The real freedom retirement brings: speaking your mind

I’ve been retired for several months now. I headed out on vacation a week before our daughter’s wedding in early June, and when my accrued paid time off ran out, what I’ve dubbed the “rest-of-my-life vacation” began.

You start enjoying a number of thoroughly delectable “freedoms” once you retire: No more setting the alarm for crazy o’clock in the a.m. Lazily sipping your morning coffee at the kitchen table instead of gulping it down during the morning commute. Reading the newspaper early in the day, while the news is still vaguely fresh. Exercising or reading a book when the mood suits you. Catching a movie during the week. Wearing sweats and tank tops instead of business attire. Wearing sandals instead of heels. And scheduling every day based on your personal wants, needs and interests, rather than at someone else’s behest.

But the biggest freedom? Speaking freely about work, coworkers and careers – because all three are in the rear view mirror.

As a writer by education and profession, that sometimes means posting my thoughts online. I may not get paid to write what I think – and it’s certainly possible that few folks will ever read my musings. But it’s positively liberating to reflect on my 40-plus years in the work world and share my discoveries with those just starting their careers, or with those struggling to make it through to their own retirement.

Sometimes, though, it’s a casual conversation that morphs into reflections on play and work, fulfillment and frustration, autonomy and obligation.

I had one of those yesterday, while in the checkout line at a store. The woman behind me commented enviously about my crazily polished fingernails – royal blue French tips with a band of sparkly gold edging the nail bed. “Wish I could do my nails like that, but I could never wear it at work!”

“I couldn’t either!” I laughed, “but I retired a few months ago so I decided to do UCLA nails for our first home football game last weekend.”

That sparked a conversation that continued through my purchase, and hers, and out into the parking lot as we strolled toward our cars. She shared that she’s “planning to retire next spring, but I’m getting to the point where I can’t put up with the nonsense anymore. I got mad at my boss yesterday, and I knew if I went in today, I’d get irritated all over again, so I took a day off.”

Oh do I remember “those” days. Maybe it was a “colleague” claiming credit for my work or horning in on a plum assignment. An employee who’d screwed up an assignment and was trying to blame someone else. Or a business unit customer with no skill or expertise as a communicator but still fancied himself a creative genius, telling me not just what to say but also how to say it. (That’s a too-frequent occurrence when your profession is based on the written word. “Everyone” can write. Yeah, we all write papers and exams in college, but not everyone understands how best to communicate on a sensitive subject or illustrate a complex concept.)

Whatever the particulars, I’d had “those days” too. And once you get to the point in your career where you’re no longer seeking the next opportunity, no longer contemplating the next step up the career ladder, but are instead calculating living expenses, toting up retirement package benefits, and setting a target date for your departure, “those days” start grating even more. You deal with the irritation of the moment while muttering under your breath, “I don’t need this any more!”

I’d begun the unhitching process in my mind a couple of years ago, after a major medical scare convinced me there had to be more to life than work. My husband and I started running the numbers, and I started calculating a good retirement date.

We had decided it would be some time this year. I was thinking I’d announce it before our daughter’s wedding, and leave later that summer. And then it happened.

My boss, working offsite, got ticked off about a story that an employee on another team hadn’t posted by his deadline. He tried to reach that person’s director, but she didn’t pick up her phone. So he called me. He yelled. He shouted. He gave me hell – I guess because he had to yell at SOMEONE, and I was available.

It wasn’t the first time he’d blown up. Or blamed the wrong person. But it was the final straw. I shut down my computer, put my phone on message, and left for the day. Driving home, I called my husband. “I’m done.” “For the day?” “No, I’m DONE.”

We talked that night. And in the morning, the first thing I did when I booted up my computer was log in to the HR service center tool and start the retirement process.

I informed my boss later that day. He was stunned, and said, “I hope this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to yesterday – that wasn’t my shining moment.”

I could have pretended. I could have been polite and said, “Oh no, it’s not that.” But I wanted him to KNOW. I wanted him to realize that it’s not okay to take out your frustrations on your employees. I wanted it to be crystal clear that, YES, it was about yesterday – and all the yesterdays before, when he or others had disrespected or demeaned or devalued the people with whom they worked.

