Chapter 8: Yoohoo… anybody home…??

In Retirement 101, one of the first things they tell you is that you must prepare to lose the work-based community that has likely been the core of your social identity for many years. All those people in your office and your organization - the ones who know who you are, where you fit in, and how many coffees you have before 10am -  will fade away, faster than you can imagine. And even as you raise your last paper-cup toasts, and make your yearbook promises - “drinks soon!” - you know that without the daily intimacies of dull staff meetings, memo re-writes and glorious victories against the mad edicts of ministerial staff, there may be little left to your acquaintance. 

A steady job gives structure to your life; a 32-year career can define your entire social network, as it does mine (with some jealousy for friends who have had school and parenting circles to draw upon). Nearly every friend I have comes from my work. All my best stories. Most of the memorable snogs. 

Who will be my new little friends in retirement? Will anyone want to come out to play with me, when, let’s face it, most of my social skills have been built around my ability to make amusing quips about shoddy powerpoints during executive committee (a 12-bullet slide with no scalable graphics? Have they lost their minds??). True, as a diplomat, I have learned to make cheery small talk with any person, in any circumstance. Work-me is gregarious and can beguile any boardroom, zoom chat or dining table with undue fascination for local weather, trans-Atlantic travel mishaps or where to get the best morning scones in London (the answer is in the tea rooms of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Just delightful. Trust me.)

Real-me is the is Myers-Briggs card-carrying introvert, who is never entirely certain why anyone would want to talk with me. And the greater absurdity is that I have spent decades shunning invitations and plotting early escapes from dinners and parties, disappointing friends whose kindness I just haven’t always had the energy to accept. These very same wonderful - extraordinary, generous, hilarious and brilliant - friends who I now fear will drift away when they realize that real-me has much less entertainment or accomplishment to offer. 

I know this is irrational - an exaggerated self-effacement - but it is rooted in a reasonable thought: a career of doing interesting things does not necessarily make you an interesting person, and once you’ve bored acquaintances with your tales of exotic glories past, what are the qualities that you have to offer in friendship in this new retired world where nobody gives a shit about that time you shared a magnificent chocolate pie with Condeleezza Rice in the State Department executive dining room (which I totally did. And it was awesome. Do you want to be my friend??). 

You are now a 50-something year old kid, plunked into a vast playground with only your wits and monkey bar skills to rely upon. You may warily eye the clusters of ex-colleagues, strangers and neighbours and even your dearest, oldest friends, and wonder who will invite you to come to play. 

Or maybe some will see me - real-me, at last - swinging merrily up on my monkey bars, watching the world at a placid pace, and choose to be there too.

🐒🐒🐒

 Chapter 7: Wake up - it’s the first day of the rest of your life!

On the first day of the rest of my life, I slept horribly. 

I lay there tense and tight in my brain, my throat, my knees and feet, paralyzed with a dopey, undefined sense of alarm that is usually reserved for my dreams about trying to drive my mother’s station wagon from the backseat, with Kentucky Fried Chicken snack packs where my feet should be.

This, of course, made no sense, because according to my detailed retirement prospectus, the first week after ending work should be one of blessed relief, with long naps, mid-morning cocktails and general puttering about the house in aimless, bra-less bliss. 

Shrieking, suffocating brain terror was not pencilled in until week 8. 

Now, years of work-stress insomnia have taught me that 2:30 am is the absolute best time to make a methodical inventory of all my life anxieties. Did I leave the stove on? Are the dogs in the house? Did I get distracted and forget an appointment to destroy one of my mortal enemies today? You know, the usual stuff.  I scanned my mental horizon for the meetings and deadlines that were gnawing at my gut, or some other way that I might fail to deliver on a promise or plan. But of course, there was none. 

As of July 18, I am a woman without a plan (and a total palindrome fail). And that, on this very first day of freedom forever, turned out to be the one thing that completely freaked me out. 

Those who are wise in the ways of retirement will tell you to do nothing - NOTHING - for six months. Make no commitments or big life changes; don’t sign up for college classes, build a jungle gym or, for the love of god, even think about switching your nail polish colour.  Instead, find a cottage, a yoga mat or a well-worn dog bed, and hibernate while your work-weary soul unshackles itself from the old ways and old worries. 

Perhaps the trick of it all is to add by the same degree that you subtract. Take away a schedule full of corporate meetings, add morning strolls through the park. Finish your last performance evaluations, then volunteer to do something good for your community without expectation of reward. Sleep through the night without angsting about what you should have said to a treacherous colleague, treat yourself to a long overdue coffee date with an old friend. 

