A Glimpse at Early Retirement

Growing up I wanted to be a professional baseball player.  I mean, what’s not to like?  Your season is during the spring and summer months.  For the most part you do a lot of standing around, and when you do have to sprint it’s usually for 90 feet.  On top of that, no one is trying to hit you or tackle you, and when you have to dive for a ball you land on soft grass as opposed to a hardwood floor or a frozen field.   Hell, you don’t really have to be that good.  If you’re successful just 25 percent of the time, you’ve got a guaranteed job, and if you’re successful 30 percent of the time, you’re considered to be one of the “great ones.”  I’m actually convinced that mediocrity is widely accepted in both professional baseball as well as meteorology (are weathermen ever right???).

As I got older, and my dreams of playing professional baseball went out the door (it seems that being successful just 25 percent of the time is harder than I thought), I focused on another type of “dream,” one that involved my wife and I working closely with one another. 

After all, my wife is my best friend, and she is smart and a hard worker.  You could do a lot worse when looking for a co-worker.  Unfortunately, our careers led us in different directions, and working with her simply didn’t materialize.  To make matters worse, our careers, as they so often do, kept us away from one another for much of the week.  I’d see my wife for 20 or 30 minutes in the morning before heading out, and I’d see her for a couple hours at night once we had both gotten home.  Certainly not the kind of “quality time” I had dreamed about when planning out my goal of working closely with her.

So the next dream or goal became retiring as early as possible so that my wife and I could enjoy some of that quality time that we had simply missed out on by not being able to work together.  Now this dream seemed like a million years away, but sometimes a million years can be a lot shorter than you think. 

A couple months ago my wife’s company reorganized, and she agreed that there was no need for marketing in the new organization. That meant she would either be getting laid off or take a new job within the company sometime early in 2011.  Upon getting the news my wife began looking into other opportunities, and in fact has already received a couple different offers, so in the end this may actually work out very well for her/us.  Though, if you listen to my mom talk about this situation it seems like the end of the world . . . “Well that’s just awful.  What are you two going to do?  You’ll be broke.  How are you going to put food on the table?  Are you going to sell the house?  Who’s going to buy your house in this market?  Do I have to clear out my basement so that you guys can live with me?”  She means well, and she really is a fantastic mother, but I’m fairly convinced she doesn’t listen to a word I say.

Anyway, slowly but surely, as her job and her responsibilities have dwindled, my wife has been spending more and more time at home.  It was just a day or two a week back in November and that turned into lots of vacation during December, and lately, even though she still technically has a job until the end of January, she’s been working from home at least three days a week. . . . with very little to do.

She calls it a “preview of retirement,” and I’m calling it “A FREAKING NIGHTMARE!!!!!!!”

My wife is ALWAYS HOME.  She’s set up her laptop on the dining room table across from my laptop and it’s like dueling banjos.  She’s banging away on her laptop, and I’m banging away on my laptop.  Every once in awhile she looks up, smiles, and asks me what I’m doing. 

The Pearl Jam and U2 I usually have on while I write has been replaced by her music.  She’s monopolizing the TV with Food Network, Cooking Channel and HGTV.  Literally I caught the last 10 minutes of one of these shows and watched someone making Spinach Gnocchi Balls.  My wife assumed that I was interested in the show since I was paying attention (which I wasn’t, I was just horrified that someone had their own show on TV featuring them cooking Gnocchi Balls while I remain unemployed), and she now calls for me every time Barefoot Contessa is on. 

She has no interest in taking walks with me as it’s too cold outside, but she doesn’t hesitate to visit me while I’m dropping a deuce.  Just recently she came into the bathroom while I was sitting on the toilet to let me know that I had to pick up my oldest son from school at 4:45 PM.  It was 10:30 in the morning when she came in to tell me this.

And as for the afternoon sex, or the morning “quickie” that I’ve longed fantasized about . . . no.  I can count on one hand (and I don’t need all five fingers either) how many times we’ve had sex in the middle of the day since she’s been home.  She’s copied my stay-at-home look of sweat pants and fleece, so frankly I don’t think either one of us has the urge to start anything.

So I’ve decided that not being able to retire early probably isn’t a bad thing.  I’m frankly not sure what we would do, other than the fact that my wife is actually cooking more.  I just hope that she doesn’t make those gnocchi balls.  I’ll be ordering Domino’s later that night.