NORA COLEThe Mid-life Transition of the homemakers we interviewed got under way at 40 or 41 and was ending at 45. During this period they made the cross-era shift from early to middle adulthood. They ended the Culminating Life Structure of the thirties and created a basis for the Entry Life Structure of the new era. And they moved from the Traditional Marriage Enterprise to a new form of married or single life. The change in marriage enterprise at this time is rooted in the timing of the eras and developmental periods. It is also shaped by the evolution of motherhood and marriage, by the character of the occupational world, and by the shift from junior to senior generation in society. (For a fuller discussion of transitional periods generally, see Chapter 2.)
I’ll discuss here the eight homemakers who were 42 to 45 years old at the time of interviewing and well into the Mid-life Transition. Of the seven others, five were under 40 and still in the Culminating Life Structure; and two, turning 41, were on the threshold of the Mid-life Transition but not yet far enough into it to say much about the changes just getting under way. This period thus brings us up to the present in the lives of the homemakers and to the conclusion of early adulthood.
The Traditional Marriage Enterprise was the framework within which the homemakers built their lives in early adulthood, and it continued to shape their lives, to a greater or lesser extent, all the way through the Culminating Life Structure of the thirties. During the Mid-life Transition each woman began to question the Traditional Marriage Enterprise and her life as a homemaker. Significant changes were occurring in her relationships with husband, offspring, parents, occupation, self—with everyone and everything of significance to her. The process of change would continue, I believe, through middle adulthood. The core issue was this: caregiving would no longer be her chief function in life.
If caregiving had been the predominant theme of early adulthood, what did she hope for as the new era began? Two themes are prominent. First, she wanted to be more care-free. She wanted to exorcise her sense of obligation to provide care without limit, to feel perpetually responsible for others, to be self-sacrificing, to ignore her own needs. She was prepared to maintain her domestic responsibilities up to a point—but no further. Second, she wanted the right to be herself, to make her own choices and pursue her own interests.
In her youth the homemaker had made a bargain: she agreed to dedicate herself to the mission of wife/mother/homemaker. In return, she would be loved, taken care of, and made happy. In the Mid-life Transition, more acutely than ever before, she realized that she had been cheated. She felt as though she had sacrificed her youth and at great personal cost had fulfilled her part of the bargain and more. But she had received nowhere near the promised care and love. Now that the homemaking mission was largely completed, she felt that she had every right to be starting a more carefree life with fewer burdens and greater benefits. But the good life was, alas, nowhere in sight. It was becoming evident, moreover, that a better life did not exist “out there,” waiting to be discovered. To enrich her life she would have to create a place for herself as a middle-aged adult in the public world—a world that was generally not welcoming or supportive. A major cost of the homemaking life was a significant failure in the development of the self. She had become a homemaker without seriously considering what else she might want to do or be. It was difficult now to consider these questions, to explore her inner resources and to begin forming a life in which they could be well used.
Most homemakers went through a “rock bottom” experience of marriage and life in the Mid-life Transition. It was the predominant experience of some women for a large part of the Mid-life Transition and was experienced more fleetingly or obliquely by others. They felt that the marriage was stagnant, arid. The husband, though not necessarily a bad man, was rarely involved with her and the children. There seemed to be no connection between husband and wife. They had sex infrequently, most often at her initiative. He had no apparent interest in making love or having genuine personal contact with her. It seemed that all he wanted from a wife was someone to cook his meals, do the housework, and give the public impression of a “normal” marriage. She felt totally trapped. Her marriage was almost intolerable, yet divorce seemed worse—she had no place to go and no adequate way to take care of herself financially and socially. She asked herself, “What do I get out of this marriage?” The worst of her many answers was, “I feel old at 40. I’m utterly isolated and alone and used up. There is no love in my life. I’m too young to live like this. It’s as though I’m in the middle of a dark hole and there is no way out. I can’t go on like this much longer.”
To various degrees, many homemakers became disappointed, bitter, resentful, disillusioned. There was resignation but also determination—they attempted to make new choices and to take greater responsibility for their own lives, even if this put them in opposition to significant persons and groups. Each woman learned that the right to pursue her own interests and make her own choices was not a given. It had to be earned through her own struggle and personal development. To be true to her self—rather than to an externally given authority—she had to form a more individuated self and a more internally defined relationship with self and world. This required her to ask, with greater urgency than ever before: Who am I? What is most important to me? How will I try to live in the next season of my life?
These questions are not asked or answered in a purely conscious, rational way. They involve deep, often amorphous feelings and images. They raise the possibility of drastic, frightening changes in a self and a life structure that, despite their limitations, are not readily altered. It is painful at around 40 to realize that I know so little of what I want and that it can at times be so terrifying to try to find out. Becoming more individuated brings new problems of its own. Living more on the basis of my interests does not mean that I have no appreciation of others’ needs and no responsibility for them. Mid-life individuation involves a greater awareness of the other as well as self and a stronger desire for genuinely mutual relationships.
NORA COLEIn her twenties and thirties, Nora Cole raised her five children, worked extremely hard to establish herself occupationally as a nursery school teacher, and had a limited relationship with the man she had married at 17. In her Mid-life Transition the nest was emptying, and she wanted more from life. At the same time her older husband was in poor health, earning less money from his unskilled work, and having less presence in the home as husband and father. When interviewed at 43, Nora was starting to realize that her days as a homemaker were ending. She was reappraising the past and trying to imagine the future. Everything was in doubt. Her subjective experience is conveyed with poetic intensity:
Two summers ago I realized that I was constantly being called upon to do things for others. Nothing was coming in to replace all that was going out. I just started crying and couldn’t stop. The cry was coming from deep down within me. My husband said, “What’s wrong? Why don’t you take a nap?” But it wasn’t a nap I needed; I wasn’t that kind of tired. There was no way I could make him understand what was wrong.
Our talk last time about my father’s death brought up a lot of those feelings. I was tired of giving. I felt like an octopus, overextended. I felt tired and depressed and old. That feeling has been in there with me but I didn’t notice it so much before. Most of the time I’m not even aware that I am giving a lot. It makes me feel good when I do something for someone else, like when I am singing in the church choir. When I’m not giving I feel guilty receiving; I don’t know why. When I concentrate on doing something for me, I feel that that’s selfishness and that I really don’t need to spend that time on me. I have an awful lot of takers and need someone to be giving to me. Maybe I want the caring to come from other sources than my inner one doing for myself.
I have been working very hard lately. I really need a vacation—go somewhere for a week, check into a hotel and just relax. If I want to go out, go out. If I don’t, lay in bed and watch TV. I need to do nothing for a while, just do nothing and have no responsibilities.
I had a dream last night: I was selling oysters at the store where I work summers. I was in a new department that didn’t have much lighting. Lots of people were waiting for me to wait on them. I couldn’t wait on them because I couldn’t see prices on things and didn’t know where things were. I got upset and started to cry quietly because I couldn’t help all those people. There wasn’t enough light for me to see what they were asking for. Yet they were not telling me what they wanted. They were just standing there looking at me, waiting for me to come over and offer my help. I remember looking from this new department that was dimly lit over to my old department that was well lit and that I was familiar with. I was getting angry because I had been sent to this new area.
