Aging Out or In? Not in My Retirement Chapter
Renee Lonner on the benefits of later-in-life work
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
My grandsons have aged out of day camp. My kids are now squarely middle-aged. And I seem to have aged out of my peer group. Next steps, anyone?
Worse yet, many people in my peer group have either retired or are counting down the days on a huge wall calendar, Sharpie in hand, practically salivating. In contrast, I love my job. I have always loved it, and I have zero intention of retiring. I am grateful that friends and family have stopped asking when I intend to do so, having finally tired of hearing the same response for years:
“And do what?”
As I look around, many older people act nothing like our parents did — although my parents were quite a paradox, which is maybe where I get my weirdness. They considered themselves “old” by age fifty-five, yet my father retired from a long-term career as an executive for a major corporation and was immediately recruited, at age sixty-five, for a consulting job. And that was in the 1970s.
I’ve begun to think that my current state may be the counterbalance to my childhood and adolescence, much of which I spent reading and studying, then reading and studying some more. Yes, I went outside and played with other kids. No, I did not have social phobia. But I did spend an inordinate amount of time just being a nerd. Now, the other kids are retiring and I’m still loving my work while also spending more time on my other interests, like writing and gardening, both of which nourish the soul.
To say I am happy with my life at this point would be an understatement. After watching women struggle with this question for decades, I have come to a simple conclusion: Yes, you can have it all, but not all at the same time. Show me a woman with a full-time career and children at home, and I’ll show you one exhausted female. Ask her what she does for herself, and she is likely to laugh uncontrollably, or cry.
When I was at that stage, I always said, “fine,” to the meaningless question: “How are you?” But the real answer was, “Tired, anxious, guilty. Aren’t you glad you asked?” I loved my career then, too. It’s just that there was too much day and never enough sleep.
In addition to fatigue, there were the normal but often consuming thoughts and worries many of us had during those years. In my case, the frequent crystallization of clinical meaning ten minutes after my patient left my office instead of ten minutes before the session ended. There were the usual parental anxieties when my son was born until the time he was eighteen, though maybe that should be twenty-one, or twenty-nine, or forty. There was the insidious guilt that nearly every working mother carries and the concern about my own parents’ health.
If you’re lucky, one day you wake up and your children have grown into lovely young adults, your career is stable and rewarding, and you are in decent health. Your anxieties have given way to actual space in your head for the next phase of your development: making some new choices for yourself. It turns out that age and stage do not always line up in the way they did for many of our parents and grandparents. Thank goodness.
At this year’s Tony Awards, two of the leading contenders for Best Leading Actor in a Play were Nathan Lane, age seventy, and John Lithgow, age eighty. Laurie Metcalf, who was seventy at the time, won Best Featured Actress in a Play for playing Linda Loman, the wife of Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman.
Several weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to see both Giant and Death of a Salesman on Broadway. The acting was stunning, moving beyond words. All three actors so fully inhabited their characters that the audience was mesmerized, transported into the worlds they had created.
Perhaps our culture needs to modernize its concepts and expectations of “older” people. We can start by seeing them as individuals, with very different capacities, appetites, talents, and timelines.
You know, kind of like people in general.
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