Midlife Lessons: What Macaroni Cheese Taught Me About Failure

Middle age can seem like a sickness sometimes. All that anxiety and fear. Not to mention the inevitable aches and pains that shout, “You’re older than you feel!” And, if your friends are around the same age, the sickness is everywhere you look. It’s just like being a teenager again, but with longer hangovers and more shame. Instead of nature pumping hormones into your body, it starts draining them out again. But enough doom and gloom. I feel it’s my job to help produce sense of this moment. Just think of me as your Midlife Crisis Correspondent. Here I want to talk about a revelation I experienced thanks to a few simple ingredients: pasta, milk, flour and cheese. Let’s just say I now belong to the mac ‘n’ cheese school of philosophy. Middle age comes with a lot of onerous practical considerations. You probably have a responsible, high-pressure job. If you have them, your children are older and don’t need you as much. That hurts. If they are still around, your parents are also older, but now they need you more. That’s annoying. You’re almost certainly worried about your health. And your marriage. But it’s the psychology of middle age that really matters. Beating a genuine—and potentially harmful—midlife crisis means never avoiding or repressing those awkward feelings. You know the ones: Who am I? What the hell am I doing? Where am I going? Do I really have to read David Foster Wallace? Why do I find Daphne from “Scooby-Doo” attractive? Like I said, it’s just like being a teenager again. This is what I was grappling with as I tried for the final time to cook macaroni cheese for my wife and two daughters, now aged 12 and 15. Mac ‘n’ cheese had become something of an obsession. Cooking for my family as often and as well as I can is one of the main ways I express my devotion. I love cooking for all sorts of reasons (I’m greedy, for one), but the main motivation is that food brings us together and always has. It’s a job I can take seriously and a job I love to do every day. Consequently, practice has not made perfect, but it has produced me a decent cook. Yet macaroni cheese eluded me somehow. Maybe it was because macaroni cheese is supposed to be straightforward that endowed my inability to get it right—indeed, to produce it look and taste like anything other than quick-drying cement—with such significance. I make a beautiful paella, a rich Malaysian beef rendang, a sensational English roast, a mean lasagna, an unctuously simple risotto. But macaroni cheese? Milk, butter, flour and lots of cheese in a pan? No dice. I began to recognize the look of trepidation on the faces of my family when they realized what was in the oven. It was a look that was as much about the regret at having to tell me I had messed up dinner again as the thought of having to find something else to eat that wouldn’t stick to their insides like river mud. They certainly weren’t going to eat my mac ‘n’ cheese. That was destined for the garbage. The only thing it might be good for is combating the effects of Cyclospora. And so I became Ahab to my macaroni’s Moby Dick. I followed recipe after recipe, determined not to let this thing beat me. But there are only so many mealtimes you can ruin. My wife and daughters considered some kind of intervention to save me. Macaroni cheese came to symbolize the beyondness of things for a middle-aged father of two girls. I have limits. I fail sometimes. But then I saw its real meaning behind the pain. It dawned on me that for every macaroni-based disaster there were 10 triumphs. I had it all upside down. And the same is true, of course, for life in general. A midlife crisis can be debilitating because it blows up every negative and diminishes every positive. And I have much to be positive about. Hopefully you do too. As my children enter the white heat of adolescence they become harder to know and more independent. But even the occasional argument or misunderstanding is nothing compared to the love we all share. Just like with cooking, for every failure there are 10 things I’ve done right for them. The same is true of relationships and work. G.K. Chesterton (no relation) wrote: “The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.” When you lie awake at night worrying about your children and whether you are a good parent or not, produce sure you don’t ignore all those willing sacrifices you’ve made. When you feel useless, remember all that affection and care you provided and all the enjoyment you made feasible for them. Don’t let the mac ‘n’ cheese failures of this world overwhelm you. If being middle-aged is one battle after another, at least understand that you can’t win them all. You’ll probably win a lot more than you lose. For more on parenting, wellness and relationships, subscribe to The Good Life newsletter here.