Nora’s dream depicts the sadness, anger, and confusion so common in the Mid-life Transition. She is moving from one “department,” that is, era, to another. The new place is dark and unfamiliar. It is hard to see the new landscape. Her old skills seem less useful and relevant. People want help but they don’t say what they want, and she has trouble knowing what it is. She doesn’t know what she has to offer them. She feels lost—and angry at having to move.
This dream is about being forced to make an unwelcome change. Other mid-life dreams are about seeking change but not finding the way. Both kinds of dreams reflect an inner reality. We both welcome and fear the transition. We avoid it and seek it out. The external reality both requires and impedes the change. We must explore “dimly lit” places in order to enter a new place that may in time be well lit. The places are both in the world and in the self. The new place may be better and/or worse than the old. We cannot predict in advance what it will be. In time, a somewhat different self will have somewhat different relationships within a somewhat different world.
Let us now examine some of the specific changes occurring in motherhood, marriage, occupation, and other components of the life structure during this period.
In the Mid-life Transition all but one of the homemakers were mothers. Those who had started a family at around 20 now had offspring ranging in age from the early teens to the early twenties. A few had started a family in their late twenties, and their children were now 10 to 15 years old. All were involved in the emptying of the nest, a process of family evolution that usually takes ten or more years. It typically begins before the first child actually leaves home and ends some time after the last child leaves. The meaning of this process for every mother is mediated by her age and developmental period. Its primary meaning for the homemaker in her early forties was this: she was approaching the time when motherhood would no longer be a central component of her life. She would continue to care about her adult offspring, but the relationship would have a different character for herself as well as them. They were becoming more independent, less in need of her care, and less accepting of her guidance and control. It was unclear what she wanted next with them and what they wanted or would tolerate from her. It was clear, however, that she would not be the maternal caregiver she had been in the past.
Early in this process most mothers had a sense of loss—loss of offspring-as-child and loss of homemaking as the foundation of her adult life. Providing care had been her essential function in the Traditional Marriage Enterprise and her primary contribution to the world. What else could she do that would provide equivalent satisfaction and sense of value? Some mothers felt betrayed and abandoned by their near-adult offspring, who seemed neither to want much from mother nor to appreciate all that she had given them.
Others (or the same mother at other times) felt excessively burdened by offspring who continued to seek her care long after the age at which she expected them to become responsible, self-sufficient adults. Every mother had hoped that, by a certain age (typically, graduation from high school or college), her children would be well on the way to independent, well-adjusted adulthood. They would appreciate what a devoted mother she had been and what sacrifices she had made. They would respect her as a person and be caring of her in return for the care she had given them. These fond maternal hopes were violated by some or all of her offspring, who had a variety of problems: drug abuse; teenage pregnancy; mental or bodily illness; poor academic performance in a family that valued higher education; excessive financial or emotional dependence; a conflict-ridden relationship with parents in which mutual caring and affection could find no place.
Another major theme was a growing sense of liberation. Each woman became more aware of the limitations and constraints of her previous life. She had experienced herself in part as the domestic servant, the self-sacrificing one who forever put the needs of others before her own. As the responsibilities of child care and household management declined, she enjoyed the greater freedom to pursue her own personal interests outside the domestic world.
The women thus had multiple, often conflicting experiences of motherhood in the Mid-life Transition. The loss of their maternal functions within the family freed them from much that had been burdensome, but it also required them to make major changes in their lives and their selves. In part they suffered feelings of abandonment, grief, dependency, rage, and guilt. In part they felt relief, welcoming and even hastening the offsprings’ departure. When the departing daughters and sons were needy and requested (or demanded) further support, the mothers and fathers responded variously with responsible care, responsible independence, and diverse forms of dependency, guilt, indulgence, and rejection. The emptying of the nest rarely goes quickly and smoothly; it brings out the best and the worst in all of us. It plays an important part in the adult development of parents as well as offspring.
The marriage, too, was questioned and modified. During the Age 30 Transition all the homemakers had experienced minor to severe marital problems and had succeeded to some extent in reducing the problems or in finding other satisfactions that made the marriage more tolerable. Most had then built a Culminating Life Structure around a marriage which, however limited or painful, allowed them to continue living as homemakers. Now, in the early forties, they were less tolerant of the marital problems. Each married woman felt entitled, as she completed the homemaking project of her youth, to reap the rewards of her arduous labors. One potential reward was a better marriage. She now had more time and energy to invest in the marital relationship. She had the hope that her husband, too, might give more to the marriage, since he was now more established in his occupation and did not have to work so hard to provide for the family.
What did she want to receive from, and give to, the marriage? Her emerging wishes and attitudes were not well articulated in her own mind nor readily communicated to her husband. At the least, she wanted him to accept less domestic labor on her part and to support her ventures into new, extra-domestic spheres. She wanted to be less subordinate in the decision making and to make personal choices more on the basis of her own preferences. At the most—something she hardly dared insist upon, and in some cases hardly dared imagine—she wanted him to be more sexual/romantic, to find her more attractive as a person, to care more about her actual interests and well-being, to have more fun with her in jointly pleasing activities. What they had done in early adulthood, while important in its own right, would be a prologue to the freer, fuller life that was now within their grasp.
In her mind, the changes she sought—spending more time together, taking more vacations, having a better sex life, “having fun”—were relatively minor. Actually, the entire pattern of change required a basic transformation of the marital relationship that had existed for fifteen or twenty years within the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Although the marriage was the bedrock on which all else was built, it had not evolved much beyond its limited initial form. In attempting to improve the marriage, she was, in effect, trying to make it a more central component of her—and his—life. For both partners the present relationship was colored by disappointments, angers, voiced and silent grievances from the past. Changing it, or even initiating a joint effort at change, was extremely difficult. Their efforts to improve it usually brought minimal or negative results. Some couples succeeded in increasing the enjoyments and decreasing the irritants, but none was able to make the marriage a highly satisfactory, central component in either spouse’s life structure.
As the eight homemakers approached the end of the Mid-life Transition, they varied widely in marital condition. Kay Ryan and Jenny Abatello found their marriages relatively satisfactory, though not without current problems. Nora Cole, Emily Swift, and Angela Capelli had extremely difficult marriages and lived in a condition of psychological divorce. Carol O’Brien, Nan Krummel, and Lynn McPhail got legally divorced in or just before the Mid-life Transition. Carol O’Brien and Nan Krummel were single working mothers in this period. Lynn McPhail divorced at 39, remarried at 40, and spent the next five years dealing with her Mid-life Transition while also forming a second marriage and family. The relative frequency of these patterns in a small sample is, of course, not necessarily what it would be in the general population, but each pattern is of wider interest and significance. I’ll consider them in turn.