As I lay awake in the early hours of that first Monday and contemplated the gaping abyss of freedom that would mark every single day of the rest of my life, I did the only sane thing I could think to do. Panicked, went online, and at 3am bought myself a bright, beautiful wall calendar with big, open squares waiting to be filled with the gentle minutiae of a new, better life.

Or so I think, since I then fell back asleep with only the vaguest notion of a very dull dream about stationary, and a lingering suspicion that I might need to check my Amazon account in the morning...

🛌 🛌 🛌 

 Chapter 6:  10… 9… 8…

I have had a “countdown” app on my phone since last fall when, amid exhausting work crises and a few dispiriting personal realizations, the notion of retiring at 55 took hold in my frazzled brain.

This app is my favourite time-wasting toy - literally. When I have had a crummy day, I would open it up and watch the seconds tick away, or sometimes recalculate work days versus calendar days and find new ways to compress the passage of time so that my final work day could seem almost imminent. 

This was something of a stretch since, when I started, I think it showed close to 400 days to go… but each passing second was a tiny notch of optimism that brighter days would come. And suddenly, here we are. My final 10 days of work as a public servant, as a diplomat - as a person with a job and somewhere to go in the morning.

Now that it is here - this dreamed for, longed for, meticulously planned for time - the weirdness is not in the leaving, but in the complete lack of sense of what I am actually supposed to be doing in this time before the actual leaving.

There is an impatient surrealness to each of these final days, like living in a metaphysical parenthesis that is waiting to be closed. Chris de Burgh would have me in a half-life, on that train between Guadalquivir and Old Seville, biding time until the final cards are thrown down, and I can move on. 

Well, in my head, at least. And I said lord, oh lord, you’ve got to win! The sun is down and the night is riding in. That train is still on time and my soul is on the line…

In reality (so overrated and lacking in glamrock musical numbers), I continue to review briefing notes, sit in meetings, find pithy things to say about budget management, and - apart from an obvious and nearly unbearable air of smug giddiness - I go through my day as if it were A Completely Normal Time. 

Which it so is not. 

When I try to picture what the respectable final working days of a dedicated public servant should look like, all I come up with is golf and gold watches. Not quite me. But what constitutes a good end-of-career victory lap these days? 

Maybe there should be a concierge for soon-to-be-retirees, hovering modestly in the doorway to offer a delicate throat-clearing when we entrap terrified staff with one too many stories of glory days (You should have seen that memo! They don’t make punctuation like that these days, I tell you!). The concierge would make us sign our forms and tidy our recycle bins, and then effortlessly guide us towards cake. 

Through a year of counting down, I probably should have paid more attention to making these last days count. One last lap around the photocopier. A final flattened, greasy grilled cheese from the cafeteria. The ritual deletion of a 10,000 emails.

I hear the faint, disapproving cluck of my concierge. Not one of these things matter, and focussing on passing the time is far inferior to filling it up. How much gratitude can I pack into 10 days? How many messages to let people know how they have made my life better  can I send in 1,440 minutes before I hand in my laptop? Could there ever be enough time to express what all this has meant to me?  

I really hope the concierge ditches the watch and brings me a stack of kleenex instead.

⏰⏰⏰

 

Chapter 5:  You Just Might Find… You Get What You Need

On a warm May day in 1989, I wrote my final exam of my final year in university. Latin 101 (a bird course to fill out my credits while I waited to get my golden ticket into the foreign service). Spectacularly, about two minutes in, I realized that our glorious hippy-dippy prof had based half the exam on Rolling Stones’ lyrics. 

Non semper id quod voles.  You can’t always get what you want (but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need 🎶). 

I remember giggling maniacally in the gym, and then singing in my head like it was the Altamont Speedway concert - through the final stroke of the exam, and all the way down to the sticky velvet sofas of the old Duke of Somerset pub, as the power tune of the last hurrah of my last day of university. 

I think of this song every time I feel myself on the rising wave of a big change in my life. A wistful, yet euphoric personal anthem.  On June 15th - the day that marked one month til my final day of work before retirement - I idled in the Timmies drive-thru, and there it was on my radio. You can’t always get what you want, Tamara (unless it’s the Timbit multipack, in which case, you’re all set).

Life transitions come in different packages. Some announce themselves in big shiny boxes, with bold, type-faced labels: Marriage. Children. A new job. You open these with a sense of occasion, with care, and you make them a centrepiece of your life for years ahead.

Others sneak by you in a rumpled brown paper bag, the unforeseen product of a casual decision, or maybe something you didn’t order at all. It wasn’t what you wanted, but it is what you got.

I chose my university because I tried (and failed) to join the parliamentary page program. I joined the foreign service because I got dumped by my first real boyfriend, and thought that dramatically running away to a far-off land would be a comeuppance. Got engaged two months into dating my future, and soon thereafter ex-, husband because, well, he asked.

Sooo… thoughtful decision-making may not always be my strong suit… but the unexpected consequences of ill-planned life moments have brought me great joy. The incredible friends,  kooky adventures - and indeed, some fairly spectacular post-divorce snogs - are worth every detoured dream and silver-lined swap I have had to make. 

Choosing retirement now, at (not quite) 55, may well be a paper-bag decision - an urge for change that could just amount to the need for a really good nap. The sense of moment comes and goes, feeling more like the heady, concentrated freedom of a grade-11 summer vacation (Let’s steal the car and have the craziest 8 weeks ever!!) than the sober embrace of new - final??! - phase of life. 

And I don’t really know if I will get what I want in this next life transition - mostly because I don’t actually know what I want (aside from that nap. And many cocktails. And - why not? - let’s throw in some snogging). Living my life by the philosophy of the Rolling Stones hasn’t let me down yet, and I am sure that whatever comes next, I will have what I need.

🎸🎸🎸

Chapter 4:  The Money Thing. Sigh. 

Money - financial planning, your savings, a pension if you are lucky enough to have one - is central to retirement. It has to be. And, after health and hot flashes (you feel me, ladies), it’s what’s going to keep us awake most nights.  For me, 4 months away from my official retirement date, here’s what I have figured out about the money thing:

1. I am terrible with money.

2. No matter how reassuring the numbers look, I am legitimately afraid of running out of money when I am retired, and becoming poor and desperate and pathetic.

3. It isn’t really about the money. 

Public servants are not supposed to talk about money (at least not about getting paid). Public service executives, even less so. And diplomats? Eek. I think we are meant to live on the fumes of euphoria from serving the public good. 

Can you blame people, though?  I can’t. Despite the many misconceptions of what government work is like, we are so very - so extremely - fortunate to have the security that comes with a public service career, and especially now in these truly terrible, really just quite shit times for so many people. But you cannot talk about retirement without talking about the money. Your money. My money.  So I’m going to try. 

My money story is simply this: I have worked since I was 17 years old, and have never been without a job… until 4 months from now.  I worked to pay my way through university in all the usual crummy jobs, and then straight into government at age 22.  My dad worked until he died in his 60s - we emptied his office. Our mum is still running a small business at 82. 

If you peel back all the layers of my character (the fascinating creature whose words you continue to read here for unfathomable reasons) - you will find at its core a panicky compulsion to self-reliance. Being safe means counting on only yourself, and that means work. And work means earning money. My DNA does not let me trust in anything else.

Oh, I know how that sounds. Small-minded. Maybe a bit soulless. Irrational? Possibly. 

My panicky, self-preservation wired brain is at fault here. No matter how many times the maths of pension payments, CPP adjustments, RRSPs and tax benefits are explained to me, my untrusting brain scatters the data and locks my synapses in the blinding headlights of a single thought: it can’t be true. You are not meant to be safe. That is for other people - the ones with kindly grandparents who took them on sailboats and hayrides, and showed them how to grow old with grace and comfort. With parents who coached them on savings, and avoiding debts, and didn’t have to struggle to shield them from the shame of goodwill deliveries and food packages that left a permanent blot of embarrassment that has never quite scrubbed off.

So, point #3. It really ISN’T about the money. Clearly…

The irony of planning for my security in retirement, is that I am realizing that it is going to have to be about a completely new value system. If until now work = survival (and vice-versa), then what is the existential formula for retirement?  I suspect that the shocking answer to this lies in the idea of seeking fulfillment, rather than financial sustainability. I also suspect that some people figure that out much sooner I did. Damn their eyes.

But now I am wondering what is the cost of fulfillment. Effort? Experimentation? Enlightenment?

I don’t know yet. But I have a sneaking suspicion that fulfillment is not entirely free. So I had better get smarter about the money thing. Sigh.

💰💰💰

Chapter 3: When I am an old woman… which Golden Girl will I be?

(The answer is Maude. It’s always Maude). 

(Yes, I know her name is Bea Arthur, and she was Dorothy on the Golden Girls. But it’s my blog, and she is Maude.)

Most women know this poem:

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.”

(Jenny Joseph)

Who will I be when I grow up… and grow old?

There are so many questions that fill your head in the retirement planning process - where will I live? what kind of budget can I manage? how will I fill my days (do I need to fill my days?? can I just fill my wine glass instead?). You write lists and make calculations, study the Air Canada sale flyer, and mesh together a chaotic collage of the practical and aspirational decisions that will frame your passage into retirement. 

But really, the question that actually matters, and that even the most impressive of Excel spreadsheets cannot answer for you, is who will I be in this new phase of my life? 

