The last time Krista Johnston played water polo she was 10 years old in swimming lessons. Forty years later, lookinfuelling workout that wasn’t aquafit, she signed up for a Friday morning water polo drop-in at her local Kelowna, B.C., pool, expecting, at that hour, to swim with other people roughly her own age. Instead, she stood poolside on the first day in her teal one-piece with tummy control, the only one with a float belt, watching super-fit, much younger swimmers expertly slinging the ball around. To flee or not to flee?
The dialogue in her head went something like this: Why am I embarrassed? Because I’m 50? Good for me. Because I have a little more around the middle? Well, I’ve had two kids. And then more loudly, insistently, this thought: I deserve to be here.
The women of Gen X (my friends and I included) share her defiance, as they arrive at middle age, their careers established, their families launched, or nearly so.
Krista Johnston started playing water polo again at age 50.Kathleen Fisher/The Globe and Mail
Our generation, now age 45 to 60, has officially hit the years of colonoscopies and mammograms. And we all know how it’s supposed to go. At the half-century mark, men get a power upgrade and become silver foxes. Women get turkey necks and bingo wings and become irrelevant, invisible and no longer you-know-what-able.
Gen X is having none of it. The mothers I spoke with for this story are starting businesses, taking up skateboarding, travelling with their adult children, dreaming up their next steps.
They are focused on personal agency and joy. They dropped more F-bombs than any batch of interviews I’ve done for a story. They’ve probably danced past midnight more recently than many twentysomethings.
The last thing they are is invisible or irrelevant. “Society wants to put us out to pasture,” says Ms. Johnston. “We’re not accepting that.”
Middle-aged motherhood has been long overdue for a female-friendly reboot, ideally a fearsome, liberated remake that stomps the crap out of what Ms. Johnston calls that “age-shaming baloney.”
This power move is already happening in Hollywood. Gen X directors and actors such as Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett are producing on-screen storylines where middle-aged moms have hot sex with besotted younger men, or team up to mastermind heists and criminal cover ups.
Add to the movement Michelle Obama, who, at 61, gets honourary Gen X status. When her absence from public events prompted rumours of a marriage breakup, the former first lady explained on a podcast in April, “I chose to do what was best for me, not what I had to do, not what I thought other people wanted me to do.”
Even Stacy London, who, for years, dictated fashion advice on her make-over TV show, What Not to Wear, has now hit middle age and menopause with second thoughts about her previously critical assessments of women as frumpy and too-flashy. She’s just launched a cleverly marketed mea culpa: a new TV show called Wear Whatever the F You Want.
Points for the pithy title, although this doesn’t make up for “No miniskirts after 35.” Also, quick question: If we’re wearing whatever we want, do we still need instructions?
Because telling Gen X what to do is not going to fly. Based on the conversations I had for this story, the Big Change fueling all this ferocity is not hormones and empty nests and culture wars and grey hair. It’s the unsung superpower of middle-aged womanhood: You stop giving a damn.
In Langley, B.C., Darla Halyk, 52, has zero damns left to give. (The actual expression she used was much more on brand.) “I’m not the girl walking down the street concerned about what anybody thinks anymore.” she says. “I speak my mind clearly if someone says something I disagree with and I don’t fear the repercussions of making them uncomfortable.”
And so, you won’t be surprised to hear that at the pool that day, Ms. Johnston decided no one would put her in a corner. She climbed down the ladder, while everyone else dove in, and chased the ball until she thought her lungs felt like they would explode. “I didn’t want to strut out there, you know, like, ‘I’m ready,’” she says, “but I had to.”
Had to, Ms. Johnston says, because she remembers the way her mom spoke wistfully about missed adventures, and then died, at 65, before she felt free enough to do them. Because Ms. Johnston wants to set a more empowered example for her own kids, and for the younger mothers trying to break the rules behind her.
Because why did we all work so freakin’ hard just to slink away from life now?
This expletive-laced remaking of middle age was probably inevitable. What else would you expect from a generation that leans hard on sarcasm and surliness, chafes at dumb rules and knows the world is, sigh, unjust.
And who better to lead this modern new middle-aged motherhood franchise than Generation X, my small yet feisty cohort that‘s always punched above its weight?
We were the first large group of grade-schoolers who went home to empty houses, and the last teenagers to get up to no good without social media surveillance. The first female generation to surpass our male peers in educational attainment. (Although we still earned less than them.) The first mothers to get one-year maternity leave, and the second sandwich generation, caring simultaneously for still-growing children and fast-aging parents.
We saw the Tiananmen Square student massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall happen six months apart, and watched 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky get the blame for the blue dress, so we learned early that borders change and tyrants rise, and that Pity Him would come after #MeToo.
But we also raised our sons to hopefully understand consent in a way our own dates sometimes didn’t. We warned our daughters not to take abortion rights for granted. And we took them both to the therapy we never got.