So I replied, “Well, this is something I’ve been contemplating for a while, but yesterday crystallized things for me, and I decided it’s time.”

I shared that story yesterday with the woman I met at the store, and offered a bit of advice: When you realize you’re emotionally “over” your career, start figuring out how and when you might want to call it quits. Start preparing for that day, so you know how you’ll want, or need, to alter your lifestyle to accommodate the disappearance of that full-time income. Start a private countdown calendar and post it unobtrusively in your office or cubicle, if it helps you get from one day to the next.

Because you might just decide, as I did, to retire even sooner. Knowing that you’ll be okay gives you the greatest freedom of all: the ability to pull the plug just because, as the Howard Beale character in Network so loudly proclaimed, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

But you will have lived to tell the tale. Now, that’s freedom.

Power of the purse (and the shoe)

I have a really hard time finding shoes that fit. I’m a 6 ½ narrow in an “our narrows start at 7” world. When I find a pair of shoes that stay on my feet, I become as fixated on possessing them as those folks charging through big box store doors at midnight on Black Friday to grab a “just 100 at this price” big screen TV.

So imagine my joy, five or six years ago, when I spotted a pair of nicely styled dress shoes, size 6 ½ and exactly the right color and heel height for my special occasion dress. While they were medium width, they ran narrow. A fit! And on sale, to boot. Then I looked inside and saw two words: Ivanka Trump.

I had nothing against Ivanka at the time, but I was already boycotting her father’s products because of the birther nonsense he was spouting about Barack Obama. Our hard earned dollars weren’t going to someone who behaved so boorishly toward our duly elected, born-in-the-USA President. No suits or shirts or ties from The Donald for my husband. Nope.

But shoes. PRETTY shoes. Shoes that FIT.

No can do. I slowly put the shoes back on the shelf and resumed my quest for politically correct, non-Trump pumps.

Today, however, I wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond. I’d drop those shoes like a hot potato – which is exactly how a friend described her reaction to seeing a great casual top at a department store the other day, picking it up, and then realizing it was an Ivanka product. “It was as if my hands were on fire,” she laughed.

Ivanka Trump’s just-announced policy proposal to resolve the long-standing , oft-debated problem of affordable child care for American families -- and her imperious, tone-deaf reaction to its critics – were the last straw.

In announcing her father’s policy proposal, she called it a “revolutionary” idea that would address “the lack of affordable, safe, quality child care…in a comprehensive way.” She called it a “giant leap from where we are today, which is sadly, nothing,” and declared it “a really incredible plan that has pushed the boundaries of what anyone else is talking about. On child care specifically, there are no proposals on the table.”

It is a child care proposal that Ivanka’s own clothing manufacturing company and many of her father’s properties don’t offer to employees today – their personal rendition of “do as I say, not as I do.”

It applies only to working mothers, and offers only a tax deduction -- useful to high-income earners who can wait for tax season to write off weekly or monthly child care costs but meaningless to lower-income workers who can’t afford to front the money and might not qualify for a deduction in any event.

And in clearly backwards Robin Hood fashion, it steals from existing unemployment insurance funds to pay for its maternity leave provision.

Trump’s plan is hardly “revolutionary.” It would be far more fitting to label this one-percenter-devised tax break for upper income earners as the stuff from which working-class revolution is born.

She and Papa Trump added insult to injury by falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton has offered no child care policy proposals at all – a phony criticism they could have avoided making had anyone on their campaign team taken a cursory glance at hillaryclinton.com/issues, where the Democratic nominee’s family and child care policy proposals have been posted for the past year.

So, Ivanka dear, I just wanted to let you know: I’m not just boycotting your father now. I’m boycotting you and your brothers and your husband and anyone I can identify who has anything to do with any one of you. You don’t deserve my money. You deserve my contempt.

And, in case you were wondering if your shameful policy pander will convince this woman – or pretty much any other rational, self-respecting female voter in America – to change our minds and vote for your daddy, you can stop wondering right now.

