Reinstating my blog as I reinvent my life

August 20,2022

It has been nine months today since we closed on the sale of A Butler’s Manor, and about four months since we took possession of our new house in Connecticut. I have thrown myself into the organizing, painting, furnishing, and decorating of our new (old!) house with my usual manic energy, with the result that yes, it’s starting to look like I want it to and feel like home. I’m very excited about what I’ve done so far and plan to share it in more detail. But through a combination of factors, I realized that what I most needed to document is how I am learning to navigate my life in retirement. So I am reclaiming my neglected blog and committing myself to sharing my journey on it.

The hardest part of starting this conversation – and I hope it will be a conversation – is that I don’t know the ending of the story. As a writer who admittedly has concentrated more on blogging over the past however many years, I’ve always been conscious of writing pieces that wrap to a conclusion foreshadowed in the opening. So this is a challenge for me when I don’t even know which way the story will go.

The hardest part of starting this conversation is that I don’t know the ending of the story.

Me

Several years before we actually made our decision to retire, a very wise friend suggested that I anticipate, read up on, and find ways to mitigate a very real sense of grief at stopping work — specifically, grieving who I was without my career. I knew this to be true because I had already experienced it in 1992 when I left a fairly satisfying career as an advertising and marketing director in SoCal to move to the end of Long Island, where few similar positions existed. I foundered for the first 15 months because I didn’t know how to detach my SELF from what I DID (important point: for pay). I remember a seminal moment a few months after we’d moved and I was arranging for car insurance.

The agent, filling out the paperwork, asked what sort of work I did.

“I-I’m in transition,” I stammered, using the euphemism at the time for Between Jobs.

“Okay, a housewife,” he said, writing it down.

I went home and had a meltdown. A housewife! When at the time I was anything but. Chris and I were living in a small room of a large mansion he was running, with staff who took care of everything except us. I had no home to wife, no salary, no point to my life.

It wasn’t until I began writing and taking classes in publishing and marketing that I came back to life, now feeling I could assign myself a title when faced with the question of what I did. I was a writer. And I spent the next ten years writing a memoir, three novels, and a book on wedding customs before our eventual purchase of ABM absorbed me and my writing time. Then I could also say: I’m an innkeeper. I’m a chef. I have a purpose. The purpose makes a living.

So yeah, I heard her when she said Watch out that you don’t become derailed by grief over the loss of your working self. I sought out blogs from those who had gone before (notably https://kathysretirementblog.com/), where I noted that no matter what pre-planning you may have done, Life has a way of throwing you scary curveballs like illness or incapacitation. (Too scary to contemplate right now.)

So I feel that I came into this transition a little forewarned.

We bought a 120-year old house on 1-1/2 acres of property which had formerly been a retail nursery. The property ticked off nearly all of the boxes on Chris’s and my respective wish lists: water view, no cookie-cutter architecture, proximity to shopping, services, and ferry back to visit friends in the Hamptons, room for a garden, a garage, a workshop. We have a gazebo and wandering flagstone paths through specimen trees and shrubs, a white picket fence in the front, a flagpole over the car park. A wonderful old barn gives Chris his 2-bay garage plus 2-1/2 floors of workshop and project space, as well as space for a craft room for me. The property rolls gently down to a large, river-fed pond. It also came with a 100-foot greenhouse, a smaller 40-foot greenhouse, two hoop houses, a large, deer-fenced raised garden, and a whole lot of space suitable for nursery stock. What will we do with all of that? Who knows? All options are open. And no time frame is hanging over our heads. Years and years worth of projects to keep us both busy and from falling into the “Who are we without our business?” trap.

With my usual introspection and anxiety over what I can’t control in the future, I do wonder if I’m simply prolonging the meltdown by lining up all the projects. When I finish (if I finish) all of these things, will I still need to redefine myself?

Who can relate?