Wandering the Ecotone

Facing my 40th birthday dread, and letting go.

I once read a memoir written by a 39-year-old woman trying to come to terms with her looming 40^th birthday. I was 34 or 35, and the premise felt like a distant cliché. Turning 40 only means something if we make it mean something, right? When my time came, I would keep my wits.

Now I am 39-and-a-half. I think turning 40 means something, whether I want it to or not.

I’m thinking about getting older. About entering new phases and letting go of old ones. About setting new goals and changing the way I do things. I’m noticing my wrinkly knees.

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When my daughter was an infant, I could not imagine the slimmer face and longer limbs she would have at 5. When she was 2, I’d sometimes catch glimpses of her kindergarten face, flashes so quick I had to close my eyes to hold on to the image. As a toddler, she was in this middle place where I could still remember her infant face, but I could also imagine her 5-year-old face. She was not 5, but I could see 5.

I am not old, but I can see old.

I am not my grandmother, but—suddenly—I have her knees.

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40 is a middle place. “Middle age”—neither old nor young. In the middle of all the ages I will ever be. Medium, indeterminate, ambivalent. No Man’s Land?

No Man’s Land: a strip of land between two countries’ borders, especially in a war.

The country of youth, the country of old age. A battle between the two. A person standing in unoccupied territory, with views on either side.

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A bizarre interruption seems to arrive reliably around 40 or 45. It is an emotional aberration, a psychological breach. We’re busy adulting, answering emails and spending our grown-up paychecks on grown-up, seven-dollar coffees—and then… a little rupture, like a transmission from another frequency breaking into the regularly scheduled programming. Words in another language (not the language of busyness, not the language of doing):

Is this the life I want?

or

Am I doing it right?

They are questions in the language of meaning (a foreign language).

Hollywood gives us a name for it: Midlife Crisis.

Hollywood gives us an image, too: a man buys a red sports car, a woman has an affair, someone packs a suitcase and flies somewhere far away. A pathetic middle-aged person fears getting old and does whatever she can to stay relevant. A sad tie-wearing man just wants to feel something. A 40-year-old throws a tantrum because her upper arms are newly flabby or because she feels invisible or because she’s just sick and tired of boiling broccoli for people who don’t want to eat it.

The Midlife Crisis is a punchline. We pity the man or woman trying to make sense of the middle of life. He reeks of desperation. She is a trope.

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I thought it wasn’t real. Like everything distant and unfavorable, I hoped it would not apply to me.

But I am the youngest of my friends, six years younger than my spouse, and I have been watching it happen. A few years ago, men not prone to self-examination began asking uncomfortably deep questions over bottles of wine. Women began thumbing through graduate school course catalogs. My sister ran a half-marathon for her 40^th birthday. I could tell people were being interrupted.

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If a kind stranger knocks on your door one afternoon unannounced, she is one of two things:

a crisis (“go away”)

or

an invitation (“come inside”).

Which she is depends on the state of mind of the person who opens the door.

That’s the way it goes with interruptions. The one that comes at midlife might be a crisis. It might be an invitation. It matters who opens the door.

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Finally, I think, the wave of 40^th-birthday dread has passed. 40 and I are on the mat, sweaty and spent, and I am pinned—but smiling. At peace, grateful for the fight.

Probably I wouldn’t have gotten here if I hadn’t put the phone down. It’s been a few months of reckoning. I am a person who wants to love the past. I want to parent the middle schooler the same way I parented the second grader. I want to run at the same pace I ran last year. I want the clothes in the stores to look good on me, all the ads aimed at my wallet. I want backpacks always to hang in the mudroom. I want to dispense advice, have answers my children don’t, be the mythological mother instead of the disappointing human woman. I want to be young—not invisible, not irrelevant, not yesterday’s news. I don’t want to stop wanting.

The interruption came in the form of wrinkly knees and children who dressed themselves for school. It came when I took dinner to a new mom and didn’t recognize myself in her careful, hesitant movements. It came when a bunch of trees fell in our yard, and when I wandered at the base of giant redwoods on the other side of the country, and I noticed how, for months, everything has felt like a metaphor. I asked my friends if they would remarry if they were widowed. I imagined letting my hair grow gray. I donated half my closet.

It’s so embarrassing to want things, to speak the language of longing or grief. The only acceptable language is the one of accounting. (Let the soul rot—we will never speak of it so long as the numbers are in order.)

I don’t pity the man who buys the red sports car. Who knows the answer to the question Am I doing it right?

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We live our first twenty years outside of time.

