The Dreams That Didn’t Come True
Two articles — unrelated — came together for the perfect storm of heart squeezing this past weekend. I’m putting them out there because I’m hoping I will feel differently if we talk about them.
The first one is this. Yes. All of it. Every single word of it. We are the “wrong place, wrong time” generation. We are:
The Title IX babies who were the first women in their families to go to college. Or go away to college. Or to live on their own, launch a career, marry in their late 20s (or never) or choose to stay home with their children … They’re smart. They’re grateful for what they have. They’re also exhausted. Some of them are terrified. A few of them are wondering what the point is.
Yes.
Josh passed along the article to me because he thought it would make me feel better to know that everyone is worried all the time, but it actually just made me super sad. Especially the idea of ambiguous losses:
“Ambiguous losses are a particular type of loss that lack a definition and lack closure,” says Kelly Maxwell Haer, PhD, of the Boone Center for the Family at Pepperdine University, in California. “The ambiguous loss of singleness is particularly challenging to navigate. The person could be found in five minutes. Or never. You’re not going to get an email from God that says you’re never going to have a partner. That hope lingers on, and it’s really hard to live in hope that is not met, but there’s no end. Humans don’t do uncertainty well.”
Replace “singleness” with “infertility” and “found in five minutes” with “successful next cycle.” That idea of having hope that doesn’t have an expiration point. It applies to everything big in life: partnership, career, family building. And it’s exhausting. It is exhausting to be a constant state of uncertainty; a constant state of striving or trying. To feeling like once you get one duck in a row, another goes out of line.
So there was that.
The other post was “When I Realized That Some of My Dreams Will Never Come True.” I clicked on it because I was curious: Which of her dreams didn’t come true and was it really too late for it to happen if she wanted to make it her life goal?
I mean, yes, I am well aware that there is an expiration date on certain dreams, or in order to achieve the dream, you need to change the dream a lot.
But there are plenty of things that can still happen up until the day before you die. Get married? Run a half-marathon? Publish a book? Become a doctor?
But what she’s talking about is… well… all of the above. The American dream. Of doing as well as your parents. Again, we’re the Title IX generation. We are supposed to be able to have it all, do it all, be anything and everything. We’re the Free to Be You and Me generation, and we believed Marlo Thomas when she told us that we could be mothers and welders.
7 comments
I don’t know – I don’t think I worry as much as other people. I have other issues, to be sure – the way I bite my family’s heads off when they interrupt me in the middle of trying to do something complex is quite the over-reaction. But I made a decision in my 20s to try and make life as stress-free as possible and I think I’ve done moderately well with that. Some things and people are irritating, but overall, I’m on the downward slide into doing only what I want when I want to do it. There are moments when I would like to chuck it all and take off for Central America, like a friend suggested when I was in college. But that’s not really me.
I am, however, entering the age where I remember what I was like in my 20s and cringe in embarrassment. I’m sure I was mostly insufferable. Sigh – here’s to the people who have continued to put up with me!
The first article reminds me of the Madness book—essentially, our generation was raised to believe we could do it all but reality is different. I didn’t appreciate the article’s emphasis on perimenopause—enough already. Being in my late 40s I’ve experienced even women doctors dismissing symptoms as just my hormones running amok. Reminds me of how in the 90s women were viewed as unpredictable loons bc of PMS.
Sadly having a baby, unlike finding a life partner, does have an expiration date. I’m very lucky that I managed to squeak in just before my eggs expired. I think that is even more devastating than having no expiration date. I was 99% sure my time was up. Whereas I could still go back and get my PhD—sure it’d be awkward with a bunch of 22 year olds but it’s still possible.
Ive never like the comparison between being single and being infertile (and I say this as someone who is getting married right before turning 39 and is going to try to conceive, however bad the odds are. I’m mentally preparing for failure already). If I can’t have a baby, I may feel like my body has failed, and that sucks. But not being able to find a partner feels like not being good enough to be loved, which is a much deeper hurt. And not only that, but when I was single, I couldn’t even try to have a baby. It was a double loss.