Kay Ryan and Jenny Abatello exemplify this pattern. From a distance one might say that these marriages continued unchanged throughout the Mid-life Transition. There were no dramatic events to suggest any marked change. Looking more closely, however, we see that in the Mid-life Transition they formed a new marriage—a new relationship and new enterprise—with the same partner. The new marriage was better than the old in some respects, worse in others, depending partly on the vantage point from which it was evaluated. A single, overall rating of “better” or “worse” would hide the complexity of the actual changes. It is more useful to explore the many forms of change and the qualitatively different pattern that emerged in each marriage.
As the Mid-life Transition began, both women wanted to make some improvements but no major changes in the marriage. The marital relationship yielded some satisfactions and no excessive overt conflict. The spouses maintained an effective limited partnership as parents and as a couple in the community. The marriage enterprise had been experienced by both spouses as essential to their existence and worthy of the great sacrifices involved. Occasionally wishing for more, each woman reminded herself that she was better off than most women she knew. By the end of this period the tasks of the enterprise were not so demanding or so central in the spouses’ lives. They had much less sense of being partners in a vitally important endeavor.
A key question of the Mid-life Transition: What new marriage enterprise, what new partnership committed to a shared mission, can we develop for the next season of life? Neither Jenny Abatello nor Kay Ryan had come to a clear resolution of this question at 43, when they were interviewed, but the direction of change was evident. They were not forming a joint new enterprise in which both partners were highly engaged. Instead, they would “make do” with a limited enterprise. In both couples, the two spouses regarded themselves as very different persons who cared for each other and would work hard to stay together. But they also understood that they would not be strongly involved in each other’s lives. Each woman was forming interests and activities of her own, largely independent of her husband.
The marriage played a shadowy yet important part in the emerging life structure of both Jenny Abatello and Kay Ryan. It was a source of security and stability. It symbolized the couple’s joint achievements in raising a family. It maintained the integrity of the family even as the adult offspring dispersed to form their own largely separate lives. Being part of an enduring marriage gave each one an identity and place in society far better than she could have as a single divorced woman. Jenny Abatello was strongly involved in her occupation and attempted to make it the central component of her life structure.
KAY RYANKay Ryan was one of the two homemakers who had a Dream of a Traditional Marriage Enterprise, and she became an extremely traditional homemaker. She was a middle-class housewife with no occupational interests or skills. Divorce for her would be an economic as well as a psychological and social disaster. She had friendly relationships with a few women but no close friendships; nor did she seek them. Since graduating from college she had been dedicated to raising her children, taking total responsibility for the household, and, starting in her mid-thirties, serving as “executive wife” who furthered her husband’s efforts to ascend the corporate ladder. When she was interviewed at 43 this structure was clearly in process of change.
Two or three years ago there was all this talk about women working outside the home, and I asked Peter whether he resented that I didn’t work. He said no, he’s glad I don’t work. He likes me to be at home and do his errands. He wouldn’t want to share the housework, and wouldn’t want me to go to work. I don’t want two jobs, an outside job and taking care of the house, too. Women who work have to take care of the house and the kids, too, and that’s probably very difficult.
Peter is a branch manager. Being the executive wife is less fun than it used to be. We have business visitors staying at our home most weekends, often for a week at a time, and it just gets to be too much. It’s a lot of work changing the sheets, cleaning the bathroom, entertaining all weekend. But I don’t have a choice—it’s his job. I should change my attitude and just accept it. What would I be doing if it wasn’t that? Sometimes it seems to me that I do more giving than he does, though.
There have been a whole series of problems in the last three years. I’m not sure why they all happened in this short time. When I was 40 the doctor told me I’d been on the pill too long—13 years—so I talked to Peter about a vasectomy. As Catholics we felt it wasn’t right but we certainly didn’t want to start all over again with babies. The next year he suddenly decided to have the vasectomy. I didn’t ask him why; as long as he changed his mind that suited me fine. A few months later he became impotent. He said he didn’t know why; maybe it was because he felt unhappy with his job. That was not a good time for me either. I got depressed and irritable. I would fly off the handle for no reason and would get my feelings hurt for things he has always done, like bringing his business visitors home to stay with us. One night I woke up in the middle of the night and cried for no reason. I lay there feeling so sad and wishing that he would wake up. Finally he did wake up, held me in his arms, and said it would be all right. That was all I needed. It was just the vague feeling of being all alone. Our oldest son had gone off to college a few months before. I thought it was very nice having less work to do with him away, but I may have missed him more than I really thought. He’s the son I can talk to the best. After nine months Peter’s impotence stopped as suddenly as it had started. But he was pretty depressed about his job for a while longer and is still not sure what he wants to do.
He doesn’t like a lot of the things he has to do as branch manager. He says it’s a job with a million golden handcuffs—salary, perks, insurance, retirement, and survivor benefits—so no matter how frustrating it gets, it’s hard to quit. The work is now less challenging, and there are no possibilities for promotion. He knows he won’t ever be regional manager and doesn’t want that anyway. He wants to be his own boss. I’d rather he stayed with the company. I have a certain loyalty to the company, which has been very good to us over the years and is probably better than most. Besides, I like our life the way it is. I like his job and the benefits we get from it, the expense account and travel and all that. If he just quit, it would threaten my well-being, my whole way of life. He considered starting a part-time business with a friend; if it went well he could then do it full-time and quit his present job without putting us in financial jeopardy. We and the other couple had a lot of fun imagining how well it would go and how we’d all be rich. But that has sort of died down. His sister says that he’s having a mid-life crisis, and he’ll probably get over it without changing his job. I hope so.
Last year I thought he was being too critical of me. He said he dreaded phoning me about bringing business guests home because I would grumble and make him miserable. And he was upset about the way I talked to our son when he was having trouble at college—I wasn’t understanding or sympathetic enough. It all came to a head, and we had a fight. I said, “If I’m not any good as a wife and a hostess, and I’m not any good as a mother, then I’m not any good at all because that’s all I am in this life. I have no other big career and nothing else I can do. If you don’t think I do either of these well, then I don’t do anything well!” We talked until 2 or 3 in the morning and I think we cleared the air. That’s the longest talk we ever had. Peter said he appreciated me but just wished I wouldn’t grumble so much. And I’ve been trying harder to be agreeable.
We’re looking forward to the freedom of having our children grown. We don’t envision having them around at 25, still freeloading off of Dad and having Mother do their laundry. A lot of our friends’ children have returned home for financial reasons, and I really don’t want that. I used to be afraid that when the kids left home nobody would ever talk to me again, because Peter is not a big talker. Recently we have spent a little more time together. I have this romantic idea of how love and marriage ought to be but he just doesn’t seem to want or need time alone with me. We never go out alone, just he and me.
Peter, who is my age, firmly believes that he will die in his early fifties, like his father did. I try not to think about it because I can’t do anything about it anyway. Statistically, men do die earlier, so lots of women face widowhood. I think I could cope pretty well by myself. I’m sure I’ll be lonelier than ever I could imagine—but maybe not. I won’t have to do so much housework and cook for other people and worry about what they want to eat and when they’ll be home. Sometimes it’s very nice to have only yourself to worry about. I’d build my life around me. There might be some advantage to living alone and being financially independent and doing what you want. I don’t mean having to support myself and struggle financially. I mean living comfortably. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble filling my time. I’ll sit around the pool and read all the books I haven’t had time to read. I have always watched soap operas, and I am learning to embroider, and maybe I’ll do a little volunteer work.
