There were several discussions last year among my coworkers in regards to mid-life crises. I think they came up so often because we all witnessed mid-life crisis behavior in someone we know. A new jeep of dreams was purchased. A used to be friend blew up his marriage with an affair. Everything I was witnessing were all the cliched old behaviors that I had heard people joke about for years. Yet…I never heard these stories about women and mid-life crises. Every joke and actual witnessed behavior has always been a male perspective. He bought a toupee, a convertible, traded an older wife in for his younger mistress.

I’ve never heard a feminine pronoun do any of those things.

No one knows because women do not have time to blow up their world with crazy shenanigans. We’re too busy trying to remember where we parked our cars because the perimenopause brain fog is a real thing. More hours of the day are wasted by calculating the amount of protein we’re eating or not eating. These are new tasks that have been thrown into our pile of daily tasks that we had before the perimenopause symptoms started wrecking havoc on our bodies. Women are too tired to go buy themselves a convertible or have an affair with a younger man.

It made me question what my mid-life crisis would look like. This is officially the last year of my forties. If I’m going to go out and blow up my world, this would be the year to do it. It also means I must be expecting to live to be almost one hundred. Honestly, I feel like I missed the mid-life crisis boat. That’s something I should have done years ago. Which is fitting. I have always been a bit delayed in these kinds of things. Years after our friends had bought homes and settled down, Chris and I were finally doing those same things. I clearly remember buying my first lawnmower and feeling like this pushed me into grown-up status. I was thirty five years old. I am a Laggie.

Then I remember the year Chris died.

It is quite possible that year was my mid-life crisis year. I drank more. I did more drugs. I had questionable interactions with strange men. I lived a little bit more dangerously than usual, enough so that I recognized that I was being dangerous. Usually it’s only when I hear people gasping around me that I am in the middle of a dangerous action. There were moments in that year when I knew well before the gasps started. My motto for that time was YES and I said yes to all of the things, many things I should have said no to. It didn’t feel like I was blowing up my world because that had already happened and I wasn’t the cause. Which leaves me questioning if a mid-life crisis brought on by grief really a mid-life crisis?

All of those mid-life crisis behaviors are attempts in grasping onto joy, a way to fill the void of unrecognized goodness that all ready exists in a life. The flashy new car and exciting new lover are straws in the grasp. Those of us who have learned how to see the joy in our daily lives do not require the grasps or crisis and I believe those of us with daily gratitude practices have an easier time of seeing that joy.