by Sandra Lowen

Created on: October 21, 2009

RETIREMENT AND WOMEN

Women approach retirement in one of two ways: with hope and anticipation or with dread and despair. I've known women who pushed the employment envelope well into their seventies and even eighties, because they feared that not getting up every morning, not punching a clock or not having planned-out tasks to do would signal the knelling of church bells tolling their end. I've always been busy, one woman told me, and if I stopwell, what would I do with all that extra time? On the other hand, I've also known women who woke up with the larks the day after their retirement parties and launched into lives they never would have dreamed of.

An aunt of mine was the latter kind of woman. Her husband died when she was in her mid-fifties, and she found herself facing a mountain of bills that necessitated her working ten years longer than she intended. She woke up one morning and just decided she was 'done'. Over the next five years we received a deluge of postcards from exotic portsEgypt, Israel, France, India, Chinaher house filled up with letters from friends with foreign names and mementos of faraway places. Hale up to the last few days of her earthly existence, she summed up her travels from her hospital bed: I saw the world while I was still in it. It's really something, the world.

What does retirement mean to women?

Once we matriculate into college, or start a career, or enter marriage, most women leap into the fast lane of life. As children move away, as we run out of 'lifetime' education courses to take, as we find ourselves relegated to the role of 'non-essential advisor' at work, we realize that retirement looms ahead. Deciding whether withdrawing from a moneymaking, responsibility-laden existence into a more relaxed mode means defeat or opportunity is the question each woman needs to ask herself. What does it mean, not to be needed? Does she go to pieces, or does she view this as a chance to see herself in an entirely new way, doing things she never thought she ever would?

I approached encroaching retirement with a little apprehension. What would it be like, not to get up at six, slouch into the bathroom for the morning's ablutions, fight time's impingement with puff and paint, dress as if I loved corporate attire, and fight the commuter's war for standing space and a hand-hold on a germy strap in the subway? How would it be, to do without the badly-made office coffee that I paid a dollar a day for the dubious pleasure of drinking,

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