Mama Gena on Midlife Crisis: An Opportunity to Take the Lid Off Your Passion

Welcome. This is Donna Otmani, live from the Pleasure Palace, headquarters of Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts. I’m here today with Mama Gena, continuing our ongoing series of interviews on the Case for Pleasure. Today’s topic is the “midlife crisis.”

Donna: So, Mama, what are your thoughts on what causes a midlife crisis, and what’s the antidote?

Mama Gena: I love a good midlife crisis. I think it’s the call of the wild. I think that, in a life well and outrageously lived, with great abandon, there is no such thing as a midlife crisis. Life simply continues to unfold with outrageous abandon.

But most of us have the experience of sitting on parts of ourselves—of keeping certain lids on aspects of our passion or aspects of what it is we desire. Usually it’s the parts of our desire that frighten us or that run counter to the expectations of the culture or the community within which we’re living.

So many women, round about the time of perimenopause, will begin to experience a deepening of their own unhappiness or frustration, or a feeling like perhaps they will never get fulfilled or acquire what it is they desire. Or there can be almost a fierce despair or desperation for aspects of one’s body and soul that are still unfulfilled. And we call that a midlife crisis.

I call that an incredible opportunity. It’s a chance for rebirth. It’s a chance for reinvention. It’s a chance for recreation—to totally redesign the pathway that you’re on to insure that you’re squeezing every delicious drop out of the privilege of being alive.

In the Mastery Program here at the School of Womanly Arts, I see hundreds and hundreds of women in their late forties, fifties, sixties who come to class with a sense of despair or desperation or a feeling that perhaps they will never have the love that they have always longed for or a sense of joy in their own body or a sense of owning their beauty and their sensuality. It’s almost as if the parade has passed them by. And one of the great joys of my life is to see how the Sister Goddess™ community and the class itself can give women in midlife a way to navigate the crisis and to begin to use their profound longing as a way to jettison them into reinventing who they are as women.

In my particular pathway, the consequence for me was that I divorced my husband. We had had a good marriage, but it was something that we had both outgrown. And it was very, very hard for me to let go of that because I thought, “Oh God, I’m Mama Gena and everyone expects me to be married,” and it was just after I’d written my book, the Marriage Manual, and it was a little embarrassing to tell Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster, “Well, I’m going on a book tour but I’m getting a divorce” (laughing). You know, that’s somewhat of a midlife crisis.

But the consequences of writing that book were that it made me see how important my desires were, and that what I had been accomplishing with my husband was remarkable, and that my desires were larger than I had expected or had known about. So it was the catalyst that spurred me to make that level of transition.

That’s not always the case for women. Sometimes it’s simply tucking in and learning to feel more delicious and more beautiful and more right with your own body and your womanhood, which develops a sense of confidence and an ability to unfold your sensuality with more righteousness than you felt in your twenties or your thirties or your forties. You have more roots in the earth at fifty or sixty or seventy than you did before, and this time very often leads a woman to a kind of impetus for that kind of exploration of their sensuality and their confidence.

I’ve also seen women make radical, beautiful, courageous jumps in their careers—where they have been keeping a lid on it, and suddenly it is so uncomfortable to keep the lid on, so it’s time to really blow it off. So a woman can begin, perhaps, owning her own company or starting her own business or asking for the kind of monetary reward that she’s been deserving all this time but never felt righteous enough to ask for.

It’s a time for a woman to really take the lid off of the legend that she is and begin to live it with extravagance, with enthusiasm, and to cut new trails for the women of tomorrow to follow.

I think a midlife crisis is a fantastic thing. I think it should be welcomed, honored and paid exquisite attention to, because every woman is her own best pathway to her dreams. And it’s time we really listened and really paid attention to our own desires.

So bring it on, ladies! Enjoy your midlife crisis. It’s the best thing that ever happened to you.

Return to article search page