Some reflections
on how I got to where I am now…
I retired at age
61, several years before I thought I would.
One day, I simply had had enough.
I had accepted a position that I had once thought I’d
never accept, as a manager. I’d been a
children’s librarian for many years, and loved the front-lines work, the
story times and class visits, the connecting a child to the right book. I never wanted to be a manager, and passed up
a clear opportunity to go that way several years earlier. But now I was a few years away from
retirement, and I had the chance to boost my income to get a better
pension. Plus, I didn’t want to train
some young newcomer how to do the job (with the possibility that I’d have to
endure a bad boss in close quarters). I
knew plenty about what bad management looked like. So, I took the job.
What I hadn’t
really bargained on was having managers above me who were far from ideal. My immediate supervisor did or could not
mentor me; I had the sense she herself was way in over her head. Her supervisor, the big boss, had few people
skills. The writing should have been on the wall when I got the job. They not only made me jump through hoops to
get it when it should have been an easy stroll in the park. Then, the big boss offered me the position
minutes before an all-staff meeting so she could announce it, without really
giving me the particulars of salary, etc.
Oy vey.
I actually wound
up mostly liking being a manager, as long as I was in my own little children’s
library and away from the bureaucracy.
But that was not to be, and one day, after feeling ill-treated at
another all-staff meeting, I had had enough.
In addition, the city was threatening to come after our health benefits. I decided to get out while the getting was
good.
Why does this
come into the picture? Well, I had no
idea how burned out I actually was. For
four months after I retired, I still couldn’t do much of anything. I had attempted to ritualize the transition, having been warned by my friend and elder Leona that it was extremely important to do so. Regardless, I started getting symptoms, problems
in my digestive tract, from one end to the other, and which no one, neither
allopathic doctors nor many, many alternative practitioners, could truly
diagnose or heal. This was another
beginning to my story of healing, or maybe of aging. Or both.
Almost eight years passed before my SIBO diagnosis came in. And now, in a 69-year-old body, of course
aging is front and center. I am turned
towards my mortality, even as I still have trouble truly believing it. How can I be old? How did that happen? And as hard as it is to comprehend, the fear
of it is omnipresent.
About a year
after my retirement, we began to consider moving from the peninsula, where we
had lived for over 30 years, to the east bay, to be closer to our children and
our new granddaughter. Only friends
really held us there; Barry particularly hated what the area had become – a
fast-paced, shallow, Silicon Valley-dominated rat race. We put our house on the market after getting
it into better structural and cosmetic shape.
It didn’t sell. We continued to
make changes, swapping the old wood paneling for clean white walls.
semi-staging the bedrooms. In the middle
of all this, I broke my foot.
One night, home
alone, I got up from the couch and somehow tripped. I went down hard, my right foot turning
under. It hurt a lot, so I drove myself
to urgent care, and sure enough I’d broken it.
They put a boot on me (Which I had to remove to drive home), but at the
next day’s doctor’s appointment they told me I couldn’t walk on it. I rented a knee scooter, an annoying
contraption, but preferable to crutches.
People would come to look at the house, and I had to scoot around the
block to Starbucks because I couldn’t drive.
On our weekly visits to see Ruby, I had to go up and down their stairs
on my butt while Barry carried the scooter up.
The only bright side to this was that Ruby thought the scooter was a
blast. She’d perch in front of my knee
and we’d scoot around the house.
Most of the time,
though, I felt housebound. It was
stressful. We had to keep the house
perfectly clean for potential buyers, of which there were not many. I knew I could fall into a depression given
the circumstances, so I came up with the idea of regarding this time as a
writing retreat. I started this blog, which
I named Hanging Out with Hecate, because
it felt like we were stuck at a crossroads, unable to move on. Hecate is the goddess of the crossroads and
plays a small but pivotal role in my beloved Persephone story. Hence the title.
This idea of
reframing is significant. I chose to
make lemonade out of the lemons, as the saying goes. Of course, it wasn’t a panacea, and there
were still plenty of times of depression and fear. But it helped.
The house
eventually sold. My foot healed. First, I got to dump the knee scooter and
walk on the boot. Then, I got to
gleefully throw the boot in the trash.
Everything changes. A good thing
to keep reminding myself. It sounds prosaic, but much of the time my mantra these days is: This will pass.
