askyermom

I almost forgot to do this and now I wonder if I almost always forget to do this. It’s been a pretty wild year, particularly the last part when my life force made the decision to retire from my job. I already wrote about that in a general way, but the way the universe spit me out into retired life is, well, oddly noteworthy.

Last summer, we had a family vacation, which I offered to arrange. It is incredibly difficult to find a house to rent that can accommodate 14 people without having six fold-out couches or a dining room that only seats half the group at one time. The beans’ requirements were tough, too. We had to have a baby-safe pool and not travel too far, not at the beach, and the bedrooms had to be sufficient for the collection of couples in our configuration.

Lake houses, I learned, almost never have swimming pools, and some private pools are salt water or may host several generations of frogs. When you have a daughter-in-law who studies marine biology, nothing will persuade her to jump in a lake, so lakes were out. Finally, I found a sort of historical compound that met all the requirements, and as a bonus was somewhat haunted and even had horses we were not allowed to talk to.

The place had been seriously remodeled, if not to modern safety standards, at least to modern photographic standards. We all agreed that the excess of terraces was a problem as people continually stepped off of surfaces to wobble with alarm. I was tremendously charmed by the servant stairs and used them all week, even though they were forbidden. There’s nothing I enjoy quite the way I enjoy a secret passage in an old house. Boo!!

It was too expensive and too remote and too good at giving people reasons to kvetch, so we are skipping it this year. I loved it but I’m not gonna make everybody pack up and go to the country just so I can startle them from a trap door every day.

In the Fall, my house needed masonry repairs. Wasps were getting in during the previous winter and in the course of investigating that ridiculous problem, I learned that the house had a bigger secret. While no one could explain how paper wasps were bopping into my bathroom all winter long, the way they entered the house was a snazzy gap where the mortar had fallen out. It was a couple of feet of brick work, crumbling way up high. One of my architects said it was normal for the south face of an old building. Still that normal bummer cost me a chunk of money and required unhinged emails from a contractor who wanted to overcharge me twice. He had no idea who he was dealing with and probably still ponders his misfortune from time to time. For me, I visited a special kind of hell, designed for a safety person, to watch people doing very unsafe labor and having no authority to make it right. They did good work, nobody died and my odds of more wasps and manic baby squirrels in the attic are vastly reduced. I was very relieved and was convinced that I would not tolerate building anything above ground any time soon.

A forceful sense of self-acceptance swept over me in the past year. This has nothing to do with swimming vacations and wasps in my belfry, I bet. I just began to comprehend my situation in life from a much more complete vantage point. That sounds bonkers, but it’s the best I can do to describe the sensation. It’s sort of a gift of later life, maybe, that anything can be turned around for better understanding. When I acknowledged that I did not feel valued (this was about my job), I could immediately see that this was about my ability or inability to value myself. I understood my old baggage makes it difficult to appreciate good things, because in my life, good things were immediately snatched away when they were noted.

So many of my old struggles have moved over to teach me grace, like rolling over a log to find a new tree stubbornly sprouting. So while I am worried about large scale things, at the very same time I am blissed out on a personal level.

I began to understand that one of my impediments to forming close connections with new people is that my peculiar communications make most people uncomfortable and cause them to step back. A younger version of me who noticed this would have tried to filter myself to be more palatable, but not sixty-something me. I yam what I yam. Even as I feel like a tourist in the wrong place most of the time, I seem to have endless gumption to keep trying to find the new clubhouse.

Another item of growing understanding was that I could not progress much further as a person while having a full time job. I had stopped writing much at all and had a cycle of survival and restoration that was not improving in the longer term. Despite improving my own health, I had little steam left to do what mattered, and my days were filled with empty efforts.

Nothing is more entrancing than feeling resilient and open. That’s a note I wrote when I decided to decide to retire. I started a count down, which is so far the best way I have found to steer myself toward big action.

I am spending more time with people who have alarming illnesses. I find it easy to be optimistic and try to share those hopeful feelings without being too much of a jerk about it. I do not always succeed, and none of this is intended to suggest that I am somehow highly evolved. I am not above changing my evening walk to avoid the ice cream truck.

When I leaned into retiring (at least temporarily) in order to figure out what I wanted to do next, the necessity of being my own boss was staring back at me. My alarm clock broke, my family was having more emergencies, I was selected for a jury when somebody wasn’t paying attention, and finally my appendix flared up and demanded to be permanently retired.

My last days of work were in bedroom slippers with a foggy nonchalance. That is, I had a lot of nonchalance, not the slippers. They had just a little.

It’s a pretty great to heal up and feel that resilience and openness and to trust that whatever is next, is next, and it will be okay.