As someone in her 40s, unequivocally in middle age, I find myself and my friends in that stage of life that seems to auger constant assessment — am I happy? Am I doing the right thing with my life?

Evidenced by the number times Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic piece "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" was posted on Facebook, it served as a cri de coeur of the collective unconscious of those of us swimming in the Gen X/Baby Boomer estuary, last stop before becoming truly elderly. (It's apparently also the most-read article in the magazine's 155-year history.) Slaughter rightly questions why having a family complicates the career ladder for women in a way that it does not for men. But the hidden heart of the article, I believe, is its hinting at that unspoken yearning for that perfect life that has been promised to us by ... someone? Ads? TV? Ms. Magazine? Those ATHLETA catalogs?

Let me compare and contrast that with a typical incident that happened just last week in my own 40-something working mother life. My husband and I were sitting in the office of a neuropsychologist who had just run an assessment on our 12-year-old son who has a variety of disabilities and medical problems.

"You know cognitively, he's functioning at the bottom 1 percent of children his age," he said.

I nodded.

"That means 99 percent of children are doing better than he is."

I nodded again. (Yes, I can do the math.)

He waited, seemingly perplexed. "Having seen what I saw, and of course you have to be with your son all the time — I have to ask you, how do you have the patience?"

I looked at him. He's my son. It was so obvious, I did not say it.

"I mean, really. How do you do it?" He looked to my husband, who gave him the same look. He tried a different tack: "Well, with all this stress, how are you two doing?" Read more

Sources

• The Atlantic Monthly
• Image: Boxlunches