There Are No Grown-ups Read online

  ALSO BY PAMELA DRUCKERMAN

  Lust in Translation

  Bringing Up Bébé

  Bébé Day by Day

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Pamela Druckerman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Portions of this book first appeared in the New York Times under the titles “What You Learn in Your 40s,” “How to Find Your Place in the World After Graduation,” “How to Talk to Children About Terrorism,” and “In Paris, a Night Disrupted by Terror”; and in Marie Claire under the title “How I Planned a Ménage à Trois.”

  ISBN 9781594206375 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780698186811 (ebook)

  Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved. In some instances, the chronology of events has been changed.

  Version_1

  For Simon, Leila, Joey and Leo

  contents

  Also by Pamela Druckerman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Bonjour, Madame

  1. How to Find Your Calling

  2. How to Choose a Partner

  3. How to Turn Forty

  4. How to Raise Children

  5. How to Hear

  6. How to Have Sex

  7. How to Plan a Ménage à Trois

  8. How to Be Mortal

  9. How to Be an Expert

  10. How to Have a Midlife Crisis

  11. How to Be Jung

  12. How to Get Dressed

  13. How to Age Gracefully

  14. How to Learn the Rules

  15. How to Be Wise

  16. How to Give Advice

  17. How to Save the Furniture

  18. How to Figure Out What’s Happening

  19. How to Think in French

  20. How to Make Friends

  21. How to Say No

  22. How to Control Your Family

  23. How to Be Afraid

  24. How to Know Where You’re From

  25. How to Stay Married

  Conclusion: How to Be a Femme Libre

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Forty is a fearsome age.

  It’s the age when we become who we are.

  CHARLES PÉGUY

  INTRODUCTION

  bonjour, madame

  IF YOU WANT TO KNOW how old you look, just walk into a French café. It’s like a public referendum on your face.

  When I moved to Paris in my early thirties, waiters called me “mademoiselle.” It was “Bonjour, mademoiselle” when I walked into a café and “Voilà, mademoiselle” as they set down a coffee in front of me. I sat in many different cafés in those early years—I didn’t have an office, so I spent my days writing in them—and everywhere I was “mademoiselle.” (The word technically means “unmarried woman,” but it’s come to signify “young lady.”)

  Around the time I turn forty, however, there’s a collective code switch. Waiters start calling me “madame,” though with exaggerated formality or a jokey wink. It’s as if “madame” is a game we’re playing. They still sprinkle in the occasional “mademoiselle.”

  Soon even these jocular “mademoiselles” cease, and my “madames” are no longer tentative or ironic. It’s as if the waiters of Paris (they’re mostly men) have decided en masse that I’ve exited the liminal zone between young and middle-aged.

  On one hand, I’m intrigued by this transition. Do the waiters gather after work for Sancerre and a slideshow to decide which female customers to downgrade? (Irritatingly, men are “monsieur” forever.)

  I’m aware of the conventions of aging, of course. I’ve watched as small crinkles and creases appeared on the faces of my peers. Already, in my forties, I can see the outline of what some people I know will look like at seventy.

  I just didn’t expect “madame” to happen to me, or at least not without my consent. Though I’d never been beautiful, in my twenties I’d discovered my superpower: I looked young. I still had the skin of a teenager. People honestly couldn’t tell whether I was sixteen or twenty-six. I was once standing alone on a New York subway platform when an older man stopped and said, sweetly, “You’ve still got your baby face.”

  I knew what he meant, and I was determined to preserve this small advantage. Long before any of my peers fretted about wrinkles, I used sunblock and eye cream each morning, and rubbed on more potions before bed. I didn’t waste a smile on something that wasn’t truly funny.

  All this effort paid off. Into my thirties, strangers still routinely assumed I was a college student, and bartenders asked to see my identification. My compliment age—the age people say you look, to which you must add six or seven years—hovered safely around twenty-six.

  In my forties, I expect to finally reap the average-looking girl’s revenge. I’ve entered the stage of life where you don’t need to be beautiful; simply by being well preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty.

  For a while, this strategy seems to work. Fields of micro-wrinkles appear on the faces of women who’d always been far better-looking than me. If I haven’t seen someone in a few years, I brace myself before meeting her, lest I accidentally gawk at how much she’s changed. (The French call this tendency to look the same for a long stretch, then to suddenly look much older, a coup de vieux, an “age blow.”)