I read them both. I dunno, my takeaways are
1) I agree that it is a common expectation that our lives be better and more privileged than our parents. And what parent doesn’t want that for their children. But when I think about it, I also think it’s an illogical expectation. The world is full of hardship. Why should anyone assume, just because she was born at a certain time in a certain place, in a certain social class, that she should be above that hardship? Maybe we’re supposed to be looking for what can be improved in the world, and working on that (starting with ones own house), not fretting over what we don’t/can’t have.
2) anything can drive you mad if you let it. I let things keep me up at night. Sometimes I have to listen to YouTube lectures for hours to make the thoughts stop. But it helps to try to live in the present, which is the point the second article was making. I also appreciate my education and analytical mind when I start to spin. I might not get richer, more popular, more attractive, etc. But I can always get wiser. I get energized by that reflection, no matter how overwhelming things feel. Plus, you have to be able to see your own absurdities.
3) no you can’t have it all. No, I shouldn’t talk about other people; I don’t know their potential. But I can’t have it all, because I like my downtime too much. So when I get to pick what I sacrifice (I don’t always get the choice) I’m really lucky. I’m lucky even in the hard decisions, because they are still my decisions. Another important perspective.
4) you only live once so do you really want to live in fear. I am anxious by nature so this is an ever present question. And the answer is no I don’t. It’s very limiting to live in fear. As I get older I try to embrace everything, all emotions, even if they are unpleasant. It’s mind opening to embrace the awkward and difficult, not pushing it away.
So is any of that an answer….no not really. Just what I’ve found to be truth and try to embrace.
I just — no. Not because the present is fabulous or we live in the best of all possible worlds, but. I’m closer (much!) to 50 than 40, so adjust accordingly, but when my dad graduated from high school, that, plus the fact that he was caucasian and had a penis, guaranteed him entry to our state’s flagship university. Lacking the last two traits — no admission. Same for the college he did go to, where the debate wasn’t how many African Americans or women should be admitted (consensus: none), but how many Jews (consensus: only a few). My mother didn’t go to college, and when my dad’s sister divorced in the 1960s (for cause, obviously, no-fault divorce wasn’t a thing back then…; she’d gone to college but dropped out when she married/got pregnant, as she was not allowed to continue once one or the other of those happened), she could neither take out a credit card nor buy a home, though she did have a job (she did buy a house and pay for a mortgage, but her dad had to co-sign for her to do so). Are things easy now? No, of course not — and certainly we have good reasons to be worried both about how we’ll pay for our kids’ college and whether we’ll be able to access health care (I blame much, though not all, of those issues on our collective decision-making, i.e., politics). But I think another big reason we are “stressed out” is that there is a much more open playing field than there used to be, and yes, that means there’s a lot more competition. But it’s not a bad thing, and for lots of us, it’s big improvement over the past.
Whoa on the first article (took me days to read, which is not a reflection on the quality of the article). So many parts spoke to me, and this is the one I cntr-v’ed.
” research suggests that women’s happiness bottoms out around 40; men’s, around 50.
Yup. I remember feeling that.
I think it’s a fallacy that you can have it all if you just _____ enough. But we all want to believe it in our 20s and 30s.
I’ve been waiting to reply here until I had the time. I’m at the older end of Gen X, so there are some things in the article I don’t relate to, but there was an awful lot I nodded at and said, “yes, that’s me.” I can certainly relate to the woman looking for a job or contract work in middle age, with flattened hierarchies, ageism, and yet sexism is still alive and well too. I do think in my late teens and early 20s, I bought into the hope and opportunity of “you can have it all” or “girls can do anything” and had that hope squashed pretty early on.
I was a bit surprised by the “Dreams that didn’t come true” article, in that I thought that growing up taught us that. I knew in my teens of dreams I had had, or still wanted to have, that I knew wouldn’t come true. And of course, more and more have been added to that list, or have been discarded as I’ve changed. I related to her focus in her 40s to simpler things, to being calmer. That was the real highlight of my 40s – the shedding of ambition that was never going to deliver what I wanted anyway.