Bel Mooney on Mid-Life Exhaustion: Why Taking Care of Yourself Is Not Selfish

A woman in her late forties, who signs herself Jenny, wrote to Bel Mooney with a question she was nervous to ask. She works full-time. Her husband works long hours. Their two teenage children need ferrying to school and sports, and the house needs running. She says it is the family life she always dreamed of, and that she and her husband split the load evenly. Even so, she is tired all the time, and their conversations are mostly logistics: who collects the children, what is for dinner, the mortgage. She wakes tired, works, cooks, helps with homework and collapses into bed. She has considered a week away alone, but fears being selfish. Is this normal in mid-life, she asks.

Mooney's first answer is that Jenny is far from alone. She says she can almost hear readers saying that this is exactly how they feel. The letter recalled her own Eighties, when she craved a meaning and peace that her beloved family, she admits, did not supply. She does not claim to have settled Jenny's last question. She says it has eluded her, and she invites readers to send coping tips for her closing section, 'And Finally'. She also says this stage will seem short once the children leave home, and that Jenny will probably look back on it wistfully.

Her practical advice is to build in time for yourself. Mooney says that once she would never have thought of a facial or a massage, which she considered self-indulgent. Four years ago, a clinical psychologist told her it is not self-indulgent to look after yourself, because it gives you the strength to look after others. So she suggests Jenny and her husband schedule such time into the week. If he goes for a run while it is her turn for the school run, she should get something equivalent, perhaps a long bath. On a pinned-up weekly timetable, Mooney says, me-time should be written down as essential rather than an extra. She also suggests a monthly night out with girlfriends and a monthly date night with her husband, reminding Jenny that her exhausted but blessed situation exists because of the love she felt at the start.

The column's second letter comes from Chrissie, who has dated for two years, mostly in short relationships with men who wanted nothing serious. She has been hurt by men who vanished after sex, so she told her current partner she wants to wait until they know each other better. He is kind, caring and ambitious, but she is not sexually attracted to him, though she told him early on that she was. She is tired of dating and the cycle of uncertainty and rejection. Abstaining, she says, has kept her from falling for him. Should she end it?

Mooney asks her to swap the sexes and imagine the man had written the email, knowing he was staying in a platonic relationship because he was tired of dating. That, she says, would not feel nice, and Chrissie is acting in bad faith. Attraction might grow, she concedes, but sleeping with someone for dishonest reasons bodes badly. Arousal can fade over years, but it has to be there at the start, and so does honesty. She concludes Chrissie cannot go on and should not continue the lie.

The third letter is from Eileen, whose 95-year-old father died last Monday. The next morning his partner showed her what she described as his alleged funeral wishes, giving the partner total control. Eileen notes that the documents are not witnessed and that a section reading 'and approval with his daughters' has been tippexed out. A note at the funeral directors reportedly says the daughters should be referred to his solicitors. The partner also wrote a eulogy in 2022, supposedly dictated by him, and emailed Eileen the funeral date.

Mooney, after reading the eulogy Eileen attached and finding it perfectly pleasant, replies bluntly that Eileen seems to be turning grief into resentment over things she cannot change. She says adult children commonly resent a father's partner for seeming to take the mother's place, and points to the scornful quotation marks around 'partner'. The arrangements, she says, are simple, there are no rules about eulogies, and anger will only embitter. She urges Eileen to sit with her two sisters, remember happy times and recognise that the partner is grieving too.

Mooney closes with her own news. She skipped a column because of a holiday in Vienna, their only break this year, where she and her husband both fell ill. Covid tests were negative, and her GP diagnosed bronchitis. She plays a bad news/good news game. She saw Bruegel and Klimt before falling ill, lost at least six pounds, and had to leave Mozart's Cosi fan tutte at the interval because of her cough. Now the Bath Mozartfest begins, five miles from her home, and she offers a glass of wine to any reader who says hello.