The Drive to Produce

and the need to retire

I started working at the age of 10 when my mother went into a cycle of medical situations where she was either in the hospital recovering from surgery or about to go into the hospital for surgery. The legitimacy of all of those procedures is debatable and yet, it was the reality I lived with. As the oldest child and only daughter, it fell to me to make sure my father and brothers were fed, the house was as clean as I could get it (my mother did not set the bar very high for that), and my brothers and I caught the bus on time and got our homework done.

I had my first son in 1978 and a few months later, moved to Guam to join my military husband, Paul. I transferred from taking care of my family in Kentucky to taking care of my family on Guam. Within a year, I found a job on the Air Force base and from then, at the age of 17 until early 1998, I was in the work force doing everything from bussing tables to teaching childbirth classes to working in an OB/GYN front office to being a medical transcriptionist to acting as administrator at a preschool to being a telephone operator to working on a HAZMAT team.

When you are a military wife, you take whatever job you can get at whatever base you happen to be at and that is what I did. For part of that time, I was a single mother of four working three jobs after Paul and I divorced… twice.

I spent most of my life working hard in some capacity, either in the work force or as a mom raising kids or both. Eric and I bought a computer repair shop in early 2014 and it quickly became our first metaphysical store. Out of that tiny shop grew Crossroads Metaphysical Store. We loved it but wow, you just don’t know how much work goes into running a business until you run a flourishing business as its only employees. When a store has to open five days a week and you’re going to work 14-15 hours each day, it’s pretty unforgiving no matter how much you love what you are doing.

It was an amazing experience and the shop even managed to somehow survive the COVID closures. We built the store we wanted to go to and that energy attracted people who were a lot like us.

In 2021, we lost our house in the Caldor Fire and all we had to our names was what was in the store and the little bit we could get into our two cars when we evacuated. The community we’d built around the store gave us unfathomable support, which is what got us through, as well as our love for one another and faith in The Process.

Almost immediately after the fire, I had a series of medical procedures, including two surgeries, due to a cancer scare. During that year, we rented a small modular home until we moved into our new home in late 2022. The new house was further from our shop than the rental home was and it is difficult to describe how incredibly drained and exhausted we both were after that previous year.

In early October 2022, we decided to close the shop at the end of that month and retire. People had some things to say about us closing the shop and specifically about us retiring at such a “young” age. I was 60 and Eric was 45. We knew, however, that it was what we had to do. To be clear, “retiring” meant that I now worked seven days a week instead of five since we continued our online business.

Almost immediately after moving everything from the store to the house, rehoming many of the fixtures and furniture, Eric and I both came down with COVID for the first time. It hit him hard, but he was up and around again within a week. I had “long” COVID and was sick in bed for a month and coughing and weak for months afterward. I developed pneumonia after my first surgery in March of 2022 and as it does, COVID targeted me where I was weakest, which was my lungs.

As such, it was a few months before the reality of retirement settled on us. There was so much to do to settle the house after the store closed, integrating everything into the few possessions we still had and figuring out the dynamics of working entirely online without a storefront. We were sick or busy for a long time, so our experience of retirement was delayed a bit.

Once the house was finally settled, once our health was picking up again, and once we fully converted our business to online status, everything eventually found its place and its pace.

Which was weird.

It was as if we’d been running down a staircase at full speed for decades and very abruptly, hit the bottom. What would or could we do in absence of work and a formal career and raising kids?

For a while, it was a bit like playing hooky from school. People had told me, “You won’t know what to do with myself.” It was the same thing people said to me when Nathan, our youngest child, went to kindergarten in 2004. It was the first time I did not have any kids at home during the day since 1978. They were wrong. As I did in 2004, in 2022, I knew what to do with myself. I’d had a list for a very long time.

I wrote the last few books of the Seven Sisters of Avalon series, which I had started to believe would never find completion. I wrote Warm Hands, which I knew would be my final book. I did some editing work for Green Egg Magazine. Eric threw himself into the stewardship of the land, tending the fruit trees and taking out the trees that were not healthy. He took tons of classes. He went rock climbing and paddle boarding. He spent a year providing volunteer hospice support.

I did a lot of shadow work about my place in the world and who I could be without labels like “shop owner” and “mom” and “writer.” Now, I continue to feel myself retreating deeper into isolation, especially with such tremendous conflict out there in the world beyond my bubble. I can barely stand to be off my property these days.

Our social contract is one of service and in a capitalistic nation, if you are not pushing as hard as you can to make money and be productive, you might as well not exist. If you are not giving and doing and creating and serving, society struggles to know what to do with you and in truth, we sometimes struggle to know what to do with ourselves.

I often wonder if I should do more than I am doing, if I should have a Next Big Thing or some new project brewing. Even though I spend a good bit of time doing old lady things like painting paint-by-numbers and working on diamond art, I always wonder if it is enough. I constantly ask Eric if he needs me to do more or be more and he always tells me no, that I’m doing just fine.

I understand why so many people die soon after retirement. I used to think it was the math of the causation/correlation issue of it being mostly old people who retire, therefore, they were already closer to death. Now, I think it is more of the spirit wondering why it should be here if not to produce and have the gratification of income to validate what we do in a day. The indoctrination is strong and it is insidious and it is brutal.

The need to have a flurry of activity to prove myself has mostly abated. I find joy in being present in the moment, in each moment, hyperaware of the here and now and of the luxury I have to retire, even if I have to live frugally to do it.

I burn incense. I open windows to feel the wind, which is pervasive where we live. I reach out to people I love. I create art, which is something I never imagined I would do. I connect with most of my kids on an almost daily basis.

I sleep. I watch an unbelievable amount of streaming entertainment. I pray. I sing karaoke. I go to the movie theater to see a film now and then. I meditate. I cook. I try and fail to learn to play the piano.

Mostly, I just breathe.

I don’t know what part of all of this is broken, if any of it. I know our society is set up in such a way that the work force wrings as much as it can out of us and that this is so much, so much worse now than it was when I was the one getting wrung out even a few years ago. Raising kids is hard, unrelenting, and often without reward. The true expectation of the world is that we will work and work and work until we die and if we do not do that, then we have no value.

The obligations of family and work squeeze us and squeeze us and when and if we ever get the privilege of retiring, the sudden release of that grip is stunning and often, we don’t know what to do in response to that release.

The trick is figuring out what your value is to you and what you need to thrive. I think one of the biggest adjustments of retirement is transitioning from getting your validation from other people to getting it from yourself.

It is hard to believe that we can have value simply by who we are. Life doesn’t set us up for that kind of thinking. We are forced to develop it on our own… or not. Because it doesn’t come naturally to us, we question it when we do feel it. For all of the affirming internet memes and “You are Enough” platitudes, at our heart of hearts, we often don’t believe what others tell us about our value, much less what pixel words superimposed on a pixelated image says.

No matter how many people validate us, we have to believe it, and truly believe it, all the way to our bones to be OK. Otherwise, the need for approval becomes a thirst we cannot quench that is exhausting for us and everyone around us.

That’s my new project, my “Next Big Thing.’ I am determined to truly feel like I am enough.

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