WARMING UP TO UNEMPLOYMENT

    

I've been unemployed for 2 years now...though sometimes I prefer to call myself retired. I've also been 60 for 3 years ...that is I've been warming up to the reality of my present age. It is a challenge to suddenly have no external purpose, no structure to your days and great insecurities about whether or not your life at this time has a purpose. Time becomes a true flow. Being the habitual human that I am, I have seen how difficult it is to teach an old dog new tricks. Adapting to change is never easy. But I have noticed that over the past two years, I have become much better at allowing myself to live life without a plan. Wow. That is a novel idea...that a person can live without an agenda of to do's. It has been slow, but I find myself now warming up to the idea of not having to go to work for someone else. Suddenly I am my own boss. For the first time since I attended kindergarten...my schedule is for my own making. There is freedom and exhilaration in that thought. Like a bird freed from a cage, the joy of flight is intoxicating. Suddenly all things whimsical and put on the back burner for my whole life of nurturing others, are possible. Art projects, poems, writings, makings of all sorts be they cooking, cleaning or shaping behaviors have suddenly become possible. I am startled and astonished by the potential. My lifelong habit has been to steal time for my creative endeavors. Write when Sam naps, when I'm at lunch, on door watch, driving between appointments...wake up an hour earlier than I need to so I can drain my brain on paper. From the first days of school on, someone has been telling me what to do.

      I had a brief exchange of messages with a friend on Facebook last week. Something she said has stuck with me all week. She said she was fine but "very busy doing nothing". I had to chuckle because so often it seems that if I was an outsider looking in, I would see myself doing nothing as well. I mean, I'm not working or making money...no one is depending on me ...except maybe Gracie. I cook and clean and grow food and write and paint and love my family and walk my dog. Company comes and I am happy to take care of cooking projects so I can give my full attention to my house guests. As I look more carefully, I see that I am calling all these activities "nothing". I feel the lingering effects of past judgements I've made of my own mother. As a kid, I perceived my parents as polarized. To me...my Dad had a full creative life as a professional architect who met interesting people and experienced new places. He was a great story teller and delighted his kids with stories of his own boyhood. We hardly ever saw him because he was self employed and worked 6 days a week. His life in comparison to my mother's was so much richer and more fun in my child mind. My mother on the other hand, was always home bringing up 5 daughters; cleaning, cooking, taxi driving...all that makes up the life of a  mother at home. I perceived her life as boring and insignificant...small and somewhat self centered. She had some activities she loved, but mostly I thought of her life as a jail sentence. I feel very lucky to have become a mother myself and so learned to eat my judgments on her life. My son's growth and development has taught me the richness of a mother's life in the home. In hindsight, I've even become grateful for the choice I made repeatedly over the years, to be a mom at home for my kids. Isn't it funny how we learn to love what in the past seemed disgusting. With all kinds of attention issues, I have never been strong as a multi-tasker. Stephen and I decided from the get go that we wanted one of us to rear our kids and the other would focus on the job of providing.
   
     It was a sharing of gender specific jobs and as much as I resented the stay at home, wipe the noses, cook the meals of the home-based woman at times, I look back with gratitude and pleasure for what that choice has created. Now that my 2 boys are all grown up, I am repeatedly reminded that the choice I made early on is part of the reason they are such wonderful human beings now. And I am reminded of women's work in general; teaching, social work, nursing, behavior shaping...all are jobs that seem undervalued by our society. Women are under valued in the most basic ways made crystal clear by the fact that women only make 70 cents to a male's dollar. Why does this still hang me up?
Because I actually chose the life that I had judged severely. As soon as I became clear that I wanted nothing to do with marriage and children, I met Stephen, got married and had 2 children. I have lived my life in counter point with myself. But somehow I came to learn that the undervalued job can be the best job in the world. Everything took second place to my marriage and family. While I was living along that path, I felt resentment and anger. I felt trapped. I lost my temper and stole whatever time I could to express myself. Now the guys are grown and gone and it is just Stephen and I with Grace and the chickens. I can read if I want...or felt or paint or write or ski. I look back on my mothering years with only 1 regret...that the whole time I was bringing up my boys, I thought there was something else I should have been doing.  What I wished I did  was be there 100%.

     Now I have 100% of my own time! And like a bird freed from a cage, I can swoop and soar to my hearts content calling my own shots and working on my own agenda. It is awkward to have the time I used to steal. My creative endeavors pale in importance to the rearing of my sons and the sharing of my marriage. Before, everything was well planned and scheduled...busy, busy, busy. I tried to be productive with every moment. Now that I've shed that skin, I feel weightless. It has caused an anxiety in me. So long accustomed to being the caterpillar moving slowly along, it is scary and strange to take flight. I talk to myself all the time to argue with the inner voice that berates me for not having ambition  and life plans at this moment in time. I tell myself that I have worked my butt off for my whole life long...since I began babysitting in 7th grade. I have given to the world in the jobs I have chosen and now it is time to give to myself. So when I hear a woman say she is busy doing nothing, I have to giggle, because her "nothing" is made up of so many important things. And besides, when the universe asks you to dance, it is necessary to put everything down and let the universe take the lead. Suddenly being unemployed has become the greatest gift I can give myself because there are so many nothings I want to do.