Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was our tender, funny guide through the mortifying terrain of adolescence.

At midlife? We’re on our own.

From American Beauty to Mad Men, the male midlife crisis is a cultural obsession — complete with sports cars, affairs, and existential breakdowns.

Take my dad. In his early 60s, he bought a black Mustang GT convertible, beautiful but impractical, a coupe with negligible legroom. We still had a family dog, and my parents regularly made long drives. My mother recalls a juddering so relentless that every few kilometres she double-checked her fillings hadn’t fallen out.

While he conformed to the trope of the male midlife crisis, the reality is a little starker.

Midlife can be a period of reflection, a grab bag of unmet goals and shifting roles. My dad had recently retired, but his job had been central to his identity. His kids were grown. He began offering (not so helpful) observations on my mother’s vacuuming. In retrospect, the car was a stand-in for feelings of grief and loss he couldn’t articulate.

Given that men have been conditioned to externalize distress — acting out in anger, masking depression through workaholism — it makes sense that someone identifying as male might address midlife malaise with a big-ticket item.

A fast car equals a new lease on life. Problem (not quite) solved.

Are you a woman over 45? Pass me the eraser

It’s trickier to find evidence of the female equivalent.

As Ada Calhoun writes in her seminal book, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis,

From the outside, no one may notice anything amiss. Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone, use CBD edibles to decompress, or cry every afternoon in the pick-up lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centred on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.

Society has a terrible habit of literally erasing women of a certain age from public discourse.

Here I’m thinking about Lisa LaFlamme, the estimable CTV anchorwoman who embraced natural silver locks during the pandemic and disappeared from screens shortly thereafter.

In the United States, a lawsuit against the media company Meredith Corporation highlighted the age disparity between men and women on TV news. Writes Calhoun, “In five years the company removed seven female anchors with an average age of 46.8 and replaced them with younger women, whose average age was 38.1 … male anchors remain a decade older, on average, than their female co-anchors.”

Cause and effect? You decide.

On top of this, as women, we’ve been socialized to internalize our feelings.

So, if we don’t see ourselves, or our crises, play out publicly, it can lead us to believe we don’t need or deserve psychological help.

“A middle-aged woman’s midlife crisis poses a dramaturgical problem,” opines Calhoun. “Women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular … but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.”

The question isn’t whether we ruminate at this natural inflection point, when as much lies behind as lies ahead.

Of course we do. It’s a season of life when we ask ourselves if it is too late to start a business, get divorced, get married, quit a job, write a novel, travel to far-flung places, or start fresh. But Eat, Pray, Love-ing it only works if there’s someone to watch the kids and walk the dog.

In other words: Is this all there is?

This kind of rumination becomes concerning when we shift from workaday introspection to genuine psychological distress, even if that distress is so quiet we’re the only ones who can hear it.