Suzanne Braun Levine, the original editor of Ms. magazine and now a midlife guru, invokes the phrase ‘second adulthood’ to describe a phase of ‘existential bewilderment’ that afflicts women in midlife and is every bit as traumatic as adolescence. As we enter it, we wobble. We question everything we once took for granted. We experiment, re‑evaluate, take risks, confront our fears, ask ourselves who we are and where we think we’re going. Our metaphysical, practical and emotional concerns collapse together as they are brought to bear on a single question: our suddenly malleable identity. This evaluative project suggests that there’s more to mother-daughter mirroring than either biology or chronology can account for. But Braun Levine is merely a populariser: the key to that more is to be found in the work of the German-born developmental psychologist Erik Erikson.
Erikson, who died in 1994 at the age of 91, coined the term ‘identity crisis’. (...)
Each Eriksonian stage brings with it a form of enrichment, or ‘virtue’. For example, stage six, or young adulthood (roughly, ages 20-40), sees the individual forging solid relationships and lifelong partnerships by negotiating a psychosocial crisis that pits the needs of intimacy against those of isolation; its associated virtue is love. The succeeding midlife crisis (in stage seven, adulthood, ages 40-65) demands that we embrace ‘generativity’ over self-absorption and go on to embody the virtue of ‘care’. If we fail to do so, we run the risk of stagnating and of sliding into unhappy narcissism. (...)
In the self-help model, you are your ‘Youniverse’. By contrast, generativity suggests that midlife’s rewards are the end products of hard work that displaces ‘you’ from the centre of your world. In other words, generativity is not something you can achieve in isolation. It is a process in which some kind of mirror is essential. Braun Levine seems to grasp this, putting family dynamics into the mix when arguing that women empower themselves by channeling the midlife storm. Viewed this way, development is relational, negotiated, a trade-off of one thing over another. But even Braun Levine, at the sophisticated end of the self-help movement, does not want to acknowledge that, before any kind of development (let alone re-birth) can occur, a process of mourning or grieving is essential. This mourning takes varied and complex forms: but among them is self-burial. (...)
These days, I am practically infected with sentiment. But it has taken a new form – a nostalgia in which my own remembered (and now lost) youth has become entangled.
At the opposite end of the reproductive spectrum, I am acutely aware of the threshold at which my daughter stands today. I want to wave at her in sympathy and recognition, and assure her it will turn out well. I want to tell her that on the other side of this difficult transition there will be freedoms and experiences she’s never dreamt of, as well as new heights of confidence and competence. There will be deep friendships and deeper loves, the rollercoaster of university life and first jobs, independent travel, opportunities at every turn. I want to tell her that her dreams will become tangible. That her fears will drift into obscurity. That she will feel invincible.
But then I am overcome by a terrible sadness for my own lost opportunities, and by an ersatz nostalgia for paths not taken – a missing, if you like, of what I never had, and a misplaced anxiety about all the future paths I shall never take, because with middle age comes a shrinking sense of the possible. Since half of me is lost in undifferentiated yearning for what might have been, I’m often unable to reassure my daughter with the right level of conviction. If I am to succeed in this task, I must first let go of my ghostly younger selves – the grown-up version of putting away childish things.
by Marina Benjamin, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Mother and her Daughter by Henri-François Riesener
Erikson, who died in 1994 at the age of 91, coined the term ‘identity crisis’. (...)Each Eriksonian stage brings with it a form of enrichment, or ‘virtue’. For example, stage six, or young adulthood (roughly, ages 20-40), sees the individual forging solid relationships and lifelong partnerships by negotiating a psychosocial crisis that pits the needs of intimacy against those of isolation; its associated virtue is love. The succeeding midlife crisis (in stage seven, adulthood, ages 40-65) demands that we embrace ‘generativity’ over self-absorption and go on to embody the virtue of ‘care’. If we fail to do so, we run the risk of stagnating and of sliding into unhappy narcissism. (...)
In the self-help model, you are your ‘Youniverse’. By contrast, generativity suggests that midlife’s rewards are the end products of hard work that displaces ‘you’ from the centre of your world. In other words, generativity is not something you can achieve in isolation. It is a process in which some kind of mirror is essential. Braun Levine seems to grasp this, putting family dynamics into the mix when arguing that women empower themselves by channeling the midlife storm. Viewed this way, development is relational, negotiated, a trade-off of one thing over another. But even Braun Levine, at the sophisticated end of the self-help movement, does not want to acknowledge that, before any kind of development (let alone re-birth) can occur, a process of mourning or grieving is essential. This mourning takes varied and complex forms: but among them is self-burial. (...)
These days, I am practically infected with sentiment. But it has taken a new form – a nostalgia in which my own remembered (and now lost) youth has become entangled.
At the opposite end of the reproductive spectrum, I am acutely aware of the threshold at which my daughter stands today. I want to wave at her in sympathy and recognition, and assure her it will turn out well. I want to tell her that on the other side of this difficult transition there will be freedoms and experiences she’s never dreamt of, as well as new heights of confidence and competence. There will be deep friendships and deeper loves, the rollercoaster of university life and first jobs, independent travel, opportunities at every turn. I want to tell her that her dreams will become tangible. That her fears will drift into obscurity. That she will feel invincible.
But then I am overcome by a terrible sadness for my own lost opportunities, and by an ersatz nostalgia for paths not taken – a missing, if you like, of what I never had, and a misplaced anxiety about all the future paths I shall never take, because with middle age comes a shrinking sense of the possible. Since half of me is lost in undifferentiated yearning for what might have been, I’m often unable to reassure my daughter with the right level of conviction. If I am to succeed in this task, I must first let go of my ghostly younger selves – the grown-up version of putting away childish things.
by Marina Benjamin, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Mother and her Daughter by Henri-François Riesener
