Two months earlier Sassy and I could barely get Marilyn to leave her house. Now Marilyn wanted to go out. Every day and every night. She was at every party, invited or not. There was a flock of women from Europe staying in the Village with Queenie and soon they were all publicly removing their tops with SanTropez abandon.
The fights started when men began showing up. Kitty and Margo had words over a friend of Kitty’s who was flirting with both of them. Marilyn and Queenie had words over something Marilyn said to Queenie’s out-of-state boyfriend. Tilda Tia was having words with anyone who was willing to have words back.
And then Marilyn and I nearly came to blows.
There’d been a strange tension between me, Sassy, and Marilyn since the beginning of the summer that increased as the days got longer. Maybe because we’d never hung out in a pack of women before and Marilyn was playing to the crowd, but she began doing and saying things that felt curiously out of character. Having always insisted she was a behind-the-scenes kind of person, Marilyn became the center of attention, telling indiscrete stories about people and places that Sassy and I had never heard before. Of course, the women who’d just met Marilyn thought she’d always been like this.
It was impossible to explain that she hadn’t and so, for a while, this before and after Marilyn caused a lot of confusion. One afternoon it came to a head, when Marilyn walked in to find me, Kitty, and Tilda Tia at the kitchen table. I don’t remember the particulars of what set us off, but suddenly we were furious at each other.
I said, “I don’t know who you are anymore.”
She said, “This is who I am. This is the new me.”
Then she grabbed her stuff and made to storm off.
“Don’t you run away again the way you always do.” I knew I sounded like an idiot because the truth was, Marilyn hadn’t ever “run away” before because Marilyn and I had never had a confrontation.
And then the words came out like a slap.
“Fuck you!” Marilyn said.
I gasped. In twenty years of friendship, we’d never used the “F” word on each other. I couldn’t believe it. What the hell was happening?
“How dare you!” I shouted, as we squared off in the dining room.
My heart was pumping in my stomach. This anger was deep and disturbing and atavistic, like I was confronting something evil that wasn’t Marilyn. It seemed impossible that we could be this angry at each other. We raised our hands as if to strike.
We froze.
Something washed over us and we came to our senses.
I turned away and she turned away, or maybe it was the other way around. We separated. She out the front door and into her car and me back to Kitty’s kitchen.
We each immediately called Sassy.
Sassy gave us a stern talking-to that we were grown women and we couldn’t behave this way. This, she said, wasn’t us.
She was right. It was MAM.
MAM vs. Midlife Crisis
On the surface, MAM resembles what people used to call a midlife crisis.
Years ago, this crisis happened mostly to men and mostly when they were around forty. It was considered a rite of passage, a railing against the restraints of society. Tho
se fetters being the familial obligations and “the man” or the corporation where, once upon a time, most men worked. Back in the heyday of the male midlife crisis, a man would do stuff like buy a motorcycle or start reading Playboy or have an affair. Sometimes the midlife crisis led to sectionorce but not necessarily. It was considered a phase. Something that men went through.
Women, meanwhile, weren’t allowed to have a midlife crisis. What they had instead were nervous breakdowns, which today we would call undiagnosed depression. And so, in the midlife crisis of old, while men ran around, women went to bed and pulled the covers over their heads.
Today, having a midlife crisis at fortysomething just sounds dumb. First of all, lots of people don’t even find a partner and/or start having children until they’re forty. At forty, people are finally beginning to grow up and behave sort of like adults. They buy places outside of big cities and have typical reproductive lifestyles that revolve around their children and the children-adjacent adults that children inevitably attract and that reproducers are invariably forced to call “friends.”
Because today’s reproductive lifestyle is so busy and exhausting and fraught, because it eats up so much psychic and emotional energy, it actually acts as a deterrent to a midlife crisis. There is simply no time to query the meaning of life or to ask the great question: Why am I here?
But just because the reproductive lifestyle pushes off a midlife crisis, it doesn’t mean it goes away. It only means it happens later in life. Usually at a time when a midlife crisis couldn’t be more inconvenient because a whole bunch of other major life-changing events—like sectionorce, death, moving, menopause, children leaving the nest, and the loss of a job—are happening as well.
It didn’t used to be this way. At one time, fiftysomething meant the beginning of retirement—working less, slowing down, spending more time on hobbies and with your friends, who, like you, were sliding into a more leisurely lifestyle. In short, retirement-age folk weren’t expected to do much of anything except get older and a bit fatter and to need to go to the doctor and the bathroom more. They weren’t expected to exercise, start new business ventures, move to a different state, have casual sex with strangers, get arrested, and start all over again, except with one-tenth of the resources and in many cases going back to the same social and economic situation that they spent all of their thirties and forties trying to crawl out of.
But this is exactly what the lives of a lot of fifty- and sixtysomething women now look like today.