  I regard the graying roots and creased foreheads of many of my peers with sad detachment. I am proof of the adage that everyone eventually gets the face she deserves. And what I deserve is, obviously, a permanently youthful glow.

  But in the course of what seems like a few months, something changes in me, too.

  Strangers no longer gush about how young I look, or seem shocked when I reveal that I have three children. People I haven’t seen in a while clock my face for a few extra beats. When I arrive to meet a younger friend at a café, he stares right past me at first; he doesn’t realize that the middle-aged lady standing in front of him is me.

  Not everyone my age is distressed by these changes, but many seem to be suffering from a kind of midlife shock. One friend says that when she walks into a party, there’s no longer a Cinderella moment when everyone turns to look at her. I’ve noticed that men only appraise me on the streets of Paris now if I’m in full hair and makeup. And even then, I detect a disturbing new message in their gazes: I would sleep with her, but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever.

  Soon the “madames” are coming at me like a hailstorm. It’s “Bonjour, madame” when I walk into a café, “Merci, madame” when I pay my bill, and “Au revoir, madame” as I leave. Sometimes several waiters shout this at once.

  The worst part is that they’re not trying to insult me. Here in France, where I’ve lived for a dozen years as an expatriate, “madame” is a routine form of politeness. I call other women “madame” all the time, and teach my kids to say it to the elderly Portuguese lady who looks after our building.
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  In other words, I’m now considered to be so safely into madame territory, people assume the title can’t possibly wound me. I realize that something has permanently shifted when I walk past a woman who’s begging for money on a sidewalk near my house.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she calls out to the young woman in a miniskirt a few steps ahead of me.

  “Bonjour, madame,” she says when I pass in front of her a second later.

  This has all happened too quickly for me to digest. I still have most of the clothes that I wore as a mademoiselle. There are mademoiselle-era cans of food in my pantry. Even the math seems fuzzy: How is it that, in the course of a few years, everyone else has become a decade younger than me?

  * * *

  —

  What are the forties? It’s been my custom not to grasp a decade’s main point until it’s over, and I’ve squandered it. I spent my twenties scrambling in vain to find a husband, when I should have been building my career as a journalist and visiting dangerous places before I had kids. As a result, in my early thirties I was promptly fired from my job at a newspaper. That freed me up to spend the rest of my thirties ruminating on grievances and lost time.

  This time, I’m determined to figure out the decade while I’m still in it. But while each new birthday brings some vertigo—you’re always the oldest you’ve ever been—the modern forties are especially disorienting. They’re a decade without a narrative. They’re not just a new number; they feel like a new atmospheric zone. When I tell a forty-two-year-old entrepreneur that I’m researching the forties, his eyes widen. He’s successful and articulate, but his age leaves him speechless.

  “Please,” he says, “tell me what they are.”

  Obviously, the forties depend on the beholder, and on your family, your health, your finances and your country. I’m experiencing them as a privileged, white American woman—not exactly a beleaguered group. I’m told that when a woman turns forty in Rwanda, she’s henceforth addressed as “grandma.”

  With their signature blend of precision and pessimism, the French have carved up midlife into the “crisis of the forties,” the “crisis of the fifties” and the “noonday demon,” described by one writer as “when a man in his fifties falls in love with the babysitter.” And yet, they have an optimistic story about how to age, in which a person strives to become free. (The French are flawed, but I’ve learned from some of their better ideas.)

  Wherever you are, forty looks old from below. I hear Americans in their twenties describe the forties as a mythic, far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. When I tell one of my sons that I’m writing a book about the forties, he says that he’d like to write a short one about being nine. “It’ll say, ‘I’m nine years old. I’m so lucky. I’m still young.’”

  And yet for many senior citizens I meet, the forties are the decade that they would most like to time travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at forty?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book about turning forty in 1985. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.”

  Forty isn’t even technically middle-aged anymore. Someone who’s now forty has a 50 percent chance of living to age ninety-five, says economist Andrew Scott, coauthor of The 100-Year Life.

