Rushing toward Retirement

Am I rushing or running--both, I guess. Twenty-nine days left. I'm working at home today and trying to "clean up" a few things.

I'm still doing my usual reading and Time, Inc. is one of my weekly standards. This week, I'm amazed at an article about "empty-nesters" who now need workshops and personal seminars to cope and get through that phase. Are these the boomers who need a 12 week workshop to reconnect with a spouse because all of a sudden the distraction of kids is no longer there? I don't think my parents' generation or my generation (the "tweeners") need someone explaining the process to them. Kids are born, you raise them (or rear them--I never remember the difference), they become more and more independent as the years go by and then they leave for college. Some summers they don't come home and we get used to them being gone and not having the day to day responsibility. We love them but we expect them to leave one day and we encourage them. Who needs a 12 week workshop to get that?

This, of course, brings me to the "personal life coach" syndrome. What the heck is a personal life coach? Aren't they our friends and relatives who are always trying to give us advice, solcited or unsolicited. Why would anyone pay a personal life coach and what parts of ones life are coached?

I've always been amazed at some of the letters Ann Landers or Dear Abby got. Granted some were excruciatingly difficult relationship problems probably best left to a stranger to straighten out. But some were so simple I would practically scream at the newspaper.

Is this all a symptom of the disintegration of the extended family and neighborhood? We have no friends or relatives to ask for help so we go to complete strangers for the simplest of life's problems. Can no one cope anymore?

My family is very small and I do admit to being jealous or at least a little envious of one of my friends who has a very large and close extended family. But the only part of my life when I remember having aunts, uncles, cousins and two sets of grandparents and a large, very large, extended family on both sides was when I was very young--from birth to about age 7. Those were the days of the late forties and early fifies when every Sunday meant a large family dinner (now called lunch)at someone's house.

But then the family started to pass on with a grandfather dying, then some of the aunts and uncles moved out of state and as far away as California. We wrote letters on thin skinned paper and mailed them a few times a year. No one called on a life coach to find out how to cope with our family's migration. We just accepted what was and moved on. And that's what I continue to do these many years later.