We prepare for childbirth, so why don’t we prepare for midlife? How about a midlife doula!

 In 2020, I was 35 and pregnant with my first (and only) baby. I had spent a lot of time learning then building a successful career, traveling to some of the harshest environments around the world in the name of national security, sitting in front of senior politicians to give evidence but the birth of my child was one event I didn’t know how to prepare for. A friend of mine who was pregnant at the same time recommended Hypnobirthing. Learning online through 4 evening sessions during COVID was a necessity for a life changing experience but also a first for me since I’d only ever undertaken learning through official institutions or recognised training organisations (RTO).

I wasn’t sceptical about this avenue of learning new skills but instead more curious to see how it worked. My husband and I sat through the sessions where the facilitator was excellent, engaging, relatable and personalised the information which was paired with doable homework, checklists and resources we could explore on our own before and during the labour. Leading up to birth, expectant mothers are offered classes, information, professional support, planning, scenarios and practical preparation for this milestone transition. It was one of the best courses I’ve done and it transformed me from feeling anxious, stressed and overwhelmed to prepared, empowered and like I had agency to make the best decisions no matter what happened along the path. And good thing the course taught me how to prepare for most scenarios because while our preference and preparation was for a vaginal birth, my son had other ideas and was breech. An External Cephalic Version (ECV) didn’t shift him and while I tried all the other recommended things, we had a planned C-section with a successful birth. This training helped me process what other scenarios might occur, how to mindfully manage those, discuss options with my doctors, what I needed to prepare for at the hospital and confidently request my preferences during that C-section.

I was thinking about this experience the other day, thankful I’d paid money to learn from an experienced online facilitator for this knowledge and have access to those resources after we’d completed the training. And I found myself asking, why do we have such a cultural framework for preparing women for child birth, including doulas but nothing for midlife? There isn’t an RTO certificate or a University degree for how to steer through the career shifts, ageing parents, digital precarity offered up by significant changes in technology all compounded by a world reorganising and handing you uncertainty and unpredictability not known for almost a century. Midlife is a fundamentally different operating environment to any time in our life so this is why I’m passionate about a new model for midlife women and helping them navigate this time in their life. Call me your midlife doula!

Most of us in midlife grew up with certain expectations about what midlife through to retirement would be. While there’s always been a transition period the expectations were a linear idea of adulthood and included relative stability, predictable career progression, functioning institutions, increasing prosperity and technology as something that only made life easier and not more complex. At the turn of the century when a large chuck of today’s middle and senior level workforce left school, the world had other ideas and started reorganising with the boom of globalisation, then the global financial crisis, followed in quick succession by increased nation state competition, a pandemic, geopolitical instability, climate volatility, supply chain disruptions, massive digital transformation and increases to cost of living all at the same time. 53% of Australians now say they feel unsafe or very unsafe in the world – the highest ever recorded and a 45-point difference from 2010. So, on top of normal midlife changes and events, we have a world serving up a new layer of things to contend with. We are raising families and planning our futures inside a world that is considerably less predictable than the one we were prepared for growing up. Now, we need to stop treating uncertainty as an occasional crisis and start treating it as a design condition of the world reorganising. 

Previous generations of midlife women have had their struggles and enormous loads too but even my mum says she can see the extra load of today’s volatile world. My mum didn’t work until I went to school because they could afford to, even though the interest rates were high, overall prosperity of the middle class was growing and there was a clear path to follow until retirement.

Today’s midlife women are raising children, supporting ageing parents, working full time, managing the household, navigating rapid changes to technology, supporting children’s digital lives, managing family health, maintaining relationships and thinking about her future in an uncertain world all at the same time. No wonder there is this midlife chrysalis occurring in millennial and Gen X women. Whether we want to admit it or not,  midlife women are most often the people who see the problems first and then organise the response. Effectively this is what happens when midlife women are sandwiched between household responsibility and systemic uncertainty.

Looking at some of the statistics around the sandwich generation, there are about 1.5 million middle-aged Australians that make up the sandwich generation with 91% of carers being women and 40% of those are also holding paid jobs. While I felt like time wasn’t something I was spending well, time poverty wasn’t a term I was familiar with until now in midlife. Sandwich-generation carers spend an average of 14.5 hours a week on unpaid care for ageing parents and 15.2 hours on children, leaving under 10 hours for their own personal care. Nearly one in two (49%) say they occasionally prioritise caregiving over their own needs. Not even I was prepared for those statistics but they’ve made me realise how powerful getting prepared can be to reduce that time poverty in the next 10 years.  

We’re confronting the reality daily that technology is changing faster than we can adapt. Technology is another topic my mum openly admits is something she didn’t have to contend with in midlife while trying to raise kids. For midlife women the reality is that technology isn’t optional layer anymore which is why we’ve seen a rise in the “AI Coach” in the professional services space or the Virtual Assistant. Technology today impacts your employability, finances, access to health, parenting, education, security and independence. Most of us are asking, maybe just internally, about what happens when out children’s world is technologically different from ours or “how do I learn this new technology”. Despite high victimisation rates, protective behaviours remain low and risky practices such as using public WiFi for financial transaction were unchanged year or year. I’ve witnessed unsafe and insecure AI practices and advice on Instagram that makes my former national security self cringe thinking about the aggregation of personal information ripe for phishing, scams and foreign actors. When we’re living in a reactive state, we’re too busy to ask ourselves the important question that would help us plan, “what happens to my life if this technology changes, disappears or become inaccessible”?

Something that has helped us has also been harmful to us. Modern life is convenient because everything is connected but that also creates dependencies we haven’t created backups for. So, what happens when one of our critical systems like electricity, internet, communications, transport, digital identity or supply chains stop working? Why does every major headline trigger anxiety or why does a geopolitical event feel personal. Between 85% and 89% of Australians believe climate change, AI-enabled attacks, disinformation, economic crisis and critical supply disruption are each likely to occur within the next five years but fewer than 18% believe the nation is prepared for any of them. We literally stop, panic and put all our energy into problem solving because every disruption feels like an emergency instead of having a Plan B and an ability to pivot.

It’s not hard to understand why 72% of Australian women reported burnout in the past 12 months and why life satisfaction in Australia is at its lowest in five years with the steepest decline among Australians aged 35-44, with women also recording a statistically significant drop. I don’t just think women have more to do, it’s that we’re carrying more interconnected systems at once. So, I propose we stop treating each problem in midlife and what the world is throwing our way separately and instead look at our whole life, the world and the system to build a midlife strategy.

My framework has three parts – See, shape and own. First, we see our future by seeing signs, trends, systems, dependences, assumptions and emerging risks to anticipate change for our life over the next 1 to 5 years. Second, we shape our future with scenarios, options, backups and build our plans within our strategy. Lastly, we own our future with room to decide how to act when disruption occurs, make better decision with agency and more control, pivot and change course without starting from zero.

We prepare ourselves for a life transition and the event of childbirth including scenarios that may arise before and during. These birthing courses give women context, capability, options, agency and an overall strategy on how to move through this transition. They teach women to see the birth they want, shape it knowing that things could change and what that looks like and the power to make decisions along the way and have agency if it does change. That’s empowerment! I started FuturePivots to give everyday people the same empowerment and I want to help women through midlife by understanding the world we’re living in, anticipate what could affect us, build options and navigate whatever comes next. We don’t need to know or predict what’s changing and coming next, we need to enter our next chapter and season of life with a strategy to take back our agency and power.