And what kind of old woman will I be? Vivacious? Virtuous? Cranky? (I mean, cranky is a given. Ladies, we’ve earned that one). 

I have a 70-something cousin who goes to music festivals, lives for country & western dances with her husband, and puts pink in her hair. She is my fabulous ideal - at any age. Her mum, at 94, is sharp and hilarious and ate as much pizza as I did at our last family lunch. I love these women, and would be proud to be a tenth as cool.

And then there’s Maude.

That uncompromisin', enterprisin', anything but tranquilizin',
Right on Maude! 

We have been gradually taught to recognize how bombarded we have been with simple or sexist depictions of women throughout our lives, which have certainly distorted our sense of who we should be. As a child of the late 60s/early 70s, in a house with a big TV, my influences ran from Farrah Fawcett to a million generic tv moms and far too many strangely perky tampon ladies. But we also had Mary and Rhoda and Phyllis, and Major Houlihan, and Weezie Jefferson.. and we had Maude.  Not perfect women, not unproblematic as characters, but they were complete, dimensional women. They grew and even aged a little in front of us; they took chances, made mistakes, stood up for themselves (in their way),  and told us what they thought. All the little, pie-eyed girls of that era saw that life might be filled with a lot of compromises (too many diets, bad boyfriends and a troubling number of pant suits), but ultimately, you could be the star of your own show.

And then there's... me.

Thirty-two years as a public servant, even a moderately senior one, teach you to be an excellent supporting character. While you may have certain status, a title, some influence, your role is to support the success of the Minister, the PM, the government - and the Canadian people. That is what we do.  

In retirement, that show is over. You have no one else's star to make shine - just your own. You can be glorious, ridiculous, selfish, sassy, heroic, foolhardy, frivolous, invisible - you can be any character, don any costume, wear any hat. Even one that doesn't go. 

It sounds so free - so uncompromising, enterprising - anything but tranquilizing. Thrilling drama or a wacky new adventure each week.

But mostly what it feels right now is overwhelming. When we are still those pie-eyed little girls, we are scarcely conscious of the influences we absorb or the character-defining choices that we make. The universe is limitless, and the story will never end. 

Five or six decades later, we carry the weight of our wisdom and feel the consequence of every choice. Perhaps that's why the smart women begin with a hat.

👒👒👒

Chapter 2: Breaking Up (with my career) is Hard To Do

You are simply not human (or at least not an employed human) if you don't have a secret fantasy scenario of how you might someday leave your job, and have that one big, spotlight moment as you toss off your building pass, and walk out the office door for that final time.

There's the tried and true "Take This Job and Shove It" move, which has the advantage of needing little advance planning, and is bound to be an instant classic with co-workers who may also hate their jobs. 

Glam it up a notch, and you can ride out in a Jon Bon Jovi "Blaze of Glory", which, while still burning every bridge you had to the organization, will happily involve multiple rounds of alcohol in the office kitchen nook, and a daring, swooping smooch with a Commissionaire whom you mistake for 1980's super model Kelly LeBrock. 

Others leave their jobs with confidence at a low ebb, and the tearful wail of "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" daring the boss to finally recognize your value and beg you to stay (but the boss has skipped the farewell party, and sent an email with your name misspelled instead).

When you retire, though, there is no dramatic exit. No moment of comeuppance, flinging of government-issue iPhones or middle finger salutes. A retirement is gradual and patiently planned out. Above all, it is meant to be dignified. 

No, Jen, no! Put that flair back! As a retiree-in-waiting, you are now an esteemed Eminence Grise-roots of the department, graciously bestowing your unsolicited wisdom and witty anecdotes on the grateful masses. Until they can stand it no more. Then they have a little ceremony, toast you with tiny cups of LCBO's finest, and off you go, clutching your long-service award and whatever dry-erase markers were worth stealing from the supply room.  And yes, it is kind of dignified, in its way.

The fact is that, once you announce your retirement date, reality - or what you believed to be reality - does start to re-order itself around you, like an alternative Matrix where everyone wears sensible beige suits. Your perception of time and pressure starts to ease, while everyone around you remains in hyperdrive. They get blurry, and the precepts of their constant urgency make less and less sense. You become anachronistic to them, and to the organization, and then it is time to go. 

You can go angry, disappointed or resentful; but I think that, in the end, not that many actually do. I made a conscious decision a few years ago - when I really was mad and frustrated (a story for another time) - that this was not how I would end what has, in truth, been an extraordinary career. An extraordinary part of my life experience. And I won’t.

But I still want those kitchen drinks, and am definitely thinking about throwing the phone.

🏖🏖🏖