Breaking Point How Today's Women Are Navigating Midlife Crisis

Introduction Careening down a mountain on an all-terrain vehicle, I struggle for control as my ATV bounces off ruts and roots. A teenage friend leading the way on his dirt bike waves his hand in a "Slow down!" signal. I ignore him. At 51, I am hell-bent on adventure. Grazing the trunk of a Douglas .r big enough to halt a speeding Humvee, I make a turn on two wheels and hit the throttle. I am invincible. Ageless. Mindless, I might add, of the fact that with scant experience on mountainous terrain, I am like a grenade with the pin pulled, moments from certain disaster. For twenty-five years, I have been a working mother, juggling home, family, kids, job, and suburban community life with intensity. In middle age, I have become somebody no one knows, a wild woman with graying hair under a full-face helmet, a hand too heavy on the throttle and an adventure lust so consuming that I lie awake nights. Camping in Oregon's Coastal Range with a hard-riding crowd of off-road adventurers, I am flattered to be invited to join three of the biggest daredevils on the trail. As I gain speed, exhilaration renders gas fumes sweet in my lungs. The trees fly by in a blur, the roar of my engine fills the air. Speed rivets my senses on the moment. I lean into a sharp turn. Then, in a heartbeat, the ground heaves upward, earthquake-like. A berm erupts and lifts my two right tires. My ATV bucks and starts to roll. Reflexively, I hit the throttle. The earth tilts. My body flies off the seat. Deep-green treetops spin crazily. My back slams hard onto the dusty red clay of the trail. The sky goes dark as the 375-pound Honda 400EX flips and lands sideways the full length of my body. When I regain consciousness, three pairs of eyes behind full-face helmets circle the sky overhead, peering down at me like curious aliens landed to search for signs of life. "Can you breathe?" asks one. "Can you move?" comes another voice from beneath a fiberglass face shield. I move my neck slightly, then my spine, and say a prayer of thanks that I am not paralyzed. "She has the balls of a gorilla, doesn't she?" murmurs one of my companions, thinking I cannot hear. Their quick-witted rush to hoist the ATV off my body saved me from a worse fate, I later learn. The damage: a collarbone knocked so far out of whack that it looks like some demon battling to escape my skin. A bruise the shape of an ATV extends the length of my torso. I creep painfully onto the back of a friend's ATV and we ride back to camp. My worried children, 12 and 15, and the rest of our campmates circle me, marveling that a collarbone could go so far AWOL, and my friend shuttles me to the nearest emergency room forty miles away. What was I thinking? The answer, of course, is that I wasn't thinking. I was only feeling. I had plunged deep into the dark comedy of a midlife crisis. A series of losses in middle age had left me reelingthe death of my father, the end of my twenty-year marriage in divorce, and the approach of the empty nest as my children grew more independent. Values that had helped guide my life for decadesachievement, frugality, respectability, career success, exceeding other people's expectationsdid not matter to me anymore. Beset by an emotional deadness, I felt the truth of Joseph Campbell's quote, "Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall." For a time, it seemed, repressing my deepest dreams and desiresfor adventure, for a simpler, more rustic life, and for closeness with nature and with other people who valued it, toowas no longer worth the sacriShellenbarger, Sue is the author of 'Breaking Point How Today's Women Are Navigating Midlife Crisis', published 2005 under ISBN 9780805080315 and ISBN 0805080317.