Retirement Discussions

So we had our family gathering for Memorial Day on Sunday, and “family” includes a LOT of people in my world. In addition to an incredible menu of traditional cookout delights, the hijinks of seven delighted children, and my beautiful daughters, I was privy to a fervent discussion between in-law and ex about the possibility and necessity of retirement.

My son-in-law’s father (Marty) is pro-retirement (as am I). My ex-husband (K), father of my children, is still working hard at age 67. Marty was trying to encourage K to finally retire. After listening for a while, I joined Marty in reassuring K that he would be fine financially (much more than fine). I mean, if I can manage, he certainly can.

K listened and argued and listed his reasons for putting off retirement again. Marty turned to me in bafflement. I said something like, “You’re right, but K’s refusal to retire has nothing to do with finances. It has to do with emotions. It’s all fear. He’s afraid of losing his identity and security, and no amount of logic can cut through that fear.”

What Not Working Means

I am so incredibly glad to be retired, but I’ve had my moments of free-fall. I was reading this essay by Hugo Dos Santos in LitHub this morning, and realized what he said about being laid off was the same for retiring:

Someone who has just been laid off is someone in the process of disappearing, and they know it, even if they can’t say so. The routines that informed the self are gone. Gone are the title, the inbox, the calendar invites lining up the days. What remains is the stubborn question underneath all of it, the one the routines were so efficient at keeping quiet: Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?

I probably had less trouble with this “Who am I?” question than many, because I might have spent ten hours a day getting to work, being at work, and coming home from work, but I never felt defined by work. I had a career, but it was also just a job. What I did for a living was never my identity. In fact I often chafed at working because I am a person who simply cannot stand to be told what to do. Ever. By anyone. This is the core of my identity, this stubborn opposition to the direction of others.

If you think I’m joking you’re wrong.

So the answer to “Who am I now?” after retirement is “Myself, finally.” But this means I’m my own manager. I’ve had a few good managers in my life, and the best of them (Kathy) understood that I could and would do ANYTHING if allowed to do it without excessive oversight and questioning and nitpicking and bothering. I would power through projects like a draft horse if left to my own devices. I don’t think I ever missed a deadline.

However, as my own manager, I find that I’m a recalcitrant and stubborn employee. I can be a total pain in the ass. I think this could be helped if I gave myself more deadlines. I love a deadline, I love meeting or beating them, I’m like a dog on a track to cross that line. I miss having deadlines. So maybe I’ll work on that. Or not.

Finding that Door

Here’s another passage of wonder and beauty from the essay.

What I told myself, during those years of not writing, was that the conditions weren’t right. That I needed more time. More quiet. More distance from the ordinary demands of a life. That the writing would happen once things settled. Things never settle. What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door. And somewhere within that structure, I had stopped thinking of myself as a writer and started thinking of myself as someone who had, at one point, desperately wanted to be one. 

Oh that gorgeous line: What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door.

I didn’t do that. I was always writing something. Poems or essays or blogs, even when the urge to write novels dried up. I’d write for work and feel an almost desperate pressure to write my own things instead, but I had those deadlines, you see. So I’d send myself an email with an idea or passage or just a phrase. Then I’d go back to whatever I was doing for pay. When I got home, I’d tap away at my own work. My real work.

This writer discovered that too.

The art happens in the margins between obligations, between the work day and the start of dinner, in the twenty minutes before the house wakes up. Or it doesn’t happen. The desk in the basement is not a retreat from life. It is inside the life. 

That’s why retirement works for me. Writing was always inside my life, my true identity. Retirement has taken away nothing. Instead, it has opened up space for the parts of my life I’d fit in around the edges of making a living. I understand that it’s different for other people, but it’s beautiful for me, a blooming place where words are allowed to take up the space they’ve always needed.

If you’d like to read this fine and lovely, click below.

Who Are You When You Lose Your Job? And Other Questions You Can Answer by Making Art