chief of stuff

It has been a year since my husband left his full time job and many of you have asked me how we are handling the transition to Retirement 1.0. I was holding off on writing about this until now because I wanted to give it some time to see what shook out. 

I have heard many spouses complain about the transition from having a more-than-full-time working husband to a retired husband who is around the house more than they would like – often messing with their schedule and routines. Unlike those people, I like having my husband home, available, 100% flexible and willing to take on a lot of tasks he has not offered to deal with in the past. I have enjoyed off loading anything I can to him, and he seems to take pride in being “the hero” when he completes a household task. His last professional title was “Chief of Staff” which is a title I am entirely willing to bestow on him at home, as long as I remain CEO.

During the first three months of his retirement, I was happy to see him manage a bunch of stuff I really don’t enjoy doing, like taxes, insurance and health care. Unfortunately, when he takes the lead, he is essentially conducting an internal audit of everything I have done administratively in the last 20 years. Last summer, his first task was looking into our FasTrak account – the carpool lane and bridge devices that you mount in your car in order to pay tolls automatically. He updated the account, made sure it was in perfect order and, of course, found a way to improve on whatever I had done previously. This moment of brilliance sparked a comprehensive internal audit that has continued for the last ten months.

While diligently working through our administrative lives, he frequently barks at me: “What’s the password for blah blah blah??” I literally know zero of my passwords because I effectively rely on password management software. Still, he regularly demands instant recall of passwords and seems incredibly frustrated by my inability to recite them when asked. Because of my disappointing responses, he adopted a competing password management program and, claiming he had the superior product, strongly encouraged me to adopt his choice. I knew I needed this to happen if I wanted the “What is the password…?” questions to stop. I did make the change (which was a big effort) but he still offers “notes” on my password performance.

Besides passwords, my available, household hero husband often makes urgent requests for information. For example, I may be eating lunch in the kitchen with him sitting nearby on his laptop and he will suddenly blurt out: “Did you pay the estimated taxes and where is the proof?” I have to take a minute and consider what he is asking me and if I have any memory of a task I would normally do but could have easily screwed up. When I respond with some ambivalence,  I get a look of disapproval and an unspoken vibe of “You are a mess.”  In the last year, I have found out that my administrative task success record was far below what I believed it to be but the hidden upside is that he no longer trusts me to get stuff done.

While his administrative home audit continues, there are other patterns that have evolved. Instead of constantly reading Slack messages, he has a new fixation on Wordle, the Mini, Connections and now Spelling Bee. Most of these are completed in the middle of the night, but Spelling Bee is something that continues throughout the day until “Genius” level is reached (I blame Brad entirely for this). For the other three New York Times games that we both play regularly, he assesses my performance relative to his and he does not make himself available for clues or hints because that is “cheating.” He is an aggressive supporter of “hard mode” for Wordle and if you have any free time, please ask him to give you his argument in support of it. I would appreciate someone else taking up this fight.

Here are a few things my husband has learned in the last twelve months:

* How to upload claims to our health insurance web site.

* He probably needed to see a doctor more than once in the last 15 years.

* You can get in and out of the grocery store in 10 minutes but not if you have to stop at the in store pharmacy.

* Where we keep light bulbs, batteries, extra keys, step ladder and the vacuum cleaner.

* The name and location of our veterinarian.

* How to deposit of a check on our bank app.

My husband is also very available and willing to give feedback on what I am wearing. This is something that he has always done (see “Battle of the Network Stars”) but he now has the time and opportunity to provide opinions on tennis clothes, dog walking accessories, pajamas and whatever I wear to work out at home. Matching tennis outfits and dresses always get positive commentary. Working out at home in my pajamas receives a thumbs down. Fanny packs worn across my chest are not encouraged. It is an abundance of attention, critiques and questions – more than I can handle on some days. 

A year into our new normal, I am adjusting to hearing his thoughts on my fashion choices, his competitive Wordling and a persistent feeling that he is in my dish. Luckily, he recently started a part time job at a start-up founded by friends of ours and is really enjoying it. The gig is very flexible and now he has enough of a daily diversion that he won’t notice what packages arrive from where or how much time I spend in sweaty tennis clothes but still has time to obsess over Peloton challenges and achieving genius on Spelling Bee.