I'm 44. Old enough so that when I was a little girl, my mother (always the renegade) enjoyed making fun of the other '70's housewives--her peers, my friends' mothers-- for using the euphemism "that time of the month" to mean that another woman was menstruating. "It must be that time of the month" was a stand-in for other, coarser things--an albeit bitchy carte- blanche for all sorts of unbecoming behaviors. No wonder she didn't show up at the PTA meeting. [It must be that time of the month.] I saw her on the way to the hairdresser's and GOD did she look awful. [It must be that time of the month.] She cut me off in the parking lot at Key Food and pretended she didn't even see me...it must be that time of the month!
For many of us, and by us I mean my friends and I--urban and suburban, thirty- or forty-somethings, childless and child-ed, literate and mostly trying to live with some consciousness about what we're doing while we're doing it--we seem to have stumbled unwittingly into that time of the life. Men, women, you name it. I don't know how we got here, but here we are.
With a few rare exceptions that I'm inclined to deem willful ignorance, no one seems to be happy with their partnerhood, with the big picture. Is it me? Look around. Can you point to a strong handful of coupled people you'd consider deeply satisfied? And we all chose our choices--I'm not hearing a lot of whining about why didn't I have children; or why didn't I stay in my marriage, we could have/should have worked it out. It feels more like we are stuck in this chronic malaise. A failure to thrive.
Failure to thrive. In the midst of my grandfather's second failed suicide attempt a few years ago, I came upon this wonderful bit of diagnostic jargon. My 98-year-old grandfather, we could legally argue (it turned out), was simply failing to thrive. a.k.a., he was looking for a way out. Was ready for the check. Was feeling really quite done.
So, it seems, are we. Our marriages were fun, at some point--right? We were doing things differently, making up the rules as we went along, traveling to more interesting places, asking deeper questions, trying to resolve the ancient injuries of childhood. We had, many still have, challenging and sometimes consuming careers. Many of us decided at some point it was all cool enough to bring more lives onto the scene. Blended families and later-in-life pregnancies. Cool. Never before in history. It had to be good. Right?
But recently, I can't put my finger on specifically when, we all seemed to start failing to thrive. As couples. I'm not sure anyone likes who they're married to/partnered with anymore. Like, enough to do it for another ten or twenty.
Did we just get bored? Were we not asking the right questions of ourselves all along? Or is this just a phase--will we wake up suddenly, somewhere closer to 50, and think, Damn it, this IS good enough; what was I being so critical of?
Are we just stuck for awhile in that time of the life?