For the next twenty years, we race the clock: get the job, get the degree, find the spouse, have the babies, get the promotion, buy the house. We are not thinking. It is a race—we are running.

Then we find ourselves sitting in an uncomfortable chair, filling out a form.

Could midlife be a self-administered performance review? Take a seat, answer some questions. You’re 40, so you’ve made a lot of choices. What do you think about them?

Did you complete your work accurately, efficiently, and on deadline? Have you held yourself accountable for your responsibilities? On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life choices?

At 20 or 30, we can believe all the world’s options are open to us. Whatever image is presented to us, we think: I could do that, be that, have that. We won’t do it or be it or have it, but we could. Choice, no matter how hypothetical, feels good.

At 40, we face a winnowing of choices. Could I still change my career? Go to school? Have a kid? Maybe, maybe not. Everything is not open to me anymore. The world is some younger person’s oyster.

There’s not enough time. I want to go back to school, become a psychologist. Conduct groundbreaking research. I want to go back to that moment after college, move to New York and work in publishing. I want a corner office with a plant someone else waters. I want to be a completely different version of myself: a boss, a pusher, a force. A pantsuit. I want to go even further back, this time to the moment I chose my college. I want to go to the better school, get the more prestigious degree, walk out a woman who believed she could accomplish things.

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I do not want to turn 40. I do not want to be able to see the back half of my life.

I ask Google if there is a surgery for the problem of my wrinkly knees, if they can be lifted like eyebrows. (They can.)

It is not just that my knees are ugly. It’s that, when I look down, my knees remind me I live inside time. A person with smooth knees is a person who can still make any choice she wants, be anyone she wants to be.

Not me. I can’t be a young mother or newlywed. It would be silly to ask me what I want to be when I grow up. I am not a shimmering mass of potential. I am unlikely to stumble upon new intrinsic skills or capacities. The knees give me away.

Don’t I say that I love middle places?

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The area where two disparate ecosystems meet is called an ecotone. The word is a combination of ecology plus -tone, from the Greek tonos, or tension. An ecotone is a place where ecologies are in tension.

Is this the metaphor? The fragile ecosystem of youth abuts the fragile ecosystem of age. Between them, on land that belongs to nothing, I stand.

Where two biologies are forced to integrate, life can be richer than the ecosystem on either side. Ecotones are places for the unexpected (ah, there sprouts a red sports car!). Often, they are places of disturbance.

For a while, I’ve been stumbling around inside my little ecotone. I couldn’t remember what I liked to do with my time. Even if I could have everything I wanted, I wasn’t sure what it would be. I sat on the floor with my kids’ crayon drawings, crying. Summer was ending, and I didn’t want the season to change. I went to California, where the land cannot decide whether it is forest or beach. I returned home. I baked a lot of muffins. I stood in front of the mirror. At some point, I feel like I stopped resenting the new skin I had to wear. Being mad about turning 40 would not stop me from turning 40.

This is where I stood for my midlife crisis invitation.

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No, I do not say that I love middle places. I say that middle places are where meaningful things happen. Uncomfortable, unpredictable places change us.

What I say is this: If I can’t squirm inside the hot, prickly, confusing middle place, I can’t get the wisdom I need.

So, in my mind, I fill out the midlife performance review. Some of the answers I love (extremely satisfied). Some, I hate (deeply regret).

40 is the boundary between two biomes, the two halves of life. In nature, an ecosystem wastes no time trying to be the ecosystem across the border. A desert cannot be a wetland.

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Oh Hollywood, a midlife crisis is only a punchline when the character does not hear the question. When the character insists on changing nothing. When the character refuses to grow up.

Too embarrassed to admit to having questions (like, Is it too late to change?), the sad forty-year-old man embarrasses himself in other ways. The shame of hair plugs preempts the shame of self-evaluation. We will go to great lengths to stop ourselves from thinking. “The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying.”¹

For me, 40 is about letting go. It’s that moment in a sci-fi movie when someone is trapped between dimensions, and if they don’t let go of the hands of the beloved person they are holding on one side, they will be sucked into the next dimension with their arms torn off.

Or back to the gentler metaphor: 40 is the land between places. I remember: If I can make myself at home in the middle place, it’s not so bad. For now at least, I’ve stopped throwing a tantrum. I have a while longer to sit here in my refuge of midlife irrelevance, oddly shielded from what came before and what comes next. I am thinking of this space—this year—as a practice field for the next challenge. I am cleaning out the cabinets, waving a hand out the front door, trying to get good at letting go.

1. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward