Retirements all round me. Smiling people downing tools. I've already told every one I'm out next June. Did I reveal my hand too early? I can't decide if it is a mistake to give myself a lead year to come to terms with what is surely the biggest adjustment in life besides having a child, or I should have just sprung it on myself at the last minute? Which strategy will have made it easier? Too late now. I've given myself the year to perseverate.
When I was in my 40s, with the charm and sensitivity of the young and hale, I used to say that retirement was death's waiting room. Now I realize retirement is death's waiting room, and I don't find it nearly as amusing. I picture myself spending 30 years (I'm optimistic) in a room with saggy furniture, generic art and 5 year old copies of Skin, The Dermatologists Journal.
There are two things concerning me at the beginning of this year of perseveration: 1. in order to be truly excited about retiring, like say, the excitement before that first trip to Europe, you have find work a bit of a drag; I love my work. And 2., how will I make the adjustment from a highly regimented daily round of activities, dictated by the buzz of the bell marking the unchanging school days, to flapping about, unregulated, with no real clear motivation for getting out of my pyjamas?
I'll be really frank, I don't have the answer to either one. Everyone who knows me cries, "oh, YOU"LL have no trouble finding things to do!" in a way that fills me with the deepest misgivings. I have no such confidence. Much of my social life centers around school, where I have wonderful colleagues to chatter with all day. Retired, I fear that I will quickly become the slightly mad woman who strikes up conversations with strangers over the apples in the super market because she's outraged that they're mouldy smelling. I am, of course going to switch my allegiance from Principal to Writer, and will be writing the Great Canadian Cosy Mystery in order to give shape to my days. But the lure of helping, of working with youth and being inspired by teaching and learning has no match in sitting with the desert that is 1200 unwritten words before me.
I once quit my job for a year so I could be a stay-at-home-mom. In the beginning the house gleamed, meals were produced brightly and with a flourish at precisely 7 pm every evening, and I sat smiling at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and some cookies when my son tromped up the back stairs at 3:30. By the end of the year, so great had my disorganization become, that the house was in complete disarray, my husband was reduced to peering in the freezer to see if there was anything we could defrost quickly, or eat raw, I consistently forgot to buy milk or bake cookies, and I was nearly giddy with relief when my son's footsteps sounded on the stairs at 5:00, late, because the neighbour's mother, who worked, managed the after school snack. You haven't lived till you hear an 8 year old say "Well, what's the point of you?" I learned then that I needed routine to get anything done at all. Retire me, and you eliminate the routine. Retire me, and I live in my pyjamas for six months. What will I be like after ten years of retirement? I'll have stooped to actually reading the eye-gougingly boring articles in Skin. I'm not optimistic, on this, day 365 of my countdown to retirement.