  But the number forty still has gravitas and symbolic resonance. Jesus fasted for forty days. Mohammed was forty when the archangel Gabriel appeared to him. The Biblical flood lasted for forty days and nights, and Moses was forty when he led the Israelites out of Egypt, after which they famously wandered the desert for forty years. Brandes writes that in some languages, “forty” means “a lot.”

  And there is still something undeniably transitional about age forty. You’ve only ever known yourself as a certified young person, and now you’ve left one stage of life, but you haven’t quite entered the next. The Frenchman Victor Hugo supposedly called forty the “old age of youth.” While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter described this crossroads more bluntly: “Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young.”

  I’m starting to see that as a madame—even a newly minted one—I am subject to new rules. When I act adorably naive now, people aren’t charmed anymore, they’re baffled. Cluelessness no longer goes with my face. I’m expected to wait in the correct line at airports, and to show up on time for my appointments.

  To be honest, I feel myself becoming a bit more madame on the inside, too. Names and facts don’t just pop into my mind anymore; I sometimes have to draw them up, like raising water from a well. And I can no longer wing it through a day on coffee and seven hours’ sleep.

  Similar complaints trickle in from my peers. At dinner with friends my age, I notice that each of us has a sport that our doctor forbids us to play. There’s nervous laughter when someone points out that, under American law, we’re now old enough to claim age discrimination.

  New brain research documents the downsides of the forties: on average we’re more easily distracted than younger people, we digest information more slowly and we’re worse at remembering specific facts. (The ability to remember names peaks, on average, in your early twenties.)

  And yet, science also shows the many upsides of the forties. What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, and at controlling our emotions, resolving conflicts and understanding other people. We’re more skilled at managing money and at explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.

  Indeed, modern neuroscience and psychology confirm what Aristotle said some two thousand years ago, when he described men in their “primes” as having “neither that excess of confidence which amounts to rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly.”

  I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. After a lifetime of feeling like misfits, we realize that more about us is universal than not. (My unscientific assessment is that we’re 95 percent cohort, 5 percent unique.) And like us, most people focus on themselves. The seminal journey of the forties is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”

  In another ten years, our fortysomething revelations will no doubt seem naive. (“Ants can see molecules!” a man told me in college.) And even now, the decade can seem like contradictory ideas that we’re supposed to hold in our minds at once: We can finally decode inter-personal dynamics, but we can’t remember a two-digit number. We’re at—or approaching—our lifetime peak in earnings, but Botox now seems like a reasonable idea. We’re reaching the height of our careers, but we can now see how they will probably end.

  * * *

  —

  If the modern forties are confusing, it’s also because we’ve reached an age that’s strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your twenties and thirties you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.

  In the forties, you might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors, elders and parents who used to rejoice in your achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If you have kids, you’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. A journalist I know lamented that he’ll never again be a prodigy at anything. (Someone younger than both of us had just been nominated to the US Supreme Court.)

  “Even five years ago, people I met would be like, ‘Wow you’re th
e boss?’” says the forty-four-year-old head of a TV production company. Now they’re matter-of-fact about his title. “I’ve aged out of wunderkind,” he says.

  What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the forties—and an awareness of death—that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now seem to exclude others. And there’s a now-or-never-mood. If we were planning to do something “one day”—to finally change careers, read Dostoyevsky or learn how to cook leeks—we should probably get moving on it.

  This new time line prompts a reckoning—sometimes a painful one—between our aspirational and actual lives. False things we’ve been saying for years start to sound hollow. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At forty, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life, or collecting notches on our résumés. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called the Ding an sich—the thing itself.

  Indeed, the strangest part of the forties is that we’re now the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. People our age have titles like “chief technology officer” and “managing editor.” We’re the ones who cook the turkey on Thanksgiving. These days, when I think, “Someone should really do something about that,” I realize with alarm that the “someone” is me.

  It’s not an easy transition. I’d always been reassured by the idea that there are grown-ups in the world. I imagined them out there curing cancer and issuing subpoenas. Grown-ups fly airplanes, get aerosol into bottles and make sure that television signals are magically transmitted. They know whether a novel is worth reading, and which news belongs on the front page. In an emergency, I’ve always trusted that grown-ups—mysterious, capable and wise—would appear to rescue me.

  Though I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, I can see why people are drawn to them. It’s tempting to think that a cabal of grown-ups secretly controls everything. I understand the appeal of religion, too: God is the ultimate grown-up.