A review by se_wigget
Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun

2.0

 

This book is for a book discussion group. Otherwise I wouldn't have picked it up. 

 

Well. This brings up plenty of depressing memories. Stuff she says about growing up Gen X resonates with me. The stuff about 1970s childhood--how we're a generation before those who were brought up to think they were special.... She even brings up how teachers didn't give a fuck that we were bullied. No kidding--I was the #1 school scapegoat, and no teacher ever came to my defense. Some of the teachers were also bullies. I had such severe social anxiety that I didn't speak--I was sent to the principal's office, and he threatened to paddle me if I didn't start speaking! Yeah, just the thing to make me feel safe in school. The actual fuck. 

I know--when I remember these things, I tell myself that was a long time ago and I can hear assholes telling me to "get over it"--the usual. But the earlier the trauma, the more it has affected your development and your life. And being a social pariah and craving respect, acceptance, and understanding--these are major themes in my life that go back to early childhood. It's not like I graduated from high school and from then on I was showered with respect and admiration--quite the contrary. 

Thrown to the wolves. 

Girls are (or at least were) thrown to the wolves--especially if you have a narcissist mother and other narcissist/sociopathic relatives--and we aren't assigned a handbook on how to survive in this toxic society. 

As for "latchkey kids"--I enjoyed being home alone when I was a kid. It didn't happen often, but when it did, the house was quiet and calm for a change. 

 

Straight breeder this, straight breeder that. Yawn. The author doesn't acknowledge the existence of people like me who aren't heterosexual and have never had any interest in breeding. And no, my not wanting to give birth doesn't somehow magically make me freakish, narcissistic, or psychopathic. QUEER AND CHILDLESS PRIDE FOREVER! 

 

Are all the women in this book straight, married, and breeders? Give me your queer, your misfits, your bohemian masses. Not to mention women of color and transwomen, although I'm neither. I embrace not being straight and not being a breeder. Also, I've never had ANY interest in having children, so I don't live in the aggressively breeder-orientated version of reality the author lives in. 

 

I'm a fiction writer, and my female protagonists are always single, queer, and childless (with the one exception of a story I wrote nearly 30 years ago about a character based on my mother). These are identities I embrace no matter how much straight breeders act like I shouldn't. 

 

Maybe the title should be _Straight Breeders Lament_. Or _Discontented White Straight Women with Children_. 

 

The author apparently lives in an alternate reality in which everyone is heterosexual or at least heteromantic. "Compulsory heterosexuality." 

 

On pages 146-7 she finally acknowledges the existence of women who have never wanted to have children. But it's brief and still heteronormative. She makes voluntary non-breeders sound like a tiny minority, but I know plenty of women who are happily childless. 

 

Overwhelmingly, the attitude is oh it's such a tragedy to not marry a man and have at least one baby. There are many, many reasons for not having babies--including keeping the population down and look at how humans are destroying the planet--and the author is completely oblivious of such reasons. I have absolutely never had any interest in having children, and no amount of harassment has ever made me ashamed of this.