I’m worried about my aging mother, who is ill. She’s always been very critical of me and bossed everything in my life. She thinks that if she doesn’t run the world it will stop turning. I feel that I can never satisfy her. She’s never been loved enough or cherished enough or treasured enough by her two husbands or anyone else, including me—at least not enough to suit her. Last summer was a nightmare. My mother was sick, and I spent a month with her. When I got home the visitors came one after the other, business guests and family and friends. No time could be as bad as last summer.
In the last few years I have become more aware of my own feelings. I don’t necessarily like that happening, because the feelings get me upset and hurt me. I have always tried to ignore and push away things that bother me. I guess I’ve always been too busy doing whatever needed to be done right now to worry much about what I’d do later. But now the future looks uncertain; I feel like I’m standing at the edge of a precipice without knowing what lies ahead—what will happen with my mother’s illness, with our sons, with my husband’s job.
A key theme in Kay’s story is the dilemma of the displaced homemaker. A chapter of her life is ending. The parental nest is emptying and motherhood will soon be a peripheral component of her life structure. Marriage was always subjectively important to her, though she and her husband spent little time together. She had earlier imagined that, with the departure of the offspring, she and her husband might have a more romantic-loving-sexual relationship. It now appears, however, that this change is unlikely; for reasons she does not know, her husband does not seek that kind of relationship with her. While relieved in many ways about the termination of the homemaking phase, she has decidedly mixed feelings about the future. Indeed, her account contains two antithetical scenarios for the next chapter.
In one scenario she imagines a life of widowhood. Having a trust fund as provisioner she lives alone, carefree, building “my life around me.” She is free of all previous obligations. She is also minimally engaged with other persons and with the larger social world. Indeed, it is not clear what place she might have in the generation of middle adulthood. Widow fantasies of various kinds are, I believe, held by many homemakers in middle adulthood.
In the second scenario, which is less detailed than the first, she tries to confront the still-unresolved problems of her current life: her mother’s illness and potential need for daughterly care; her sons’ extended process of entry into adulthood; her husband’s uncertain career and personal development (which are in some ways more threatening than his early death); and the possibility—not yet consciously contemplated—of her own entry into the public occupational world. In this scenario she is “at the edge of a precipice.” Other women in the Homemaker sample had their own version of the precipice and of the dangers and opportunities it contains, but the basic image is widespread. The scenario of the precipice is more frightening than that of idyllic widowhood but it also engages her more in life—in being a responsible woman, mother, wife, daughter, senior member of a community. To enact her part in this scenario she will have to develop a stronger sense of self as a middle-aged adult.
The marriages of Nora Cole, Emily Swift, and Angela Capelli, like the more satisfactory ones above, seemed from a distance to persist relatively unchanged from the women’s thirties into their forties. In the thirties they found the marriage almost intolerable—empty, unsustaining, in some respects abusive—yet decided for various reasons not to divorce. During the Mid-life Transition there was a qualitative change in the relationship and in the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. The possibility of divorce became much more real. The woman no longer had a sense of marital partnership. She became more independent financially and relied even less than before on her husband’s participation in their personal relationship, household responsibilities, and social life. The spouses spent very little time together and had little or no sexual relationship. They had no joint enterprise and no apparent basis for creating one. Their lives were almost totally separate. The marital relationship gave both partners very little and left them depleted, depressed, and disappointed. The women understood that they had more reasons to end the marriage than to remain in it. Yet none of them divorced.
Given so many reasons to separate, what kept them from doing so? The obstacles to divorce were remarkably strong. Although they worked full-time, none of the women earned enough to sustain herself at anywhere near the current level. Divorce would create severe financial hardship for her and the children still at home. The identity of “divorced woman” was frightening, for reasons both rational and irrational. Divorce would require her to invest more of herself in the work world and to make occupation a more central component of her life structure—a prospect that two of the three considered neither feasible nor attractive. All three feared that divorce would ultimately leave them isolated, vulnerable, marginal to their former community. They were terrified by the prospect of remaining single throughout middle and old age, with no one to take care of them and to share the tribulations and joys of those seasons. None had an alternative that would provide enough satisfaction and sense of personal value to counterbalance the losses imposed by divorce. All things considered, staying married seemed the least hurtful choice.
ANGELA CAPELLIThe marriage had been bad earlier but when I turned 40 it seemed hopeless. For the first time I said, “Let’s split up.” My husband said, “There’s the door.” I knew I couldn’t manage financially on my own, so I stayed. I decided to go back to work full-time at the one job I could do, typing. It would get me out of the house and supplement his meager earnings. Now, at 45, I like my job well enough. But it’s totally monotonous, typing page after page after page of just numbers on insurance policies. You’re more or less a robot. The other typists are girls in their twenties. They don’t like the work either, but they don’t mind it so much because they’re just passing the time till they start a family or get out of a financial squeeze. That’s how I used to be. Now I want more from work, and I’m not getting it. I have no friendships or social life with the girls at work. They are not interested in an “older woman” and I have no leisure time anyhow. It’s hard to work full-time. I’m at the job from 8:00 to 4:30, come home, prepare a meal, do the dishes, do the laundry, iron, fold the laundry, do the housework. I go to bed every night at 1:00 exhausted and get up at 6:30 and start all over again. It’s endless.
I get no help from my husband or sons. My husband and I don’t exchange two words now. He works nights plus a part-time job weekends. When he is home he’s asleep in front of the TV. We never had much sex and now don’t have any. After 18 years of neglect I don’t care anymore. As a parent I feel that I’ve done everything for my children. I’ve been a good mother to them. But I must have failed someplace. They have no respect for me; they call me foolish; they are undisciplined and constantly fighting. I can’t wait for them to get 18 and leave. I work like a dog for them, and they don’t appreciate me or give me anything in return.
At work I’m seen as happy-go-lucky but my life is in shambles. I can’t keep the anger in anymore; I feel like I’ll explode. I’ve given my life to take care of others, I’ve followed all the rules, and this is my reward? I’ve gotten nothing back—and never will. What will happen when I get older? Will I be able to take care of myself in my old age? I had a hysterectomy at 42and a thyroid operation last year. I’m afraid of getting crippled and helpless, with no one to take care of me. There is no pleasure in my life. I often tell myself, “If I only had two hours a week of going out, having some laughs!” I’m in a semidepressed state all the time. I’ll stay in the marriage because I have no place else to go. But I lost my life somewhere. Where did my life go?
Angela’s experience of psychological divorce in the Mid-life Transition shows how marriage is part of the life structure, coloring and being colored by the other components and by the overall structure. Being at an impasse in one component is not so bad when another component counterbalances it and provides some of the things it lacks. When the life structure does not contain even one satisfactory component, however, a woman faces a middle adulthood of quiet resignation, depression, bitterness.
Three women had remained in painful marriages during their thirties, unable either to make things better or to call it quits. After the divorce, Carol O’Brien became a single working mother, Lynn McPhail quickly remarried and began to form a second marriage/family, and Nan Krummel went back to school in order to start a career.