I’ve been “with her.” I’m still “with her.” And I’ll be “with her” on Tuesday, November 8, and for every day of Hillary Clinton’s truly revolutionary presidency.

The insidious American condition: women working while ill

So Hillary Clinton tried to tough it out and work through her pneumonia. I’m pretty certain there’s not an American working woman who didn’t hear that news this past weekend and say, “Been there, done that.”

Maybe it wasn’t pneumonia. Maybe it was the flu or just a rotten cold. On occasion, it was a more serious condition that should have been tended to. But we’ve all done it – tried to ignore it, tried to soldier on – sometimes because we were “understaffed” and couldn’t afford to get behind at work, sometimes because we needed to save our PTO days for when our kids or parents were sick, and sometimes because we feared the “political” (in a working sense) repercussions we might face.

It starts innocuously enough, in the early years of our careers. We see that always being available and reliable are table stakes in the work world – not just for women, but for everyone seeking their way up the ladder.

The situation intensifies – I believe more for women than for men – when we become parents. That’s when women, in particular, feel compelled to prove that being a parent won’t stop them from focusing fully on their careers…because that unspoken assumption about women lurks to this day. As a younger friend of ours remarked after becoming a first-time mom in 2015, she never realized until then how the working moms she had known were “scrambling into the office every morning, looking so put together and composed, but feeling totally stressed and thrown together every day.”

There’s barely enough time to get dressed and put on makeup. There’s just no time – or tolerance – for getting sick. That unrelenting pressure, born in the early career years and amplified ten-fold when we’re child rearing, never seems to recede.

I was “lucky.” After our daughter was born, I left a full-time job to work from home, doing communications consulting, freelance writing and college-level teaching. Lucky in the sense that I could rearrange my schedule and sneak a few hours of rest when I was feeling particularly under the weather – but still scrambling to get to client meetings and teach classes and get as much done as I could between the start and end of each school day, heading back into my home office after dinner to work well into the evening hours, and spending many weekend days there as well.

Once our daughter headed off to college, I returned to full-time corporate employment. But the compulsion to work through the colds and coughs and flu bugs didn’t wane. It got worse.

It was partly the particular corporate culture in which I found myself – one where “work/life balance” was a nice catch phrase but a concept seldom honored. But it was more a realization among the women I worked with that we had to be more resilient, more reliable, and always on the job if we were to be given the same opportunities as our male counterparts that really drove that compulsion.

Eventually, though, illness catches up with you. It happened to me.

Two winters ago, I tried for more than a month to bull my way through what I thought was just a stubbornly persistent flu bug, dragging myself into the office every morning. But when I found myself struggling to stay awake on my 45-minute drive home, I gave in and went to the doctor. A week’s course of Tamiflu later, I was no better, and had added a nagging pressure on my right side to my list of symptoms. The doctor sent me for an ultrasound, after which I was promptly dispatched to the ER.

Good thing it’s a Friday night, I thought. They’ll give me something stronger, and I’ll be back into the office on Monday.

Six weeks later (during which I worked from home), a non-functioning, infection-swamped kidney was removed. And three weeks later – three weeks sooner than my doctor recommended – I was back in the office.

I had to be. I was dealing with a gullible boss and an opportunistic staffer who’d been using my illness and physical absence to try to move me out. It took the boss a number of months to figure out who the true problem was, but in the meantime, I’d gone back into the office before I should have, still hunched over from major abdominal surgery, still in pain and still needing more time to recuperate.

If I felt so compelled as a communications director toiling in relative obscurity to disregard medical advice by going to work when I should have stayed home, I can only imagine the pressure Hillary feels as the nation’s first major-party female nominee for President. The pressure would be on her even if her opponent and his spin machine hadn’t already been conjuring up delusional accusations of near-death crises for months on end (while limiting his own health reporting “transparency” to a preposterously absurd letter from a sycophantic physician).

Looking back on my own illness, I know that I should have said, “The job can wait…the problems can wait…I’ve got to get well.” And looking ahead toward Hillary Clinton’s presidency, I am hopeful that it will help spark a far more serious, meaningful and productive conversation about work and health in America than the one being tweeted and shouted by her opponent today.