I would rather leave money on the table than leave time on the table
I have been feeling guilty about not working for money.
It’s not just our culture, which seems to equate a person’s worth with her income, but also people I know. A college acquaintance, a very high earner, wrote on facebook, “people retiring at 58 is silly unless your health is compromised and you are about to die at 60…. Try to grow a pair and realize that it’s a journey.”
She did clarify that she meant someone who liked her job should keep working, but I have never liked my job enough that I would prefer working to not working. I have always worked because I needed the money. That’s been my main motivation. I needed to pay my rent and buy food.
The luxury of having a job that you also find fulfilling and worthwhile?
That is something most of us do not have.
My grandmother wanted to be an artist. She wanted to study painting in Paris. I didn’t know this until I was in my 30s and I asked her if she could have done anything in her life, what would she have done. My aunts and uncles didn’t know this until I told them.
My grandmother had to leave school, which she loved, after 8th grade. My mom still has my grandmother’s school notebooks, with careful (and beautifully done) drawings of the cross-section of a cell and insightful essays about Christopher Columbus. She loved learning.
Before she married my grandfather at age 28, she worked as a maid in Chicago, walking the miles back to work on her day off rather than take the streetcar so she could buy a candy bar with the nickel instead.
Once she married my grandfather, who had bought his parents’ farm, she, too, became a farmer, getting up before dawn every day to trudge through the northern Wisconsin snow to the barn to milk the cows, sewing her clothes and her children’s clothes, washing those clothes (including diapers) in the washtub and then putting them through the wringer and hanging them out to dry, growing and canning their produce, baking bread almost every day.
I don’t think it wasn’t until after her children and four foster children were mostly gone from the house that she started taking painting classes. Once a week, she went into town for her class with Mr O’Brian. She painted what was beautiful in her world: mothers holding babies, children, puppies, and flowers.
Had she actually gone to Paris, she would not have been considered a Great Artist if she had continued with these themes. The domestic sphere not Art unless a man does it. (See Jennifer Weiner vs Jonathan Franzen.)
My grandfather, who also had to leave school after 8th grade, had dreams. He had traveled to California to work with the CCC. He loved California and had wished he could stay.
He was an avid reader his whole life, keeping a globe next to his armchair so he could find the places he was visiting on the page.
My other grandparents also were not allowed to continue their educations after 8th grade. My grandmother persisted as best she could by getting a job at the library, working or volunteering there the rest of her life. My grandfather died at 59 from a stroke. (A stroke he would have survived today thank God for modern medicine.)
Mr T’s grandfather also didn’t go past 8th grade and worked the line at Ford for 40 years.
Forty years of backbreaking work. Forty years of getting up early, filling a lunch pail, and trudging through the harsh Detroit winter to a loud, dirty factory. Forty years of dealing with bosses and no power and no way to say no or to protest.
In his retirement, he and Mr T’s grandmother bought a small place in Florida. Grandma Mr T died early and Grampa Mr T spent what remained of his retired life without her.
When I was in college, my farmer grandparents, by then retired, drove to Texas to visit my family in San Antonio. My mom drove them to Houston for the day to visit me at college.
I was the first of 26 grandchildren to attend college. My mom’s younger siblings had attended local state schools (my mom dropped out her freshman year), but my grandparents had not been able to pay for anything, so it was a low-budget experience for all of them. My uncle told me he could barely keep his eyes open during class because he would work until 3 a.m. at UPS, getting only a few hours of sleep every night.
I still see my grandmother, standing in the middle of the quad, wearing her worn but clean and tidy cloth coat, carefully-mended stockings, and sensible thick-soled laceup shoes, and clutching her pocketbook in front of her as she beamed in delight.
I was getting to have the college experience that people dream of – I was immersed in learning in a setting of great beauty.
I was living part of her dream and she was delighted.
My dad died when he was 62.
He was not retired.
For years, he had talked about renting an RV and driving around the country with my mom, visiting all the parks. I rolled my eyes because at the time, that sounded dumb, but now? Now it sounds great. I mean, except for the driving all day and living out of an RV – but spending my days walking in beauty? Is that a bad thing?
I’m not 62 yet, but I can see it from here.
I think a lot about how I would want my last years to be if these were my last years.
When Mr T’s parents died in 2015, we already knew he had been disinherited. But because his parents were so lazy about their death preparation, they hadn’t bothered to update their IRA beneficiaries. Mr T was the secondary beneficiary on his dad’s IRA, which meant that despite his dad’s wishes, Mr T did inherit money from him.
It was a life-changing amount not in a “Wow we have so much money we never have to worry about money again” way but in a “Well if we add this money to what we have already saved, we can think about retiring a little bit early, especially if we live very modestly.”
(PS This is a warning to keep your will and other financial information up to date. You could accidentally leave money to someone you want to disinherit!)
A dear friend – who makes a ton I mean A TON of money and also holds a position of great social status – asked me, when I quit my last job, how I could walk away from the money.
I can see how it would be hard to walk away from a very high salary and a job where you are the boss and are respected and people know you have Made It.
But I was making less money than I made three years out of college. I was the lowest-ranking person in the group and the person of last resort for dealing with crap. It’s easy to walk away from being a cog for very low pay. It’s easy to walk away when your entire career has been a series of just jobs and you’re kind of a professional failure.
I think about all that human potential – so much intelligence, so much yearning – unrealized.
I think about my grandparents, working so hard every single day that they looked old even in their 40s.
I think about how they didn’t complain.
And I think about the dreams they held in their hearts. The dreams they never got to fulfill.
And then I don’t feel guilty about not working for money.
Texan in Exile 