Look Out Below: She’s Perched on a Shaky Plateau

Help! I’m stuck here on this plateau. One false move and I fall onto the demographic bulge below.

They want my house. They want my job. They want my husband. They only want one of my 2.3 children.

This is hard. I was trained as a climber. I am part of those last achievers, the older baby boomers. (Technically, the war was still going on when I was born. But while I was eating my Pablum, someone dropped the Big One, and when I turned around there were several million babies fighting for my toys.)

All my life I’ve had to stay alert or be trounced. Back in the ‘70s, when I started jogging, I thought I was pretty unusual. Then I went to my first (and last) race, the San Francisco Bay to Breakers. Nothing like standing at the starting line with 50,000 other runners to kill your sense of your own uniqueness.

I remember hearing the guy behind me say to his friend, “As soon as we get to the hill, we’ll lose these turkeys in front of us.”

Every time I thought I was on to something different, it became a major fad within a year. Two months ago, I announced I liked rap music. Next thing I knew, it was on the cover of Newsweek. I am now exactly two months ahead of my time. But who’s counting?

So I worry: What happens if I start falling behind, if I lose my grip and fall off the plateau? Will I lose what I’ve worked so hard all my life to achieve?

Well, not exactly all my life. If you are part of my generation, you know we didn’t really get started until we were in our 30s. We enjoyed an extended childhood and the reprieve the late ‘60s gave us. We spent our 20s “into” every form of hedonism and self-indulgence known to mankind, including the social revolutionary fantasy.

But then we hit our 30s off and running. Overnight, we became workaholics and entrepreneurs and parents. You know what I’m talking about if--in the last 10 years--you have acquired five or more of the following: a VCR, a computer, a phone machine, a compact disc player, a microwave, a camcorder, an unused car and a home mortgage.

We certainly don’t need any more stuff; in fact, we probably didn’t need all this stuff. But now the struggle is not to lose what we’ve got.

I get scared. I get scared, in this 15-minutes-of-fame, what’s-hot/what’s-not world, that I’ll be discarded. I panicked when I read a description of a young actress: “She’s as hot as early Meryl Streep.” What does that make me? As unhot as mid-life Alice Kahn.

Stanford Research Institute futurist Tom Mandel has said: “The ‘90s will be the decade of the mid-life crisis.” I wonder if I’ll survive it without the escape routes of my youth.

The sexual fantasyland is becoming more like Disneyland. The other night, as I was drooling over Charlie Sheen, my daughter had the bad manners to remind me, “Mom, puh-leeze, he’s young enough to be your son.”

At parties, while talking to a cute guy, I do some complicated math in my head.

The exercise fantasyland no longer works either. I used to think I could count on jogging for a perpetual sense of upward mobility. But I now struggle to do in a week what I once could do in a day’s run.

So I’m on this plateau hanging on for dear life. I look below and get dizzy. I look up and see that craggy peak. And sometimes I want to turn to the gang that’s plateauing with me and say: “Hey, you guys, why don’t we just stop right here and have some fun?”