Mid-Life Crisis: Another Chapter in the Book of Life

The timing of your child's teenager years with your own mid-life crisis is no accident, especially if you had children young. If your child has reached his or her teenage years, it means that he/she has been hanging around your life for quite some time. It's also a time when something stirs and awakens within you like a sleeping serpent. You awaken as if from a long nap and wonder where your life has gone. You hear loud music somewhere in the house and ask yourself, wasn't it just yesterday that I listened to rowdy obnoxious music in my parent's house? How could that have been twenty years ago?

The mirror becomes your enemy, revealing lines everywhere you look and cellulite galore. Having I been sitting on my ass for twenty years? How did this happen? Where was I when my body went south?

There's nothing else to do but exercise like crazy, dye your hair, and try to strike up some kind of romance with your husband, if you're still married. Many marriages around you will have bitten the dust, and some your friends may even be shacking up with twenty-five year olds and describing it in great detail. Meanwhile, you and your husband are trying, trying, trying to keep things spicy and exciting. Self-help books start appearing on your nightstand, therapists' names come across your desk, anniversaries and vacations alone start taking a priority over college savings, etc.

You watch you teenager start to date and it really makes you feel old. They have that starry-eyed look of new love about them, and you can't get them to even respond to a simple question. The world is their oyster now, not yours. Not true, but it does feel as though the next generation is kind of impatiently saying, "Could you move on please? We're next in line and we've got lots to do. Our whole lives are ahead of us."

Don’t panic. Remember how confusing it was to be young? How overwhelming even the simplest decisions were? Would you want to experience that again? No, I don’t think so. Your life experience has translated into a mellow wisdom and perspective that those young bodies don’t have.

True, it sometimes looks as though they’re having all the fun, but trust me, they’re not. Yes, we are footing the bill and protecting them from the horrors of real responsibility for the time being. But we’re only delaying the inevitable day that they wake up and have to do things for themselves. Now that we’ve had to pay bills and clean house and watch over the lives of other human beings for years, of course we’re going to be a little envious of the freedom and fun our teenager seems to be having. In fact, our children’s teenage years are the most powerful reminder for those of us who married young of the last time we felt that kind of freedom.

Face it, our bodies will never look like they used to, not without thousands of dollars of plastic surgery, and even then, the results are superficial, at best. The clock continues to tick. Having a beautiful body isn’t everything anyway. Or is it? When our teenage daughter or son looks at us with disgust because we seem old, we can suddenly find ourselves of a mind to throw out everything in our closets, get a new haircut, and make an appointment for a face lift

With all of these issues swirling around, is it any wonder that so many people divorce when their kids hit adolescence? It’s the whitewater rafting stage of parenting. Nothing in all the years of raising kids prepares you for it. You simply brace yourself and hang on for dear life for the ride, hoping you make it in one piece to the end, except there really is no end. Once your kids move out you’ll experience empty nest syndrome, be saddled with college tuition payments and then weddings, and eventually grand parenting.

So if you want to indulge a little in a faster car or new hairstyle or a couples only vacation: go on, live it up! You aren’t getting any younger.