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Men have midlife crises. Women have menopause. The men talk openly about their middle-aged rambunctions, and the women of the pain that these caused. Martha Halpin Pleasure's husband of 26 years moved out, she said, when "it seemed he had a midlife meltdown," and she was not alone among classmates who recounted how hard it was to cope when men they thought they knew intimately came apart in drastic ways. We women, though, say not a word about menopause. Maybe we deem it unseemly, but there is little shame attached to this fact of life anymore. Or maybe estrogen replacement is transforming menopause into little more than a passing nuisance.
We don't talk much about other forms of aging either. Antonia Bryan was singular in her candor: "Fifty sucks. I don't like gaining weight or the effects of gravity. I can't stand a soft jawline. White hairs offend me." Maybe in five years we'll report that we dyed our hair or underwent plastic surgery. But Bryan makes a subtler point about how aging discriminates against women. Now that she's 50, she "finds it disconcerting to be virtually invisible to most men. Unless they knew me when," she says, they don't see her as sexy.
We worry more about our souls now. The search for spiritual solace has intruded into our Cartesian ways. For Kim Westsmith Simmons, it has led to becoming born again as a Christian. For Carol Emma Carlson, it has been a dogged determination to take orders as an Episcopal priest in the face of the church's struggle over the ordination of women. For Jeanne Harris Armstrong, it is the belated "discovery of spirituality and finding myself active in the local church."
Despite our fat stock portfolios, a lot of us embrace without embarrassment our corny '60s ideals. Bronwen Taylor Tudor: "I still believe in those quaintly passe ideals of peace, justice and progressive taxation." Nancy Uhlar Murray works as director of education for the American Civil Liberties Union, taking kids south to learn about the civil rights movement. Ann Straffin Hall is co-pastor of a Baptist church that offers sanctuary to Central American refugees and conscientious objectors. Whatever our politics, we want to "give back" something to society. For women and men alike, the age of volunteerism has begun. Some of it, as Annie Gottlieb says, is the "citizenship activity that seems to kick in instinctually at this age." Now that Cary Stratton Boyd has dispatched her child to college, she wants to find "ways in which we can give back some of what we have been given, if not in money, then in time and caring." Augusta Dawes Stewart says she wants "to devote the next decades to learning to reach out more and share the blessings." At 50, we're still brimming with restlessness.