Part 1 Surprised By Midlife Crisis

1. Collision of Expectations and Reality

Part 2 Trapped By Roles

2. The Homemaker Runs Dry
3. The Professional Shifts Dreams
4. Wonder Woman Tries It All

Part 3 Squeezed From The Outside

5. Culture's Creation
6. A Stale Marriage
7. Her Husband's Own Crisis
8. The Pain of Parenting
9. Too Much Too Fast
10. The Marks of Time

Part 4 Discouraged On The Inside

11. Defeated by a Sagging Self-Esteem
12. Trapped by Depression
13. Tempted to Escape
14. The Legal Escape

Part 5 Excited About Succeeding

15. Keeping Up with Life’s Clocks
16. Answering Life’s Questions
17. Preventing a Crisis
18. Helping a Woman in Crisis
19. Blooming at Midlife

    I wanted to crawl under the bed. Or better yet, I just wanted to disappear. I didn't want to run away and be somewhere else on the earth. I just wanted to be gone. I didn't want to commit suicide. I simply wanted to cease existing.
    I felt so frustrated, and my husband just lay there, drifting off to sleep. I wanted him to talk to me, but I didn't know how to bring it about without making him angry. I finally gave a big sigh and crawled out of bed. In the dark I walked into the living room. Strange emotions were boiling inside me--emotions that had once been unfamiliar but were now all too common. Most of all, I was wishing that Jim would be concerned enough to come find me. I wanted to feel loved and comforted; instead I felt terribly alone. I didn't feel openly rejected by him, but he didn't seem to care about this raging turmoil I was in.
    A wave of self-pity would wash over me. Right after that, a bigger wave of jealousy would slam into me. And before I could get myself righted from that blow, a third wave of just plain rejection and hurt would hit me.
    Often I wanted to vanish from life, but what I really wanted was for all the inner confusion I felt to be straightened out so I could get on with the happy life I was supposed to be living. Part of me was happy but a big chunk of me was miserable, and I didn't know why.
    Experiences like this were common to me, off and on, during the last half of my thirties. My frustration and confusion were especially critical from about age thirty-six through thirty-nine. Jim and I thought the problem was simply unique to me--some personal quirks I needed to work out. I struggled desperately with feeling unspiritual and went through various spiritual exercises to try to 'die to self' and 'crucify the flesh.'
    Now we see that the problem was my transition into midlife. Ever since Men in Mid-Life Crisis (Jim Conway) and You and Your Husband’s Midlife Crisis (Sally Conway) were published, we have been contacted by many women from the United States and Canada who feel they also are experiencing a midlife crisis. We have heard heart-wrenching stories from single and married women from all circumstances of life. The severity of problems varies, but all are seeing age forty on the horizon, or have just passed it. They talk about a change in their emotions and their perceptions of life. Many have had a strong compulsion to run away; some actually have. Some feel the turmoil less intensely but still are unsettled by it.
    We searched to see if there were studies about women in midlife, and, although some involved women in their late thirties and early forties, none at that time had been done to determine if women experience a 'crisis' similar to a man's crisis at midlife and at an earlier time than the well recognized menopausal stress of the late forties or early fifties. If there is such a time, what causes it? What can be done to help ease the pressures? We both began to do research about Midlife Crisis and will be reporting what we learned throughout this book.