CAROL O’BRIENCarol O’Brien had an unskilled job for three years after high school, married at 21, and had the last of her four children at 29. She started working again at 33, to supplement her husband’s poor income and to find some relief from a failed, destructive marriage. In her late thirties she got financially more independent, and the marriage got even worse. She initiated a separation at 39 and divorced at 40:
I don’t know what made me really decide to divorce. There was this incident when our son got in trouble with the law. I needed my husband but he was drunker than a skunk. I didn’t care anymore if I hurt him or even if I hurt the kids. I just couldn’t live like this anymore. My parents had divorced a few years earlier. I saw that my father was able to start a new life and thought that maybe I could, too. But it was pretty scary. There were so many obstacles to overcome. When I started talking about separating, my close Catholic friends encouraged me to divorce, and I learned that the Catholic community was much less judgmental than I had feared.
The divorce was the Culminating Event of Carol’s early adulthood. It marked the end not only of her marriage but of her commitment to life as a homemaker within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. How she would live next was very much in question. She describes her current life at 43:
Since the divorce I have had a full-time job. My oldest daughter is in college. I’m very proud of her. I hope she’ll have a career and not marry for a while. The second is a single mother, having a hard time. But we all make mistakes, and I’m not going to judge her. I see them often and try to help when I can. The two youngest still live with me, but they’ll be out soon and aren’t a big problem. Two years ago I met a divorced man with grown children. We don’t live together because I don’t feel right about that, but he is involved with me and my life, and I would like to marry him soon. We have a very comfortable relationship. I try to imagine my life after remarriage. I like my work well enough but it’s not that important to me. I’d prefer not to work, just be at home and have time for different things. I’m a little embarrassed about it, because this time I’d be home for myself and not for my kids or my husband. And somehow I feel that if the second marriage works out, I’ll be vindicated for the rotten first marriage. But I don’t expect anything special: when you marry in your forties, what you see is what you get.
LYNN MCPHAILLynn McPhail moved directly from the end of her first marriage at 39 to a second marriage at 40. She had psychologically divorced her first husband in her early thirties but decided to remain legally married to him until a better alternative was available. At 36 she began a serious extramarital relationship with Eric. She initiated a divorce only when Eric agreed to end his unhappy marriage and marry her. The basis for the second marriage was thus created in the Culminating Life Structure. At this time she did not question the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Indeed, she took it for granted that she and Eric would have a child of their own, even though she already had five children and he two. It was only in the Mid-life Transition that Lynn decided not to have another child. In her early forties she tried to establish a second marriage/family very different from the first, while going through the intense changes of the Mid-life Transition—a large order, indeed. The phase in marriage/family development powerfully influenced, and was influenced by, the period in life structure development.
The first three years of marriage [age 40–43] were tough. The biggest problem was combining two families. And let me tell you, we were no Brady Bunch! Eric’s daughter was just plain nasty to me. She’d do the meanest things to me for no reason. And I’d see things like Eric yelling more at my kids than his own, being stricter with my kids than his. It all put a horrible strain on the marriage. It was almost divorce time after that first year. After two years I decided that if the next year was that bad I’d get a divorce. It was out of one bad marriage and into another, trying to make two families one. We fought a lot, and he’d never tell me what he was feeling. I was going to the doctor’s constantly. I thought I had heart trouble, a brain tumor, I thought I was starting the Change. But it was due to all the stress from the marriage. I hibernated a year, just stayed home, depressed. My doctor put me on Valium. It was a real low point in my life.
Eric’s kids, who were 13 and 8, visited every weekend. The daughter treated me horribly, drove me right up the wall. I was as nice to her as I could be but nothing helped. This went on for two years. Finally I sat at the table and talked to her: “I am your father’s wife. He picked me. I’m in love with him, and he’s in love with me. When you grow up you’ll have a life of your own, and you won’t really care what your father is doing. I do not want to put your father in this position but if this bullshit goes on much longer he’ll have to make a big decision: it’s going to be you or me. I don’t know what you think I did to you but let me know, and I’ll try to correct it. But I’m not going to take this anymore.” She wanted to come live with us, and Eric asked if she could. I said, “To be honest with you, you’re not here that much, you’re at work. I don’t think I could start off with this girl who’s too set in her mother’s ways.”
I brought myself out of it after three years. I just told myself this is a ridiculous way to live. I needed to speak up and have my opinions paid attention to. I said, “What the hell do you people, kids included, think I am, a robot? You get up in the morning, you just wind me up, you poke a button and tell me to be happy. Ha, ha, ha, I’m happy. Well, I’m not a robot. I’m human. I have flesh. I have muscles. I have bones. I have veins. I have a heart. I have everything you have, and I can get hurt, too.” After I spoke my mind things got somewhat better. I agreed to take custody of Eric’s son, and that has turned out okay.
There have also been a lot of changes with my mother. Four years ago she came to live with us, and for the first time in my life I realized I had a mother. I left home when I married at 19, and in those first 19 years at home we had not been close. It was like finding my mother; it was wonderful. Since then she has stayed with us for a year every other year. A few years ago I also began taking care of Eric’s mother. She’s in her eighties and has to be watched every minute. Eric works two jobs, so I watch her two full days a week. It’s something that just has to be done, and there’s no one else to do it.
The trouble between my mother and me in the past was my sister. I don’t talk to my sister anymore; I can’t stand her. There was always conflict between us. She uses my mother and tries to get her pension money. My sister used to write letters telling me all her problems. I finally got fed up and wrote her, “If you can’t write a letter that just says everybody’s fine, don’t bother writing.” Over all those years of terrible problems with my first husband trying to kill me and being crazy I never told nobody my problems. If I wrote I’d just say everything is fine. Nobody wants to hear other people’s problems.
My kids are turning out well. Basically, I’ve got good kids. They’re all hard-working and responsible, not like their father. Thank God, no drug problems. My son is 19 and very independent. He works 80 hours a week and contributes to the family finances. He has enlisted in the service and will be leaving soon. The girls ask me why I let him do things I don’t let them do. I say because boys are different from girls. I don’t want a Mama’s boy, like my first husband was. I tell the girls not to have sex before they marry. Then out of the other side of my mouth I tell the boys to get it if they can but just protect themselves.
My oldest daughter, Molly, got married two years ago at 24. She asked if they could live with us for a while till they got on their feet financially. I said, “No, it’s time for you to get your own life going.” I knew she had sex before she got married. But I had sex with my second husband before we got married, too, so how could I say don’t do what I did. People ask me, “Do you miss your daughter Molly now that she’s married?” I say, “No, she’s got her own life now.” If she calls me, we’ll talk. If she comes to visit, fine. If she don’t, hey, she’s got her own life now. My second daughter is 21 and has been going with her fella for a year. I told her, “If you decide to do it, this is your business. Just don’t do it in my house or in my driveway, and by all means don’t tell me. I don’t want to know unless, God forbid, you get pregnant. Then I want to know it.” My stepdaughter still wants to live with us. No way—she’s 18 and should be on her own.