‘The fact that like we’re not looking like the Golden Girls any more is good, but it’s also bad. Because now we have Jennifer Aniston at 50.’FELICIA CHANG/The Globe and Mail
We perfected motherhood hacks well before TikTok glamourized them. One mom I know simmered Bulls-Eye Barbecue Sauce on the stove for years to home-cooking acclaim. (In case you’re interested, she also cleverly stocks her car with the gum flavour nobody in her family likes so she’s never disappointed by an empty pack. )
Doing it all still broke many of us early. But there was a silver lining. At daycare, the kids with mismatched socks and single mittens were friendship beacons for frazzled moms barely holding it together and the resulting wine-soaked girls’ nights were training for seizing our own identities in mid-life.
But this isn’t a fairy tale: Getting old also sucks. You ache in new places. Your girlfriends get cancer. Marriages unravel. Parents die. The kids leave. Illness derails your plans.
And more than you like to admit, you grieve for your prettier self.
“I didn’t think I would feel so sad about getting old,” says Ms. Halyk. “I didn’t think I was that vain. I have never been a high fashion, wear a lot of makeup lady.” She hates that “a little bit of grey hair” makes her feel insecure. Some days, she catches her eyes in the mirror, unprepared for the reflection. “Like two days ago, I looked 10 years younger.”
Having hit middle age with independence and financial means, and still just enough insecurity, Gen X women have become a lucrative demographic. Menopause has gone mainstream, selling books and lux lubricants. From a new company started by Gen X actor Naomi Watts, there’s the Vag of Honor intimate moisture gel and the Oh My Glide play oil, a top seller, according to the website. Unfortunately, much like easy access to consistent medical care for a health issue guaranteed to affect half the population, neither are available in Canada.
Meanwhile, according to social media, a middle-aged woman’s wish list is reduced to miracle winkle cream, wall Pilates, incontinence underwear and pelvic floor therapy. That last one would feel like progress, if it wasn’t immediately followed by an ad of a plastic surgeon drawing on a woman’s face to mark the parts he would fix. (Only the neck, chin, cheeks, eyes, nose and forehead.)
“Pretending that it doesn’t ever bother us that our necks are getting saggy isn’t helpful,” says Krista O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui, a 53-year-old mom and wellness coach in Edson, Alta., who leads an online mentoring community for middle-aged women. At the same time, “If you stop spending 80 per cent of your waking hours hating your body, trying to change our body, trying to find clothes to make your body look a different way, you’ve got a lot of space now to do your creative work.”
Life also has a way of minimizing the smaller problems – and clarifying our priorities -by burdening us with larger loss.
Ms. Halyk, for example, abandoned her writing career after receiving death threats for telling a story about a sexual assault she experiences as a young woman. “You know, we all go through stuff,” she says. “You go though it, and you heal.”
Ms. O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui, lost her 23-year-old son to suicide in 2019. In therapy, she worked hard on self-compassion, and how to carry a terrible grief that will be with her forever. “It was not a pretty journey,” she says. Feeling joy again was difficult and emotional work. She moved through it with the help of professional mental health care and women who gave her space to be honest – the kind of collective embrace, she says, we need to foster more in society.
Oorbee Roy, a Toronto mom who took up skateboarding in her 40s and is now known around the internet as Aunty Skates, has an inherited condition that means she could have a heart attack at any time. “I’m hyper aware of the fact that these are good years,“ and she refuses to waste them.
Early this year, Ms. Roy, 50, announced to her husband she would not be folding the laundry anymore. “And he’s like, ‘but that‘s adulting,’” she recalls. She stood her ground: The clothes come out of the dryer, get dumped in a basket and she doesn’t care. “I don’t want to do all this mundane stuff anymore.” Two weeks ago, however, she came home from visiting her mother, and her folded clothes had also been put away. “That,” she says, “was like foreplay.”
A laundry strike may not be world changing. But Ms. O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui sees this middle-aged tension as our true selves saying, “Stop. No more devaluing myself, no more putting myself last, no more performing.“
This “reimagining of how we move through the world” can be messy, she says. Sometimes “you need to scream and get that rage out of your body.” (Insert F-bomb where appropriate.)
When I asked Gen X women for their best sources of perspective and meaning, they looked in two directions – their parents aging ahead of them, and their kids coming up behind. “I think we’re very lucky to be Gen X,” Ms. Halyk told me. “We’ve gotten to see history and the future, and really live in the line between them.”
From that vantage point, you see what it‘s like to get older, for better and worse. Maybe you start lifting weights, not so much to lose weight, but to dodge your mom‘s knee surgery at 70. Or you invest in friends who will remind you of past adventures when your memory fades like your father‘s.
With your kids, there’s common music and culture – a shortcut to closeness. You’ve likely been getting IT support from them for years already – why stop listening now?
Gen X moms are quick to say yes – to concerts with their kids, or pub nights with their millennial co-workers. When Ms. Halyk‘s daughter wanted to go with her to Disneyland for her 21st birthday, she made it happen, and even went on her most terrifying ride, the Ferris Wheel. At work, younger colleagues have taught Ms. Johnston about bubble tea and the shows they liked, and energized her natural curiosity. “Sometimes, I would forget that I was more than twice their age.” And at water polo, the players were generous and welcoming; she was soon joining them for post-scrimmage conversation in the hot tub.
