. The challenge is continuing to believe that you have excellent and exciting reasons to get up every day, and do what makes you happy, at any age.

In case you missed this short video, I’m highlighting it again! LOL!!!

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-walt-babyboomers-blurb,0,1036393.blurb

Now there’s a midlife question for you. There are so many ways to interpret this question, but for our purposes, what does freedom mean in terms of your own life. How would you know you had found freedom in your day-to-day world? What would you be doing for a living? Who would you be living with?

I know most of us may not ever find “freedom” in this lifetime, but go with me on this fantasy for a while anyway. This is an exercise in getting exactly what you want, for a change.

If you’re anything like me, you have probably done what you thought others thought you should be doing your whole life. Who were these people? Who knows! All I know is that I had so many biases and rules in my head about doing something “practical” and “sensible.”

I made them up in my head, and then allowed them to torture me. They said things like, “You can’t do that for a living! It will never pay the bills! Do something sensible! Be practical! Be less than you are! You can’t have everything, you know! Get real!”

Don’t believe everything you think!

It took me so many “failures” and misfortunes to finally convince myself that it’s now or never. It also took a good career counselor. It was time to choose the man that made me happy, not the “practical” marriage. And then go do what I loved, what made me feel fully alive, and what made me happy.

For me this was writing. I would be the first to admit that this is not a practical or particularly lucrative field to go into. And yes, it can also be extremely frustrating at times. But this felt like my last chance to get it right, my last chance at freedom. And this career can also be practical as I near retirement, because I can do it forever, and say what I think about everything!

I have found a sense of freedom I have never known before. I finally freed myself up to give myself the freedom to be me - the Midlife Crisis Queen rides again!