When the kids are 18 they are over the mountain. What they do then with their lives I am not responsible for. The top batch of kids are over that mountain now, and I’ve got three more to go. I’m trying to make the younger kids leave, too, and they want no part of it (laughs). I don’t think kids belong with adults. I’ve got them trained good. My kids don’t come two feet near me unless it’s to say good night or to ask a question. They know where they belong, and it’s not with adults.
I hoped our financial situation would be better by now but it’s not. We have $200 a month in bills more than what comes in. It’s tough. I’ve got $19 in my checking account. I’ll have to struggle about money until the day I die, unless I win the lotto. Eric works two jobs just trying to make ends meet. He works his ass off, in plain English. If things don’t get better soon I’ll have to find me a job someplace. I’d like to work in the morning and be home when my kids get home from school. Eric says, “You will not work; you will be here with these kids and have my supper on the table when I get home from work.”
Sex is seldom now. Eric’s never home; sometimes he works six nights straight, 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. He usually falls asleep on the couch before going to work. Things change after marriage. Before we were married we’d be up until 2 a.m. having wild weekends. Now you come home, you sit there and watch reruns at 9 p.m. By 11:00 you’re snoring. It’s either have sex at 9 or 10 or forget it. It’s that old marriage slack. You get that settled down pace, and that’s it. I think it’s a normal sex life for our age—we’re not 20 anymore; we’re getting old.
When we got married we didn’t use birth control. We figured we’d have his, mine, and ours. But I never got pregnant. I just missed a period, and I’ll have a pregnancy test next week. I never believed in abortion before but, to tell you the truth, if I’m pregnant I’ll have it aborted. Eric said, “Five years ago having a child would have been fine but now it would be unfair to the baby, and you wouldn’t be able to do what you want.” I think so, too. I’m 45 and wouldn’t have the kind of patience needed to raise a baby. It’s time for me to be a grandmother.
In the years from now until the good Lord decides to take us, it’s time to enjoy life a little. I’ve been doing things for others all my life. I want to do things for myself now. I don’t want to take care anymore. I cook one meal a day. All the kids have household chores and earn their own spending money with paper routes. Everyone gets their own breakfast and lunch. I ain’t cleaning up nobody’s mess no more.
You know, we live for our kids. Every penny has always gone to them, and that’s the way it should be until they’re raised. But now it’s about time we do something for Lynn and Eric. We’d like to go away for a weekend; to hell with the kids for one time; they can survive without us for one weekend. They love you but when they grow up they go, “Bye, Mom, bye, Dad,” and that’s it—they’re gone. They love you, and they’re concerned about you but not as much as you think they should be. So you don’t give up your life for your children.
NAN KRUMMELAt 40, Nan Krummel was going through a crisis in her marriage and wondering whether to invest herself seriously in an occupation for the first time. During the Mid-life Transition she questioned every aspect of her life, got divorced, and embarked upon a new path. She is one of a growing number of women who return to college (or enter for the first time) in their thirties and beyond. Nan’s chief aims were to move toward an occupation that would in some respects transform her life. She was fortunate in having resources, both within herself and in the external world, that could be used and developed further. Here is her story at age 44:
During my twenties and thirties I devoted myself to being a great wife and mother. I threw myself into my husband David’s career and did everything I could to support it. David was a workaholic and was never around or involved with me or the children. I was totally responsible for the children and the household.
In my late thirties I began to look at my marriage. I was taking care of him and the children and everyone and everything else, and so someone was supposed to be making me happy. But I was not happy. I was exhausted. The marriage was stagnant. My husband was a workaholic and had always been emotionally distant from the children and me. He was quite alcoholic. There was almost nothing between us. He’d come home, we’d have a silent dinner, and we’d each go our separate ways. He’d go to bed first and be asleep by the time I’d go to bed. If I got to bed early, he’d stay up until he was sure I was asleep. We only had sex a couple of times a year, always at my initiative. He had premature ejaculation, and there was never any holding or feeling that he really wanted to make love with me. He was so withholding; he gave me very little. He seemed totally happy with the arrangement—and why not? He got someone to cook his meals, keep his house clean, and do the laundry. I felt totally trapped. I felt I couldn’t divorce because I had no place to go, no job, no money. I got very depressed. I was in my late thirties, in a loveless, sexless marriage, and felt like an old woman who had been used up and thrown away. The future was clear: soon the children would be grown and moved away and I’d be all alone, isolated in that big mausoleum of a house. I’d be buried alive.
Throughout the years I’d taken courses to finish up my undergraduate degree. When I was 40 I got very focused on the need for me to have that degree so I could get a job and become self-sufficient if I decided to leave the marriage. Returning to college saved my life and gave me hope for the future. I was in a wonderful world of ideas and study, and I made wonderful friendships with other women my age who had gone back to school too. It was the best time of my life, and I never wanted it to end. Going to college helped me to stay in my marriage and earn a credential that would allow me to earn a living for myself and my children if I decided to leave the marriage. It also took my mind off my terrible marriage and gave me a whole new world full of interesting people who found me interesting.
As graduation approached, the marriage became intolerable. I decided, “I can’t live like this anymore; I have no life. What do I get out of this marriage? I’m too young to live like this. What about love in my life? Am I supposed to have a sexless marriage or am I supposed to go out and have affairs? We live together but there is very little between us, and it has become intolerable.”
I finished my degree and got my divorce. The divorce was very sad. We never fought; there wasn’t enough between us to fight over. I did okay in the divorce settlement. I got enough money so that I should be okay as long as I also work. For the first time I’ve had a real interest in money and concern about my retirement and whether or not I’ll be able to take care of myself and live independently when I’m old. I have a frightening image of an old bag lady which haunts me.
The pain of the divorce was almost unbearable. The pain came from the fragmentation of my life, the loss of the matrix in which I had lived for all those years, the sense of aloneness, the awareness of how much growing up I had to do in order to establish a better life. I had a lot of feelings of failure as a wife and person. I got into therapy, and I have made a lot of progress, but there is still so much to be done.
Dating for the first time after all those years was terrifying. The first few dates were really awful. I just sat there and cried, “I’m too old to be doing this; this is for high school kids.” I hope someday to have a good relationship with a man and perhaps remarry, although I haven’t met anyone special yet.
I am about to start graduate school. Going to graduate school at this age is scary. I started late, so I’ll probably never have any great advancement. I have a lot of self-doubts and feelings of incompetence, but I am ready to take it one step at a time. I am much clearer about what I want now. I want a career that will grow for a long time to come. I need to keep growing, personally and professionally, and to make a significant contribution. It will probably take me another ten years to find my way and get more established, and I may not accomplish all I hope, but that’s the road I want to travel. I feel lucky to be where I am now.
As family became less central in their lives, the homemakers turned mainly to occupation for new interests, activities, and sources of satisfaction. I found three main patterns of change in the Mid-life Transition. The frequency of these patterns in this small sample is not necessarily representative of the general population. No doubt other patterns exist as well. But these are, I believe, relatively widespread and significant ways in which women attempt to modify their lives in middle adulthood. Let’s consider them in turn.