Ms. O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui says her daughters, both in their 20s, are a primary motivator for how she chooses to live. “I want something better for them, or at least, I want to model a brave way of being in the world.”
For Ms. Johnston, a more empathetic understanding of her mother also looms large in her decisions today. She sees now that her mom was forced to be the serious parent because of her fun-loving father. At 58, her mom went back to school, to upgrade her skills, an act of bravery her then 28-year-old daughter didn’t fully appreciate. And she now clearly recognizes her mom‘s yearning for what might have been, while listening as her kids recounted their adventures.
She thinks of this when she sticks with water polo, when she proposes renting out the house and working on a sheep farm in Scotland, and realizes she would go, in a heartbeat, except her husband isn’t keen, and she still feels selfish spending money to chase her own desires.
“I’m not as brave as I think I am, or want to be,” Ms. Johnston says. And yet, this is now or never time. “Do I take a chance? Do you go out on a limb? Do I want to just be accepting things that I’m not okay with until I die?”
Her fear is that she’ll get to her mom‘s age, with the same regrets. “That definitely lights a huge fire under me.” Her mother‘s story also reminds her how abruptly that fire can go out. “I’ve survived. I’ve seen. I’ve done,” she says. “I’m lucky I’m here.”
‘I think Gen Xers we’re a little bit reckless. We kind of fly under the radar anyway. So why not do whatever we wanna do?’ says Roy.Jess Deeks/The Globe and Mail
Every Halloween, Ms. Roy and husband, host a rager in their home. They hire two bartenders, and glow-in the dark Jello syringes are the custom cocktail. They invite all the neighbours so no one calls the police. There’s dancing and karaoke, until the guests are sent home at 2 a.m. A couple of years ago, a younger mom in attendance found Ms. Roy, then dressed as the creepy, crooked-necked ghost from The Haunting of Hill House, and thanked her proving it‘s possible to still have fun as an adult.
And yet, for years Ms. Roy sat on the sidelines, while her husband and children whizzed around the skateboard park, talking herself out of having fun by joining them. She told herself: “I won’t be very good. It‘s too late for me. I’m going to hurt myself. People will laugh at me.”
And then, at 43, she decided she wanted to be a participant in, not a witness to, her family’s life. The joy she felt from that first clumsy ride was unexpected. She thought, “I want more of this in my life,” And life, she realized, was a lot like skateboarding – you fall a lot, you think about what you did wrong, you go again. If you’re lucky, you eventually land the trick. “But it‘s really about the journey.”
Ms. Halyk, who handles accounts for a tax services company, is currently launching her own business, Pawsh Trail Co., a pet product line designed to help woman walk and care more easily for their large dogs
“I just see myself in my power, more than ever,” Ms. Halyk says. “You’re not strapped to the toddler or even the soccer practices. You have more you.”
More room, for “what next?” as Ms.O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui likes to say.
On that front, Ms. Roy is starting an Aunty Skates podcast. Ms. Halyk dreams of buying an acreage with her kids, and raising chickens and canning her own tomatoes. Ms. Johnston injured her rotator cup during water polo drills; she plans to return in September, but has joined a competitive dragon boat team in the meantime.
All this example-setting and boundary-moving, personal and public, is important: Middle age can be a grim and lonely place, the time of life with the highest suicide rates for women.
That‘s why women need to come together and share, says Ms. O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui, for their own benefit, but also so that their example trickles down. She notes that her 25-year-old daughter is following hormone specialists and pelvic floor therapists on Instagram. Her middle age has already shifted, just like Gen X evolved from the activism of their mothers’ generation.
“The more that we all practise a new way of being, we’re just sort of pinging off each other,” says Ms. O‘Reilly-Davi-Digui. “We’re creating a new cultural narrative.
We might wonder why we waited so long. Considering her own reasons, Michelle Obama suggested that women too often worry about disappointing people. “I could have made a lot of these decisions years ago, but I didn’t give myself that freedom.”
Giving yourself the freedom to choose is but one lesson of Gen X aging that‘s also a lifelong happiness practice. Among the others: Mind the hour, and be grateful for the day; learn from the people you value, young and old; be bold and brave and silly as often as you can.
Roy with her kids Rohan, 12, and Avnee, 15, took up skateboarding when she was 43.Jess Deeks/The Globe and Mail
And then there’s this one, from which all of those others flow:
On a recent evening, I stood in a kitchen with a group of Gen X women. One mom, an accountant, described once begging the local baker to make three lasagnas in her own casserole dishes so she could pass them off as home made at the school bake sale – prompting laughter, à la “we’ve all been there.”
But in the pause that followed, a second mom, who had stayed home with her kids and whose talents I have long admired, quietly spoke up: She’d also felt judged, by the working-outside-the home moms, for bringing in the lasagna she supposedly “had so much free time” to cook herself. The moment landed hard: Mothers, of every age, get enough blame for being too warm, too cold, too absent, too present. Why do we add to it?
“We are all feeling the same way, and have come through so much,” says Ms. Halyk. “We need to be gracious with each other and ourselves.” If Gen X, while rebranding middle-aged motherhood, passes down any lesson, may it be this one.
