Retiring Is Hard to Do

I retired just over a year ago, and I’m just starting to figure out what “retirement” is all about.

I must admit, that before I gave my retirement notice, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I would do. I was, after all, still working as a college English professor, a job that seemed to require a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week commitment. I knew, however, that I wouldn’t be lying around on a beach chair in Hawaii; I wanted to continue to make a difference in people’s lives. I just didn’t know what that would look like.

I spent the first month of my new life walking around like a zombie. I cooked elaborate dinners, went on long hikes with my girl friends, and spent hours and hours pulling weeds in my garden and making tiny changes in my front yard landscape.

But I didn’t really feel like I knew what I was doing. I was “just keeping busy” enough to fool myself that I “was retired.”

Finally. about two months into this new endeavor, I made some critical decisions. Not that I was sure of them. Not that I was confident that I’d continue to do them forever. I just felt like I needed to make some decisions in order to be productive.

I continued to create new recipes and post them on my recipe blog. That was fun for about nine months, and then, all of a sudden, I decided that the pressure of posting recipes every day was a bit like working again. Since the beginning of 2022, I’ve only posted one new recipe. I feel fine about that. Instead, I’m enjoying watching my older sister post gorgeous photos of her cooking on FACEBOOK. I like to think that I’ve inspired her to display her own cooking talent with confidence and pride.

During the summer, I planted an herb garden that tickled me to my very core. I had basil, thyme, oregano, chives, parsley and mint growing lushly in pots just outside my kitchen window. I used the herbs in my new recipes, blended them into pestos and herb sauces, and dropped them into pitchers of water for cool summer evening thirst-quenchers. Along the way, I learned some incredible secrets about how to enrich the soil with calcium and when to plant cilantro, an herb that doesn’t grow well in summer.

I decided to take up Spanish again since I hadn’t been able to practice much while I was teaching English courses. I found my old Spanish books and got to work. Every day, I wrote sentences, used a flash card app to practice vocabulary, and even told my Argentine son-in-law what I was doing. That, I thought, was brave.

I also started writing a novel that had been simmering in my head for a couple of years. I told people I was doing this, but I also explained that I didn’t have any requirements except to write it. As soon as you tell people you are writing a novel, they ask questions like, “When will it come out on Amazon?” “What percentage of the book have you written so far?” “Can I read what you’ve written so far?” I decided that, since I was retired, I wanted to experience complete freedom in my writing: no deadlines, no demands, no rigid outlines, just the sheer joy of being creative and writing from my heart.

I also took a giant step. I joined a women’s club so that I could help raise money and award scholarships to students going to college. This was my jackpot activity, I thought. By working with this club, I would continue to make a difference for college students; however, what a commitment it might turn out to be.

At one of the women’s club meetings, one woman said, “Retirement is a time when you keep reinventing yourself.” After about six months, I knew that was true.

My Spanish practice was fine, but, whenever I tried to speak it aloud, I forgot all my vocabulary. My brain fogged up and my eyes got buggy as I dug around in my head for words, so I signed up to practice with a tutor online. Jessica was fabulous, but, I noticed that after twenty minutes into an hour lesson, I was watching the clock and getting frustrated. Finally, a friend told me about some weekly, online adult ed classes which would allow me to learn at a less strenuous pace. I signed up for a summer course and found the right fit. I’m now taking Spanish 2 for this year, and I can keep taking these classes up to level 5. After that, I’ll reinvent my Spanish learning.

The writing of my novel has proven to be more successful than I ever dreamed. My main character has traveled across Argentina and into Chile in pursuit of finding out what she wants to do with her life. She’s gutsy, intelligent, and courageous, and, most importantly, I like her. I’m still getting those annoying questions from people about deadlines, but I’m more confident about asserting that I have “no rules or expectations.” What they don’t know is that when I get to the end of my story, I’m going to start at the beginning and rewrite it. They must think that my writing is so good that my first draft drips with eloquence and comes complete with sophisticated figures of speech. I’m okay if they think that. I’m just enjoying the writing.

I’ve given myself a break when it comes to cooking, and my husband and I go out to eat more often. My herb garden is dormant for the winter, and my freezer is stocked with pestos and herb sauces. And you’ll never guess what happened just nine months after I retired and only six months after I joined the women’s club. I volunteered to be the Chair of the Scholarship Committee even though the other women on the committee all have at least ten more years of philanthropy experience than I do. I’ll try to act like a student of philanthropy and listen as I lead a group that is much wiser than I.

One day, I sat down in my living room to take a break from all my projects. My husband was sitting in a big arm chair. His Kindle was on the table beside him, and he was staring straight ahead of him, his eyes and mouth relaxed and content. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’m relaxing,” he said. “I spent my whole life working hard. I’m going to spend my retirement relaxing and having fun.”

Oh, I thought. I don’t know how to do that.

Hmmm. It’s time to reinvent myself, again.