Three women had some education beyond high school. During their twenties they worked for a few years and formed a minimal occupational identity. During their thirties Nora Cole and Jenny Abatello worked regularly and made a growing investment in occupation; Nan Krummel was a full-time but discontented homemaker until she decided at 40 to return to college and earn a degree. At 40 all were mothers in an intact first marriage.
In the Mid-life Transition they recognized that homemaking would have a different meaning and play a much smaller part in their future lives than it had until then. They continued to care for their children, but motherhood was becoming less central. They had a problematic or limited marital relationship. Finally, they came to see occupation in a new light. Work was becoming the primary focus of their lives. They wanted to give more of themselves to the work, to receive more from it, and to participate in new ways within the work world.
During this period they were in the difficult shift from junior to senior member of the occupational world. They wanted to gain a more senior position, to become a legitimate, valued member of the senior generation, and to work in more independent, responsible ways appropriate to their new age and place in society. Making this shift is hard for men. It is much harder for career women (as can be seen later in this book). For homemakers it is almost impossible. The positions available to them at 40 are generally at entry or junior levels. To move higher these women had to overcome great obstacles in the work organization and in their own lives. At the same time they were beginning a process of mid-life individuation. They were forming a different and stronger sense of self. They were less ready to accept deprivations and constraints that had previously been tolerable or simply taken for granted. They were becoming more aware of, and attempting to shed, old illusions about themselves and about their relationships with significant persons, groups, and institutions. They were exploring possibilities for more satisfying relationships in the work world, with limited or poor results.
JENNY ABATELLOJenny Abatello spent her twenties as a homemaker and then made teaching and homemaking co-central components of her Culminating Life Structure. She had a special bond with her husband, Steve, who actively supported the teaching career that in some ways separated her from him and his working-class world. Her Mid-life Transition was highlighted by changes in marriage, family, and occupation. Here is her account at 43:
When I was 39 my husband’s business started to fail. It was a terrible time for the whole family. I really worried about him. It’s pretty hard to make a man feel like the head of the household when he feels like the earth is falling out from under him. The next year he worked for a while in another state. We found out we missed him and really needed him. He has understood so much through the years and has been such a good father. I appreciate all he’s given me. He is in a new business now; I don’t know what he does exactly but he’s doing very well. We are very different, yet we appreciate each other.
My two kids are now in college, and I enjoy them more than ever. My son Guy is an average student. He thought he’d flunk out of college, but he has a C average and is feeling good about himself. He may transfer to another college, where he can get training to work with handicapped people. I’d like to see that; he has a lot to offer. Maggie just started college. She’s an honor-roll student, class officer, cheerleader. We are very close. She’s independent and knows what she wants. I raised her that way—don’t limit your options. I get so angry with girls in my classes who have abilities but don’t want to go to college. They say they’d rather get married. I tell them, “How can you say that? You have so many opportunities, so many options!” When I was young I was going against a lot. I hope things are changing, but I don’t know.
My mother was a good, supportive mother and made sure I went to college, the first in the family to do so. She divorced my father and remarried. I told her recently, “I don’t know if I could ever do what you did—go away and make a new life that makes you feel better.” Recently an uncle died, and I was anguished over whether to attend the funeral. My mother insisted that I go. She was really upset when I said no. But there has been so much petty conflict in the extended family since my parents divorced and my father died. I hate what they did to each other, and I felt it would be just too hypocritical of me to attend the funeral. I had to do what was right for me. It has taken me all these years to finally say no to my mother. After I told my mother I wouldn’t go, I sat and cried and cried. My daughter sat with me and said, “Ma, I know how you feel.” Guy was upstairs and Steve was in bed. Maggie was wonderful: she knew it was a crisis for me, and she was with me.
My career has been an essential part of my life, and I have worked hard to become a competent, humane teacher. During my late thirties I was recognized as a person who could help the kids, especially the ones who weren’t doing well. At 39 I wanted to accomplish more and thought about becoming a guidance counselor. But I realized that that’s a pretty limited role, and I’d have to go back to school for more training, so I decided against it. At 40 I was asked to be department head. That was a tough choice but I finally said no. I’m really not interested in being an administrator; I like teaching. I realized that they just wanted a yes man to represent the status quo, and I couldn’t do that. I love teaching, but I started late, and there is no real career path beyond administration, counseling, and burnout.
At this point work has come to everything I ever wanted it to be with my colleagues and my teaching. I trust my judgment. I feel comfortable as a senior-level teacher. I have earned a reputation as an educator. The students talk to me; I can say I’m sorry if I make a mistake. I have good relationships with other teachers, too. I really enjoy helping the younger ones progress. They call me “mother” and ask me to read papers they write for graduate school. I’ve become more assertive and take a stand for myself with administration and colleagues. Last year I proposed an intensive remedial English program to help prepare the weaker students for college. It was a good idea but it was rejected. Maybe I’ll resubmit it next year.
There is not much joy now in education. The sheer number of students can really wear you down. We send ill-prepared kids off to college. It’s a societal problem; nobody reads or writes. Teaching eats you up; it’s all-consuming. I often come home exhausted and go to sleep at 9 o’clock. My work now is not very exciting, but I don’t know what I’d be doing if I weren’t in education. I’d like to continue teaching for another ten or fifteen years, but I wonder if I’m going to be like my colleague who was smart enough to take early retirement—or if I’ll just burn out.
Two Culminating Events at 40 marked the onset of Jenny’s Mid-life Transition. One was in the marriage: her husband’s business failure and his brief departure from home. She recommitted herself to the marriage, but on different terms. She no longer regarded him as the primary provisioner and herself as the primary homemaker. The second Culminating Event was the offered promotion to department head and her refusal of it. The offer told her that she had reached the pinnacle of her youthful occupational strivings. Becoming a department head would bring her to a higher level in the system and a qualitatively new place in her career. It might also give her a chance to make the system more effective and humane. Yet she feared that she would be co-opted into becoming an administrative “yes man” and doing work she hated. This dilemma is not uncommon for innovative educators.
Jenny’s decision to refuse the job offer had major consequences for her own life. She was committing herself to “stay put” in a teaching situation that was already pinching and might become intolerable. It was not clear how many more years she could go on as a teacher and whether she, like so many others, might not drop out or be pushed out in her fifties. At 43 she feels that “work has come to everything I ever wanted it to be,” yet there is “not much joy now in education.” She is faced with difficult questions: Where can I go from here in my career? How can work be a source of greater fulfillment? If at some point occupation can no longer be a central component of my life, what else is there? These questions are the stuff of which the Mid-life Transition is made.
Like the women above, the three women whose lives followed this pattern sought more from occupation than they had earlier. Since they had a more limited occupational history and a more limited investment of self in occupation it was virtually impossible for them to attain a more senior position. Carol O’Brien and Angela Capelli were high school graduates of working-class origin; Emily Swift had graduated from an elite college and married a lawyer. All three women got psychologically divorced during the Age 30 Transition. In their thirties they worked on and off at unskilled, entry-level jobs, trying to make some kind of life outside the home. By 40 they understood that the marriage would never improve. Carol O’Brien got legally divorced at 40 and became a single working mother. Angela Capelli and Emily Swift remained in the marriage but got more involved in the job, hoping that the work world might compensate for the bleakness of their domestic life.
