Time Cover Story

The Time magazine cover story of May 16, 2005 is called "A Female Midlife Crisis? Bring It On!"

The buzz around women's midlife renewal is getting louder all the time. Time lets us know "how women of this generation are seizing that stressful, pivotal moment in their lives to reinvent themselves."

Susan Reimer-Torn, visibility expert and founder of Women Inventing Themselves, is among those quoted in the cover story. The focus is on midlife as an opportunity to begin a whole new chapter. Read all about it below:

"Many feel that along the way, while they were getting their promotion or having their kids or managing their households, they set aside something important that they wanted to retrieve - their hiking boots, their screenplay, a law degree. Everybody I know has a version of this," says Susan Reimer-Torn, now a life coach in New York City. "Phase I, you kind of put all the pieces together in your mid- or late 20s, and it almost always involves some kind of trade-off. You figure out what you absolutely must have and end up giving up something else." In Reimer-Torn's case, her priority was a good marriage and raising a family, so 26 years ago, she gave up living in New York City to follow her fiancé to Paris. But in Phase II, which generally occurs after 40, many women begin to review the terms of that original trade-off. "For me, my career and where I lived seemed to be a dispensable piece of the puzzle in the first phase," Reimer-Torn says. "But at Phase II, they were not." She and her family moved back from Paris just in time to take care of her ailing 84-year old mother. "My mother was ill for the first time in her life and on a very deeply personal level, I wanted to be there for her, as I had not been for all those years."

Be Visible, Stay Visible: How Women Over 49 Can Command the Attention They Deserve

Click here to read this article in a new browser window.