Early retirement

No, you were born to find your path in life, follow your dreams and be happy.

I have the endeavours ongoing for early retirement, and there are hopes it will happen. It’s still a high dose of uncertainty, but I think time will solve everything.

My husband wholeheartedly supports my decision and understands what I am going through. He says that getting less stress and more time to rest, more time for myself, will help improve my health. That we’ll manage even with a loss of income (which would have happened anyway even if I chose to keep working and get a transfer).

My mother, however, who is 87 and got retired before the Revolution (in 1986, more exactly) is against me retiring. She thinks that retirement is a waiting room for death, that I am too young to retire and that I should be at the peak of my professional career, going higher and higher. Which, unfortunately, is not true.

She is more worried about money and caring less about what I want. She wants me working until I die at work, of stress and insatisfactions, just to get whom rich? My potential heirs? I have no children of mine to sacrifice for and I have no intention to do it for my stepchildren who don’t care for any of us and don’t visit us while alive but might fight like… siblings for the inheritance afterwards.

I know that in her mind, my mother thinks that going to work and earning money with the price of my health and sanity are in my best interest. She wants all the best for me – just that the best as she understands it, which is is radically different from what I want and I have ever wanted from life.

She should trust my reasoning and she should understand that she can’t live my life, therefore she shouldn’t wish for me what SHE wanted to achieve, but let me have and fulfil my own dreams and needs. She has always wanted to transform me into her ideal daughter, instead of understanding and accepting me for what I am. I have never been enough and I never will. I got resigned to this. She can’t believe that I am happy in my marriage with the man she had never wanted and she had done all her best to separate me from and to forbid the wedding.

She doesn’t want me to feel what I am feeling, but I can’t help feeling disrespected, insulted and taken for granted when I am telling her happily that I have submitted the application for early retirement and I receive as encouragement: “Maybe they won’t let you go.” Thank you, this is exactly what I am fearing and what you are wishing to me, just confirming me that you don’t care what I want and what I think, but only what YOU think good for me.

So at 48 and a half I am a neglected quantity. I don’t matter and you want me to put me out on the market to keep working just because you think money is everything and that it is never enough that I have been married to my work for 30 years, many of them working overtime or struggling with 2 jobs. What I have done and what I have achieved is never enough, and you want more and more, not only on the material side.

But we weren’t born just to work, to pay taxes and die. I might want more from my life. I see early retirement as an opportunity to start a new life, focused on what I like more, on what can give me satisfaction and as little stress as possible. I want to focus on writing, on taking care of my health, on enjoying the life I was too busy to enjoy until now.