Ten Surprises When We Retired. And Ten Reactions.

By Karen and Erica

We had not thought much about life after retirement. Then retirement happened, and we were dumped headfirst into it. There were many surprises, good and bad.

Here are the top ten—and what we did about them.

1. We gained control over our time. We knew that would happen, but we were surprised how much we loved it. We exercised our control, gleefully. First, we had fun. We especially savored having fun in the middle of a weekday. Then we started using our time to figure out what twenty-first century retirement for career women might look like.

2. We mourned the loss of or jobs. We loved our work, and our colleagues and work communities. We had lost them forever. We ultimately understood that a mourning process was necessary, and we needed to go through it, and it might take a couple of years. This we did not expect.

3. Our identities crumbled. We were quite surprised to understand how closely our identities were tied to our work. We were still the people we were the day before we retired, but since we could no longe identify ourselves with reference to our jobs, we actually had to come up with a new way of seeing who we were. That meant we needed to find new purpose in our lives. If we had thought about it maybe we would not have been surprised. But we didn’t.

4. We discovered no-one wanted to use our experience. This was a real stunner. We could not get anyone to figure out how to structure a position—project based, for example—that would allow them to use our experience. We decided the problem was that no-one really knows who we are and what we can do. So we started Lustre to fix that. We also had an idea—America’s Future Corps— that the federal government could use to jump start improvements to our public education system by deploying the expertise and patriotism of retirees. We went to Washington to try to sell the idea to Congress. We’re still trying.

5. We learned not to use words that start with “retire” if we wanted company. They turn everybody off because they think we mean we are in retreat. We are most certainly not in retreat. We were in transition and now we have arrived. We tried to come up with a new set of words. We have failed, so far. Any ideas?

6. We need to reinvent clothes. We knew we wouid not be practicing law any more, and we looked forward to great new wardrobe options. We still want project an appearance of elegance and experience, but we don’t have to be quite so corporate. We were surprised how few designers want to dress us. We think maybe they don’t know we are here. We want to change that.

7. We learned that Boomer women are among the wealthiest cohorts in the United States (though some of us are among the poorest.) We also learned that almost no-one targets us in marketing and sales—for fun stuff, that is. Only for products to help us deal with our presumed weaknesses. That seemed very un-capitalist to us. We decided we needed to change that too.

8. We were surprised to learn that a woman who retires in her sixties has decades to live. This is an unprecedented new life stage that is the result of advances in medicine and lifestyle choices from which our cohort benefits. We realized we all should shape this new stage of life to give us maximum options..

9. We realized it was critical to have a friend to talk to about what we were experiencing. We had always valued friendship, and when we entered the career workforce we relied on the support of other women working with us. Then, we had lots of people to turn to. After we retired, we felt very isolated. Were we the only ones feeling weird? We needed to find friends to talk to about what we were experiencing.

10. Most surprising—and something we achieved only after a few years—we realized we don’t want to go back to our old jobs. We have figured out how to have purpose in our post-career lives, and we have greatly expanded our horizons. We have met amazing women—and men—whose paths we would never have crossed in our careers. We love what we are doing now. That is the best surprise of all.