“I didn’t get dumb. I just retired.”

Several years ago shortly after my husband retired, he said those words to me.   I didn’t know what he was talking about or why he said that.  But now that I have retired myself, I know how he felt.  In one day’s time I become totally irrelevant.  Colleagues at work who claimed they didn’t know what they would do without my  participation figure it out pretty darned fast.  They don’t call with questions.  In fact they don’t call or email at all.

If it was just the work people it would maybe be understandable.  But it is not. It is everyone.

I happen to have a non-work relationship with former work colleagues. At those events they greet me  with words like, “It is nice to see you again” as though I were a dottering old aunt who came uninvited to Thanksgiving dinner.  Then they turn away to continue their conversation.  My input is not relevant.

I had lots of girlfriends.  One group is five women I have known since 5th grade.  We get together several times a year for lunch.  For years they were asking when I was going to retire so we could meet during the week instead of Saturdays.  When I announced my retirement date I expected them to be cheering but they were disappointed.  I think one of them commented that there would be no more stories about or souvenirs from business trips.  Now I am just ho hum. I don’t even have any illnesses to talk about.  How much more irrelevant could I be.

I used to drive myself downtown to work everyday and to most other places I needed to go.  Since I have retired my husband thinks I need to be driven everywhere.  If I say I am going to a store, by the time I come downstairs from putting on lipstick and getting my purse, he has his jacket on and his car keys in his hand, waiting to drive me there. And when I am at the cash register he rushes over to watch me pay.  I guess he thinks I got too dumb to handle my own money.

But the saddest is that my family used to be proud of my accomplishments.  I could hear it in their voices when they spoke to me or about me.  Now I don’t have any accomplishments for them to be proud of. I am the dottering old aunt who came uninvited to Thanksgiving dinner while my family rush about in their important lives. #

A couple months ago I had the opportunity to talk to a more successful blogger than me.  She has 2500 or maybe it was 25,000 readers where I have only 25.  She told me I needed to establish a theme and suggested that anything I thought or felt about retirement would be shared by other retirees.  And if I found a clever, humorous way to write about it, I would get more readers.  Well Stacy, I don’t like retirement and I don’t find anything humorous about it, so this is going to be hard to do.  But next Monday I am starting a Case Western Reserve/Siegal Lifelong Learning course on Satire.  Maybe I can learn how to be more clever and to write in a more humorous way.