Job Hunting
After you’ve pursued various career paths and seen them through, job hunting in retirement feels both humiliating and exasperating. I climbed the Career Mountains already. I stood on the rocky peaks. Don’t expect me to feel gung ho and ready to put in 1000% and eighty hours anymore. Yet, I hoped in these late years I might do a little something to fill in my days and supplement my income. Just a teeny part-time gig that wasn’t being a Walmart greeter or a coffee barista, my choices on Indeed.com, the website Missourians use to find employment opportunities.
I made myself a job board with post-its listing all the nuances of what the perfect job should be. I put them in order of importance to help me decide. Two half-weekdays at most, so eight hours max. The job couldn’t be the emotional sort I brought home. The pay should be well over Missouri’s $13.75/hour. Its location must be close to where I live, preferably the same town. It should use my skills. I’d acquired a lot of job skills in my lifetime:
I entered the work force when I was twelve, babysitting for fifty cents an hour. One of my clients had six children, the oldest seven-years-old. I diapered, played with, and fed them as needed. I worked hard without complaint.
When I turned fourteen and my friends went off to Girl Scout camp for a week of fun, I stayed behind to work a full-time summer job of watching an eight-year-old: making her breakfast, cooking her lunch, cleaning the mother’s kitchen (the woman never did supper dishes from the night before), and taking the girl to the swimming pool and library. We played games, sang songs, went for walks, and when the next door neighbor dumped her kid at my client’s house for hours (under the guise of being my charge’s playmate and without giving me a dime), I entertained her, too. Thus, I proved myself to be responsible, agreeable, and reliable.
I saved my meager earnings to pay for my high school tuition. All my friends were heading to the parochial high school. I was terrified to be thrust into public school after eight years with them, which is what my father preferred. The only way I could go where I wanted was to pay my own way. Freshman year, I cleaned blackboards and tidied classrooms after school and continued with babysitting jobs until, as a sophomore, I landed a position at Burger Chef as a cashier and, in a pinch, a cook. My senior year, I worked as a pharmacy clerk.
Thus, I proved to be disciplined, able to multi-task, focused, and self-motivated. I added customer service and handling a cash register to my resume.
High school classes included typing, Gregg shorthand, and bookkeeping, which prepared me for secretarial work. I held secretarial positions for the next decade. While working full time, I decided at age thirty to pursue my dream of attending cosmetology school. I enrolled in daily evening classes, a two-year program. Once I obtained a license, I apprenticed in a salon on weekends to test it out. I found I loved doing shampoos, but felt too intimidated to chat with clients while trying to cut hair. I also needed more training in hair-coloring and the trendy, complicated haircuts. A cosmetology license let me explore all facets of the beauty world: hair, nails, and skin care, so I tried out these options. I didn’t like nails—everyone wanted artificial ones and forget handling people’s feet. I moved into an aesthetician role, and while I was excellent at facials, I was a nightmare at waxing, especially upper lips and all-body, though I did fine with bikini and underarms.
While creating flyers to drum up clients, I discovered that I enjoyed writing marketing material more than the cosmetology work. I signed up for a few business classes at the junior college.
When I met my third husband, I quit cosmetology, which wasn’t taking me anywhere, and went to work full time for his produce company doing international sales and office management. Evenings and weekends, I attended college. Besides business classes, I added general studies. English, always a love, grabbed me. Since I worked full time, it took ten years to earn my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and Creative Writing.
Once I finished graduate studies, I worked at a high school as a teacher’s aide. There weren’t many jobs in the rural coastal town I lived in, and I thought an aide position would give me a taste of teaching. A full-time, stable, high school position seemed a fine opportunity, especially to pay off student loans. But I found I couldn’t tolerate teenage hormones and drama, not to mention parents.
I landed a job at the local junior college. Teaching adults proved heavenly. The college only hired adjuncts, but teaching three classes required nine hours of instruction and sixty hours at home a week grading assignments and lesson planning. After nine years, I moved into full-time administration, managing a small campus for six years.
Today, I am a widow, retired, relocated, and sometimes feeling lost. I want an identity again, since “retired” sounds like I’m marching toward the elephant graveyard. But I’m picky. I earned my pickiness. No customer service, please, or obnoxious bosses. No more semester-long lesson planning and essay reading. No putting out minute-by-minute problem fires. No acting cheery on the phone.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t see ads for WANTED: Educated, retired woman who wants to have social interaction but not be bothered by people who irritate her. She will be paid top rate for eight hours of work but need only accomplish as much as she feels like finishing. She can take off whenever she wants to visit her California sisters, or attend writers’ retreats, or to simply write. She can take off days for cooking and cleaning to host her dinner parties and to exercise. Or to go to book club meetings. Or spend time with her cats and TV shows. Not to mention naps. Need not come to work when it’s raining, snowing, cold, windy, hot, or humid. Need not show up when her car needs an oil change or washing, or when she needs groceries, or to do laundry, or gardening, or crafts. Or nothing at all.
Hmm. I guess I have a new job after all.
Freedom.
It doesn’t pay worth a darn, but it’s priceless.