Retirement. If It Scares You, Get To Work.

By Karen and Erica

Did you retire at the end of the year? Or are you staring down retirement in the next few months?

If you are thrilled, good for you! You probably have a plan, and maybe you do not completely identify with your career.

If you are panicked, as we were, welcome to Lustre.  

We, the founders of Lustre, were successful lawyers in New York City—and also wives and mothers. We loved our jobs, We knew that retirement was coming, but we decided if we didn’t think about it or talk about it, maybe it would pass us by and let us keep working. We certainly had no plan in mind for what would happen next. We had gone to retirement parties of mentors and friends, and we really had no interest in the whole project. 

Nor, by the way did our families. We surely identified ourselves as lawyers, but so did our children. They had grown up with working mothers, and while that had its issues when they were very young, the benefits were many as they became a little older.  We were not there to bother them every day when they came home from school, and we sometimes invited them to become a part of interesting things we did, like Innocence Project matters. They could not imagine us not working. What, they wondered, would happen now? Would we become leeches who depended on them for constant companionship? Would we lose our minds? Obviously, nothing good would come of retirement.

But, however any of us felt about it, retirement came, And we had to figure it out. 

At first we were very tired. We slept late. We binged tv shows We went to matinees. We had slightly boozy lunches, usually with each other since everyone else we knew was working. Sometimes, we were lonely. Many of our friends were still working, and we had no ready-made community around us.  Sometimes we mourned the loss of our jobs. Sometimes we felt like we were in a deep fog, with no idea what the future might hold.

Of course, we didn’t just sit around. We got a little fitter. We experimented with new recipes. We read books. We decided to try our hands at other projects about which we had fantasized when we had no time for them. Erica went to design classes. Karen learned to fly. We could have done none of this when we worked. 

The children relaxed. We were filling our days.

But we began to wonder. We had learned that we might have a thirty year runway. Just filling our days was not enough to keep us energized.  We began to realize we needed purpose in our lives—purpose outside of our families. 

So we thought about what we might do, and we ended up making an offer to a wonderful non-profit. We would make a plan to expand the footprint of the enterprise, which they dearly wanted to do; we would do it in six months, for free; and  then we would get out of their hair. Brilliant! But—they said no. They worried that we would want to take over the entire enterprise, they knew we were not interns, so where did we fit in the organization chart? 

That’s when it hit us. We—the women now retiring from long careers, who had decades of sentient life left, and who wanted to stay involved in the world—we were unseen. Overnight we had become old, because we had retired, and overnight our value had been erased. 

Obviously, that was crazy. But we talked to many women in our position—and a few men—who were having the same experience,  

That’s how Lustre was born. We decided we needed to show what women of our age actually look like, what we wanted, what we could do, what we had to offer younger generations. In this century, women sixty-five or seventy-fine and older are actually pretty lively, and look it—nothing like the prevailing images of older women staring vacantly as they sit around in house dresses, doing nothing.  We would show our real selves in pictures, and describe who we were in words. We would change how we, and everyone else, perceived us.  

That became our purpose. That purpose gave us energy, and connection, and lots of new friends. We began to enjoy post-career life, which we now realized was an amazing gift, one that we are among the first large groups of people to receive.

So—if you have just joined the post-retirement world, and you are totally unnerved, do not despair. You will have to go through a few weird and difficult stages. But when you discover what excites you, you will start to feel like a kid again. A very experienced and wise kid. It will take time, and work, but you will start to have fun. We promise.