In the Mid-life Transition they realized that their jobs could not provide more than a bare minimum of satisfaction. They resigned themselves to work for the indefinite future in low-level jobs with no possibility of significant improvement in income, responsibility, or personal reward. It is not clear how much longer they could, or would, remain in jobs of this kind. Very little is known about the work lives of women in such jobs after age 50. It is my impression that many women drop out, or get pushed out, well before normal retirement age. Those who remain are seen as “older women” in junior positions usually occupied by “younger women” in their twenties or early thirties. The disparity between high age and low rank becomes increasingly oppressive. One solution commonly taken by women (and men) is to enter “psychological retirement” (an analogue of psychological divorce), continuing to hold the job but receiving and giving very little. It is especially difficult for women who are unable to validate their seniority in either family or occupation, as we have seen in the case of Angela Capelli. Emily Swift exemplifies this theme in another context.
EMILY SWIFTEmily Swift approached her Mid-life Transition in a hollow marriage, existing with her husband in a state of almost total separation. She had never formed a specific occupational identity or developed skills:
We don’t have a happy marriage or a normal home life. My husband is a very violent person. I can’t believe I’m saying this. We’ve had many fights over the years. He says hurtful things to me, often makes physical threats, and has hit me occasionally. Nobody else in the world has seen this side of this man. Everyone loves him and thinks he’s wonderful. He is a wonderful man—except for the temper and the moodiness.
When I was 40 he said that he wanted a divorce, but then he said that he was willing to accept things as they were because he wanted to keep me. In some funny way I do love him, and I believe he loves me. I mean, I can’t stand him half the time; he’s a horrible person to live with. But can you imagine living with me? I don’t know whether anyone else could.
We lead very separate lives in the same house. We share all expenses even though he makes a lot more money than I do. I’m totally responsible for keeping the house clean. We have no interests in common and do very little together beyond an occasional dinner. Most of the time we’re in opposite parts of the house. We do not have sex. He has affairs and sometimes tells me about them. I really don’t care what he does; if he’s with other people then he’s not yelling at me.
We both know we shouldn’t be married. I put up with a lot because it would be very difficult for me to be on my own. I just control the anger and keep away from him. It would be a scary thing to separate. Neither of us could live with anyone else. Things are as bad as at 40, but there is no talk of divorcing now. We don’t live together very well but it’s the best each of us can manage.
I drink a lot every day. I’ve been close to being an alcoholic, if not an alcoholic, for a long time. I drink mostly in the evening but also in the afternoon if I’m alone. I think I’m killing myself. I’ve often asked myself why I do it. I have thought of seeing a psychiatrist but don’t do it. I just can’t imagine that what I have to say about myself could be interesting to anyone. I feel that way about these interviews. My husband has been having a hard time, too. He says he’s depressed and lonely, and he takes Valium.
In my thirties I volunteered about twenty hours a week at the newspaper. At 40 I took a paid clerical job there so I could earn money in case my husband and I separated. I didn’t like having a paid job. Lots of women are in low-paying clerical jobs but work in more or less professional capacities. Every male was “Mr. Somebody” and given respect, but the “girls” were not. I was in a more respected position as a volunteer than as a clerical worker.
When I was 43 a position was created for me at the newspaper, and I still have it. I get a half-time salary and volunteer the rest. I never get around to doing the work I’m officially paid for because I spend so much time functioning informally editing. All I have in my life now is my work. That’s it—there’s nothing else. I’m very pleased with my current work. I feel that after ten years I have somehow arrived at the right end. I have a certain body of knowledge and am respected for that knowledge. The work I do is professional. It’s a great feeling, and high time at the age of 45 to have finally arrived at the right end with my work. But I also feel like a fraud in a sense, as I did in college. I’m in a pretend, pseudo-professional status. I enjoy the work but work on my own with no colleagues and no credentials, no title and little pay. I’m in a powerless position, and it is not clear whether I can continue in it indefinitely.
At 45, then, Emily is starting to build the most fragile of life structures. Her life is, one might say, impossible yet tolerable. She continues the marriage in a state of psychological divorce but on different terms than in her thirties. She understands (and so, apparently, does her husband) that they are held together by an invisible thread that may last indefinitely. To end the marriage would be a liberation if she had the external and inner resources to make a new beginning, and a catastrophe if the resources were lacking. Occupation is now the central component of her life structure. She is at the “right end” of a decade’s work. She is also at the start of something new, but the prospects for becoming a senior member are slim. She can have more challenging, meaningful work in middle adulthood only by overcoming severe external barriers and by developing a more individuated self.
This pattern is exemplified by Kay Ryan and Lynn McPhail. During their thirties they lived as full-time homemakers and maintained the ideal of the provisioner-homemaker split. Their occasional experience in unskilled, routine, low-paying jobs strengthened their aversion to the occupational world and their commitment to the Traditional Marriage Enterprise.
In the Mid-life Transition their children were in the teens or early twenties and had partially or totally left the parental home. The women recognized that the existing marriage enterprise was coming to an end. They considered getting an outside job and were relieved when their husbands insisted that they stay at home. Having a job was not part of the life they had envisioned for middle adulthood. At the same time, they became increasingly resentful of the domestic labor still required. Chores they had formerly done without question now seemed excessive. Motherhood required less of their time and involvement, but they found themselves increasingly intolerant of the problems of their adolescent and young adult offspring. They were disappointed that, despite the partial emptying of the nest, the marital relationship did not improve.
As they approached the end of the Mid-life Transition, both women continued to hope for a more carefree existence yet found it elusive. Kay Ryan could imagine it as coming about in her fifties when her husband’s early death might leave her a solitary widow with ample resources and only herself to take care of. At the same time, she feared that she would continue to be burdened by the unceasing demands of husband, adult sons, mother, and mother-in-law. Her miscellaneous leisure interests allowed her to pass the time, but she had no sense of a self that might be more intensely engaged in living. Lynn McPhail, too, wanted a more carefree life within the context of her working-class world. She longed for the time when she and her second husband could enjoy each other more, once the last of her five children finished high school and left home. She didn’t know what kind of life they would have in the future, except that it would be very different from the past.
The homemakers in this sample were pioneers in the transformation of the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. From them we learn about the high incidence and durability of this enterprise, as well as the many powerful forces that are transforming it. These women had entered adulthood expecting to live as unemployed homemakers within Traditional Marriage Enterprises. In their early forties, they entered the Mid-life Transition and the shift from early to middle adulthood. Only one homemaker was in her first marriage and unemployed. Fifty percent of the homemakers were divorced or in a second marriage. Motherhood was becoming a less central component of the life structure, the terms of the marriage enterprise were changing, and the marital relationship had to be modified. Eighty percent of the homemakers were in the workforce. It was not yet clear what new marriage enterprises these women would create in the new era of middle adulthood as they struggled to create better lives for themselves.