Retirement: Giving a Ripped up Middle Finger to Making a U-Turn If Possible

At the beginning of this month, I announced my intent to retire. It's been a gradual but inevitable detour off the road I've been traveling for 20 years and I've hit the point where my internal GPS has not started the refrain of "Recalculating... Recalculating..." but at this point, I am past the rumble strips and would definitely sustain some damage if I jumped the median back on to the highway. Now begins my slow, circumvalent exit, the main road still visible as I curve around and under it to get to my new main drag -- being a stay-at-home parent with cancer -- on which I will "scoop the loop".

This last week was really all about the grisly underpass where the hitch hikers take a piss: putting together what is needed for my most veteran instructors to run two back-to-back competitions. I spent the week marveling at the new technology we use to get the actual data needed for the competitions (the team names, routine entries, invoices, and payments made) but the week culminated in the frantic manipulation of the low-tech. Yes, girls. Going to The Kinks. This is the old State Director name for Kinkos Copy Places, now FedEx-Kinkos, but maiden names die hard, right? Funktionslust and the buzz I get from having everything in its right place, clipped and stapled and arranged in plastic file boxes for the user to open and smile, gave way to begging for more, more, more colored paper and rolling around on the floor in a most undignified manner, licking fingers that touched the floor to count and recount scoresheets. The hand-and-foot syndrome that I was able to avoid up until then started with the skin of my right middle finger peeling off, followed by the corner of my left thumb. Then it's driving around town to pick up my two bundles of joy from school and drop off my other two bundles of joy (each event's file box) with an awesome Utah transplant just leaving the dance studio near me. Relieved and shot, I returned home to open a card from a dance team (whom I'd all but abandoned ever having as a customer up until two years ago) with a sweet note from each dancer and a picture of the team inside. I just collapsed in Casey's arms in tears, spent. Yep, this is right choice and, yep, it still hurts like hell to make it.

Here, my phone is propped up by a richly deserved glass of wine on Friday night.


This week is more business as usual. I close out the return paperwork and send it back, but I'll also send my supplies along with it for everyone in the office to pick through, take what they want and send the rest on to whoever needs it. I liken it to a retiree's version of a Tibetan Sky Burial. If you don't know what that is, read about it but don't watch a video about it.  It's much more poetic in theory than in practice.

I'm struggling to finish this cycle of X. I'm sick to my stomach with a big sore in my throat and I slept all day, but Friday starts a ten-day break during which I'll get my oophorectomy. I definitely don't think my ovaries are going without a fight; there's still a faint diffusion of lust directed at random males in my path that tells me I'm in the weakest of heat. Don't even take it personally -- it's just chemicals, y'all. My husband gets to take it personally (ba-dum-bump CRASH!)