When I was 10, I thought my father had lost his temper and was going to divorce my mother. One Sunday morning, he came back to our tiny apartment in suburban Toronto with a head covered in permed blonde hair. Worse still, he was wearing a very soft green leather jacket that had obviously cost a fortune that we didn’t have. Before I even saw him, I heard my mother repeating over and over in a panicked voice: “Is this really true?”
Now that I’m getting older, I understand that my father was experiencing an early midlife crisis. Lately, while I too am stuck in a mid-life crisis that a dye job and a leather jacket won’t fix, I’ve been thinking about my father’s brief attempt to, I don’t even know, postpone his mortality? extend your youth? He was 35 years old, with three children, and he felt the need to drastically alter his appearance and spend an absurd amount of money on something stupid to prove that the whirlwind of life wouldn’t take him away without adornments, like the young man he once was. (The blonde hair didn’t last long and the jacket remained in its cover in the closet until my parents actually ended up divorcing years later.)
In the movies and TV shows I watched as a kid, the midlife crisis was born out of a self-satisfied sense of security. Maybe everything was going too well and you just wanted a chance to relive your youth once again. We bought a sports car, we got a piercing, a weird tattoo. In extreme cases, you left your old life behind to start from scratch, you did something that would mean your children would still be in therapy today.
Nostalgic fantasy
For
