Life-Stage Crisis v. Mid-Life Crisis

I was watching the movie Garden State the other night and two thoughts came to mind: the film did a great job of capturing the anxiety that rests in twenty-somethings today and, why on earth didn’t the movie get any Oscar nominations? Since I never agree with “The Academy,” I’ll just have to deal with the angst part.

When I had my first “mid-life” crisis at age 35, I worried it came a bit early and I wouldn’t live past 70. Then I had another at age 45, so I was thinking I’m going to get to 90. If Mrs. Laz will allow, I think I want to have at least one more, perhaps around age 55 because, you know, it would be cool to live to be more than 100.

But something occurred to me during all of these crises: there is no such thing as a midlife crisis, only life-stage crises. All the rest is Hollywood hype.

Guys face their first life-stage crisis either when their voice drops or when they get beat-up by a girl. Girls, I think, (what do I know about girls?) go through their first crisis when they have that awkward stage and nothing seems to fit causing them to beat up a guy. There are other crises to follow and some people get bit by all of them and some can deal with the roller coaster ride life gives us.

However I think there are two very overlooked times in our lives when many of us struggle to cope. One is that tough stage when you’re in your early twenties and either you’ve just finished college or, in my case, just realized finishing college would have been a good idea. At that age, just when you’ve been convinced by others that your college degree means something, you’re thrown into a world where reading Beowulf and memorizing lecture notes in a “Topics in Microeconomics” class has no translatable impact on your miserable starting salary.

You may have graduated in the top 10-percent of your class, but now you’re thrown into a situation where everyone is older, more experienced with the company and the office games played there, and, lest we forget, they all hate you because you’re young and just finished college. The only thing of value you may have learned while going to college was the ability to drink a keg of beer on a Saturday night because drinking it up with your co-workers may be the only way to get them to show you how the copier functions.

This is where the movie Garden State comes in. I thought it pretty much nailed this “what do I do with my life” stage that affects everyone in some way as they enter their mid-twenties. In my generation we couldn’t wait to discover the prize life had holding for us once we became adults and now, looking back at twice the age, we scratch our heads and wonder why this new generation just can’t get a handle on life. Since I remember feeling the same confusion about life in general, I wonder how fair it is to expect this generation to have any handle. It’s really an under-appreciated age group. The fact is, most people that age don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives and, if they do, they shouldn’t.

Except for the fact that few in this age group have weight problems, you have to feel for them. They’ve just spent their youth trying to get the best grades possible to get in the best college program possible to get in the best grad school possible and all they can get is a job as a waiter and spill fine wine on Armani pants worn by some idiot who never went to college but hit the stock or mortgage bubble at the right time. While the twenty-something was learning about the differences between the "primary" market and the "secondary" market, this goofball was making the money and blowing it on a fast car, several investment homes, fine wine and Armani pants. Or you can get a job as a “fast food knight,” as one poor unfortunate did in Garden State.

We need to cut these kids some slack and let them know there is plenty of time left in their lives before they ought to commit to anything. Including a career. The only advice I would give this group – and I’m paraphrasing P.J. O’Rourke here – is turn your hat around, pull up your pants, and stop getting so many tattoos.

Now, let’s forget about those twenty-somethings. See how easy it is to forget about them? The other life stage crisis that doesn’t get a movie produced about it, except in abstract ways, is the stage of your life when your kids leave the house for college or prison, depending on one’s particular situation.

This “crisis” often gets tossed in with the generic “mid-life crisis” because, not surprisingly, it comes about the middle of your life about the time your children are ready to leave the nest. You get so used to having the little buggers around the house, leaving their dirty plates and laundry under the bed, that it can be very destabilizing when they disappear.

But, as parents, we’re supposed to be happy about this. We’re supposed to high-five each other and say, “nice going, we raised them well.” They’re off to college and exciting new challenges (like doing what they always dreamed about when the parents weren’t around), and you’re off to the bank to refinance the house to pay for it all. I think I would have handled it better if my kids didn’t seem so thrilled about the prospect of leaving home. Well, you could have at least turned around and pretended to cry why you said good-bye, Kellen. Not that I have any pent-up feelings about that time.

I heard rumors that when the last kid in my family left the house, an audible Ya-Hoo! from my parents could be heard for miles. Then I noticed something funny about mom and dad. They kept inviting us back for dinner and often bribed us with a whiff of spending money and a meal that didn’t include the phrase, “would you like fries with that?”

It turns out they missed us, if you can believe it. Well I do now, because I missed the hell out of my kids when they first left the house. And it’s not like you never see them again or they will never move back in at some time. It’s just that they will never consider our house as their home again. They’re just visiting from that point on and you can tell that’s the case because they never unpack, which is why the garage is full of boxes of books, shoes, and clothes from high school.

Once the kids leave, it’s not uncommon for the parents to think they have the opportunity to run around the house naked and do spontaneous things like go to the movies on a Tuesday evening. That happens. Well, not the running part or, come to mind, the naked part, but let’s keep our focus here.

The point is, we wake up one day and we discover that it’s just the two of us left and it hasn’t been just the two of us for 18 years. What to do about that? The nub of this crisis is that there are only two ways to deal with it: either you say “it’s just you me!” or, “it’s just you and me?” There’s something I learned in college; punctuation can be important in expressing yourself.

Punctuation aside, it’s a difficult transition but, in the end, you make it because over the years you’ve spent with your spouse you discover you’re really best friends, in addition to all the other fringe benefits of married life. Yes, you find yourself wandering in what used to be your kids’ rooms and envision them lying in their bed and refusing to wake up for school without a lot of yelling. And you miss their friends that used to come around. Mostly you miss talking to them because, it turns out, they’re interesting to talk to and, not coincidently, they become your best friends too.

This particular life stage crisis is one of those yank your heart out of your chest and stomp on it times in your life (I wonder if I punctuated that correctly), but you get through it because it’s the only crisis that is stuck together by years of loving each other. And if you have to have a crisis, the one where the answer is “love” ought to have a movie written about it.