Is it still a mid-life crisis if I have it at the age of 54?

​I've been meaning to update this blog, but I've also been putting it off because I feel like there's quite a bit to cover and I really don't know where to start.

Latest update about the wife. I don't really remember how much I've told you about my wife but what you need to know is that I married a narcissist and we have a kid and I don't think I'll ever leave her because I fear it would mess up the kid.

I've more or less stopped paying her credit card bills. She did hand me her credit cards for keeping after I got very upset about her insane spending last year but almost immediately, she found a hack which was to use her TnG e-wallet which are connected to her credit cards and pay for things with that and she racked up tens of thousands of ringgit within days. And she "needed" to travel and needed her cards back so I did give them back to her but I've stopped paying for them. Now they are perpetually maxxed out and she refuses to cancel her cards, so I refuse to pay for them and I just pay the interest monthly. I know what you're thinking - isn't it better to cancel the cards and just not pay any interest? Yes it is, but since she refuses to cancel them, I can't make her do it until her card expires. I'll renegotiate with her when her cards are expiring and there will be a big round of playing the victim and claiming I don't love her if I don't let her keep her cards. But for now, long story short - it's cheaper to pay the bloodsucking credit card companies their exorbitant 18% p.a. interest every month than to keep paying off my wife's credit card debt and enabling her compulsive spending habit. Also, our house is just full of her stuff that we have to step over now. The whole house is a mess. Apart from our son's room and my man cave, which are off limits to her, and the living room, which she has to keep relatively tidy to maintain the illusion that she is a normal person, the entire house is like an episode of Hoarders. Actually, I'm just saying that, but I've never actually seen Hoarders. It feels too traumatic.

Most of the time, I'm just trying to hang on to my sanity and trying to bring up the kid more or less on my own now while my wife runs around being a socialite. She still needs money to live her lifestyle, but since her credit cards are maxxed out perpetually, she has to ask me to put money into her bank account every day. I'm not a control freak. I actually hate the hassle of having to transfer money to her account every day, sometimes several times a day, but I don't really see another option so this is it for now.

I keep telling myself, it's okay, I'm doing this for my son. But some days, the little shit is just angry and ungrateful and reacts to minor things with abusive language, saying things like, "Are you stupid?" which is one of his favourite phrases now. I just leave him alone and go about my day trying to stay calm and usually he calms down and apologises later. He has his mother's temper and it makes me worry about him a lot. The other day, he called me an asshole for disagreeing with his opinion. Later when he calmed down and apologised, I told him I'm not hurt, I'm just worried his choice of words will become a habit and his habits will become his personality and then he would find it difficult to fit in in the world, but having said that, one of the most abusive people in the world is the president of the United States, so what do I know, maybe he will be okay. He said that's not the kind of person he wants to be. I said I think those kinds of people become rich and powerful but they also seem very unhappy.

Anyway, I think he'll turn out alright. Poor, but alright.

But I gotta tell you, those days when he presses my buttons, I really wonder, "What's left to hang on to in this family?"

I think that may be why I've sort of been doing more of what my wife has been doing - which is living her best single life. Her activities are mostly eating and shopping and mine are - I want to say rock climbing and comedy - but to be honest, lately, it's really mostly rock climbing. I thought I was having a mid-life crisis thirteen years ago when I started doing comedy, but that's nothing compared to this. This is the real mid-life crisis, at the age of 54. I think maybe having a mid-life crisis hasn't got so much to do with your biological age but where you are in life. At some point your wife is jaded and your kids hate you, so you say fuck it, I'm getting a Corvette. Except I didn't get a Corvette. I got back into my old activity that I used to do before I got married, which is rock climbing.

I think it's no wonder I'm liking it so much. When I'm at home, I do the dishes, do the laundry, the wife and kid has zero respect for me, I go to the climbing gym, everyone is happy to see me, I work on my project route, everyone's going, "Come on, Sim! Allez, Sim! You can do it, Sim!" and then I redpoint it and it's cheers and fistbumps all around. So I can see why my wife is out all the time. She's surrounded herself with people who likes the expensive dinners she buys them and now I've surrounded myself with rock climbers. I would like to think that is different but in a way, we are the same. We've both kind of found our people.

Having said that, I also know this is an illusion. It's all positive vibes at the gym because we know only enough about one another to be supportive of each other within the context of our shared activity but if we knew each other better, we're all flawed and tangled up in difficult messy lives. Still, it is addictively nice to get an "Allez" instead of "Are you stupid?"