Have you had enough of everyone else's shit?

Midlife gear change needed

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Dear Philippa

I follow you and think advice you give to problems is very wise! Your books are great! I hope that you will consider responding to my problem.

I am in my fifties and have 3 children my middle child is 15 and autistic.

Our marriage has in the past been very turbulent. Now we co exist in the same house but are not close.

For the majority of the time I have been main breadwinner. I previously worked in a corporate job that I struggled with. I disliked the internal competitive nature of the work (league tables of high performers, pressure to achieve targets and when they were met they were increased) but I did like working with clients. My husband was made redundant from his job and we decided he would stay at home and at some point retrain.

Whilst we agreed to do this, in reality the retraining didn’t happen until children were much older. We started to get into financial difficulties. The resentment crept in on both sides and the issues that we hadn’t dealt with caused massive arguments.

We did couples counselling, at that point our marriage had been non sexual for a couple of years. The therapy sessions were difficult and at the end of the sessions I decided that I wanted to end our marriage, my husband however felt differently.

When my husband found out I was serious (I had consulted a solicitor and got house valued) he alternated between being attentive and angry. The worst thing was him telling my children that he was going to die alone because mum was going to leave and that he was going to find a rope and drive out to middle of nowhere and hang himself. I called the police one night because it felt there was no way to stop him ranting. After this he broke down, I tried to be sympathetic to this, because it’s not nice to see, but that resulted in him clinging. I was surprised by the clinginess as he had nothing but criticism for me previously.

Fast forward 4 years I stayed. One of my children was going through significant problems (school refusal start of periods eating disorder suicidal thoughts) which kicked off start of autism screening/diagnosis and my mum was also showing symptoms of dementia and other illnesses. I decided bitter divorce would not be good for our family and put it off to deal with later.

In the case of my child I did eventually get a diagnosis and I got them into a fantastic independent school where they are thriving. The eating problems and suicidal thoughts went once their school anxiety stopped.

I had disagreements with my siblings about my mum’s living situation. I went to see my mum most days as I felt concerned about her. She lived in fairly remote large rambling house on her own. My siblings weren’t able to help much with her care but didn’t want her to leave home. My mum contracted pneumonia and had to spend quite some time in hospital. We had more disagreements about care mainly via WhatsApp group though as my siblings didn’t want to talk about it in person. I found this very upsetting and we ending up not talking.

Thankfully social worker decided that mum couldn’t return home and she is now settled in a care home and really likes it there. My relationship with my siblings remains strained.

I know most people experience similar in their lives job dissatisfaction/insecurity, family fallouts and financial problems. However, I felt alone with these problems and whilst I dealt with them, afterwards I felt numb.

I have entered into a period of calmer seas but I feel wrung out and empty. I can see I have made bad choices in my life (bad career choices, bad relationship. I know I need to take responsibility for my part in them but I am finding it hard to take action and make changes.

I now work for a smaller company in same industry and I work almost solely from home. I feel isolated and out of my depth sometimes, idiotic and don’t really feel very purposeful or useful. I am miserable in work but on other hand thankful that I am miserably employed rather than unemployed.

I have no idea what I want to do and just revert to being passive but secretly seething and resentful inside. I know this self loathing, angry but outwardly passive easy going maybe even vacant exterior I present to the world is not serving me well but despite that I struggle to change. I wake up thinking “is this it” all the time and feel detached from people and things that happen in my life.

I don’t want to live like this anymore though I am also concerned about effect on my children. My parents were unhappily married and led separate lives whilst still living in same house and I felt the atmosphere constantly.

I want the next stage of my live to be more myself. I want to break pattern I fall back to of doing things that I don’t like or want to do to appear “good” to outside world. I realise outside world is too busy thinking about what they need to do to notice, but I carry on anyway hoping that someone will see and value my contribution, when they don’t I feel resentful and unhappy. When they do I feel embarrassed and unable to take the compliment playing down playing my involvement. I realise in my rational head that this is attention seeking and self sabotage and I have decided enough is enough and I want to change. It seems to be harder to change than I had appreciated though.

My Answer

I love your insight and your goals, having those is being half-way there already.

But in the meantime, it does sound like you are having a fairly miserable existence. You’ve overcome two major hurdles, your child’s problems and looking out for your mother whilst dealing with uncooperative siblings. I think the strain of all that has made other people seem like either problems to be fixed, or people to impress, not surprising really, you were overloaded, all the emotional load of looking after a family and a husband who is more like another problem rather than any sort of support. He doesn’t sound like an equal partner by your side. Work is just another solution to another problem, need-money-must-take-this-work, but it does sound unsatisfying.

So what are you going to do? Now that you have more or less sorted other problems, daughter, mother, you are now your own problem and this is trickier. So what can I suggest? I think the first thing I’d do is to stop, breathe and enjoy the presence of your children, while they are still dependent and with you. They are no longer so much people to manage but people to relate to. I would think about how you can, for your sake, enjoy their company as much as possible. I hope you can still enjoy your mother too, now that she is safe. I think you’ll have a nicer life if you come to just enjoy the presence of others and being present with them.

Add enjoyment to your goals. I want to encourage you to look for fun and connection with others where you can find it. I think there is probably a lot about your life that you could already start to enjoy. You’ve been in problem solving mode for so long, and successfully too, that to stop and smell the roses and be grateful for everything that is going right is not as easy as it might sound. I’m with you about stopping doing things that might look good to the outside world. You are already impressive! Not that you need to impress anyone. You could see a therapist or a coach, but first you could decide to write a journal to reflect on your life as you live it - it’s a cost-cutting sort of therapy. You’ll be able to spot self-critical thoughts, and decide to observe them rather than take them seriously and I think it will become clearer what you need to do about your marriage and what needs to change about your work. It sounds like you did well relating to clients in your old job, but felt infantilised by all the league table nonsense that treated you more like a machine than a person. In your present job, it sounds like it is too online, depersonalised and lonely.

What do you enjoy? It can be a hard question to answer when you’ve been in survival mode.

Your reactive husband sounds quite hard work! The dynamic seems to be that he is like a child needing you like a parent, rather than two adults supporting and championing each other. And like a child he envisions collapsing if you weren’t there to support him. Anyway I’m rambling. In a nutshell: How can you bring more enjoyment, appreciation and connection in your life? Where would you start. Can this be a project?

How about joining Queenagers? www.noon.org.uk This is a project run by a friend of mine

Eleanor Mills

. It’s about mid life women who, amongst other things, have had enough of everyone else’s problems and what to carve out their own lives.

Thank you for writing in.

Her reply to my reply

Thank you so much Philippa, great advice.

Queenagers looks fab and I have joined!

I do love my kids they are brilliant company and I love spending time with them. My mum also whilst she has Alzheimer’s loves a funny cat video!

I am going to make a concentrated effort to bring some fun into my life and first step is buying a nice notebook and start my self-therapy.

My final thought for readers

Please leave a comment but not about taking HRT. I cut stuff about HRT because everyone already knows all about it. Yes, it’s great if you can take it. We are in a Peri menopause, and menopause information saturation situation.

“While menopause has exploded as a topic of conversation and category for products and services, women don’t want to be defined by a lazy “menopause” label. That’s like branding teenage girls as “menstrual” – reductive and disempowering” Elinor Mills