Reclaiming my blog as I reinvent my life: Prologue

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

It has been a little over nine months 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 manic energy, so 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. With that in mind, I am reclaiming my neglected blog and committing myself to the sharing of my journey.

The hardest part of starting this conversation – and I hope it will be a conversation – is that since I'm stepping into the great blue abyss of The Next Chapter, there are no clear endings for my posts. 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. But in this case, I don’t even know which way the story will go. I'm making it up as I go.

Several years before we made our decision to retire, a wise friend shared that an aspect of retirement not everyone expects is grief -- specifically, grieving who I am without my career. I knew this to be accurate 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 fifteen months because I didn’t know how to detach my SELF from what I DID (and--important point--was paid for). 

 A few weeks after we’d moved, I had my existential crisis defined while 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 to feel proud of, 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 thus I spent the next ten years writing a memoir, three novels, and a book on wedding customs before our eventual purchase of A Butler's Manor absorbed me and my writing time. Which of course also allowed me to further define myself: I'm an innkeeper. I’m a chef. I have purpose. The purpose makes a living.

So yeah, I heard my friend loud and clear when she said, Watch out that you don’t become derailed by grief over the loss of your working self. She suggested that I anticipate, read up on, and find ways to mitigate the grief at ending a career. Taking her advice, I sought out blogs from those who had gone before (notably Kathy's Retirement Blog), 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 even contemplate right now.)

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

The set up: We bought a 120-year-old house on 1-1/2 waterfront acres that 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 though specimen trees and shrubs, a white picket fence in the front, a flagpole over the car park. A wonderful old barn gives Chris his two-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 forty-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 there's no time frame 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 feel the need to redefine myself? Or will I know, truly, down to my bones, that I am enough whether I do anything or nothing?

Who can relate?