At 51, I lost my marriage, my job and my mother – how I found happiness after
Every woman needs to have a midlife crisis . Frankly, it would be unfashionable nowadays not to have one, and this is the beginning of my campaign to reclaim the territory from middle-aged men in tight Rapha bike shorts.
Women have far more reason than men to have a massive midlife meltdown : our brains completely rewire, our fertility disappears, our muffin tops erupt, our hormones leave the building around menopause, and one in 10 of us leave our jobs. But when all that happens, if we’re prepared, we can revive and thrive – and sometimes become entirely new characters with new careers.
My own midlife crisis was not just a car crash but a full Thelma and Louise off the cliff. Aged 51, I left my home and marriage of 22 years, got divorced, lost my job, and lost my mother to Alzheimer’s. Plus the family dog died – of a tick bite. Those were profound losses, and I deeply regret the emotional damage I caused to others, but there was also healing – and a massive reassessment of my life.
What I hadn’t factored into my own behaviour was the profound effect hormones have on our resilience and mental health in multi-tasking midlife. I was basically on a supertanker with three teenage children, a sick mother, a failing memory, heart palpitations, and a full-time job as a film critic at The Times when I realised I just couldn’t cope any more and jumped off.
I realise now a massive part of the crisis was perimenopause , which I call menopause’s dastardly little sister, since it’s almost impossible to spot what your hormones are up to until it’s too late.
Luckily, I had friends who sent me to get hormone replacement therapy (HRT) when the NHS failed to suggest it, and my memory came back and my heart palpitations disappeared almost instantly. It felt like a miracle I had to share, and I went on to create two documentaries for Channel 4 and a book on the menopause, because I didn’t want other women just to think it was just about hot flushes – and I wanted to give them the good news about the new, safer, body-identical HRT now available on the NHS.
One of the key revelations for me was that women’s brains rewire up to three times in life at the three Ps – puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause – and that plasticity is one of our superpowers.
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But the change in our forties is challenging: in perimenopause as the hormones estrogen and progesterone pack up, our grey matter or ‘computer processor’ in the brain goes down – and then makes a comeback. White matter, our neural networking, falls too. I only realised this after reading the work of the brilliant scientist Dr Lisa Mosconi in The Menopause Brain . “Menopause is a renovation project on the brain,” she said. We become new, pruned versions of ourselves, whether we take hormones or not, and we need to seize that opportunity.
I was so inspired by my experience that I decided to write a book on the subject and realised as I met hundreds of women in their 40s and 50s that midlife is about mind, body and spirit – we need a holistic guide as well as medical help.
The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood defined menopause as “a pause while you reconsider men”, and that is what many women do in midlife – at work and at home, where, as we know, the sound of a man eating crisps loudly in front of the football can trigger incandescent rage in his partner. The so-called “Couplepause” affects lesbian couples too. There’s a peak in divorce in the mid-40s, perimenopause central – the majority initiated by women.
If we’ve been with a partner since our 20s, neither of us are the same people, so we must grow together and work at the next phase of life, or grow out of each other and move on. That’s not easy either: aside from the emotional aspects of divorce, the financial penalties are hardest for women, often because we’ve given up part of our careers to raise children.
Campaigning divorce lawyer Farhana Shahzady told me about “the Moneypause”, where women tend to do worse in midlife ‘clean break’ 50/50 settlements “because they haven’t built up the job security or the pension that their husbands have thanks to caring responsibilities”. She said: “Women’s pension pots are around £70,000, while men’s are £205,000 on average. It’s just not fair.”
But this is also the time to take advantage of changes and have a creative renaissance: a friend just told me that she was going to Birkbeck University to study French in her 60s. During research for my book, I met a psychotherapist who joined Extinction Rebellion after menopause, and a teacher who walked out of her job during a fire alarm – and became a fashion designer and queen of the @menopausewhilstblack podcast.
Health is also a huge part of the midlife renovation project, and understanding how hormones factor into that is key: our stomach microbiome changes, we tolerate food and alcohol differently, and our bodies also tend to create more visceral fat. This is the time to build serious muscle to keep our bones strong.
Rebuilding your psyche is also part of the process. I only unravelled my own story and needs afterwards, with the help of a brilliant feminist psychotherapist, and the passage of time. Alone in my rented flat, with four £10 IKEA chairs, I began to hold dinner parties, and guests had to bring their own chairs, which everyone thought was very funny. But I felt as bare as the flat, like a tree that had been brutally pruned, all the deadwood cut out.
Slowly, small green shoots began to grow, and about three years later I emerged on the other side with a new direction, and now bounce joyously out of bed in the mornings into a quite different life in a different house with a new husband and career – and a scruffy terrier-cum-hairbrush I found one night on Gumtree.
Looking back at my midlife crisis , my main advice now is: be honest always. Don’t keep calm and carry on – ask for help. No one can guess your thoughts if you don’t tell them.
Midlife is a massive renovation project, but it’s also the moment, as our caring responsibilities lessen, when women have more time for self-compassion and reinvention. What are your grand designs?
How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis by Kate Muir is published by Gallery Books. @menoscandal
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