AIBU to feel out of step as the only one still working?

[Wofflewaffle]

Aibu to feel out of step with my family?

At 53 I’m the only one left working full time.

My parents retired early (at 58 / 60) and live an idyllic life in their country house.
My sister walked away from a stressful job last year. The fact that she doesn’t have children and has married a richer, older man means that she will not be going back to work, and is effectively retiring aged 51.
My DH had a burnout last year. I don’t think he will ever be the same, but he’s better. He has gone part time (50%) with an invalidity pension to made up most - not all - of the difference.

And muggins here carries on working 42 hours a week (full time compressed into term time) and trying to support / parent / fund two teens through school and uni.

i don’t grudge them (maybe I do) but what I’m finding really difficult is that we seem to have so little in common now. All they talk about are expensive improvements on their big homes / gardens (we rent a city centre flat), the latest wildlife that they’ve spotted (if I hear one more red squirrel story I might 🤯), the long country walks that they do, the sauna they are planning to build, etc etc. I plaster on a smile and try to care. When they do ask about my life, it’s really hard not to be snippy about it - the truth is that it’s a grind. When they ask about work, there’s no real interest - it’s more like ‘poor Woffle, such a hard life.. oh look another squirrel! 🐿️

My dad keeps asking when we’re going to retire ‘because every year you work after 60 is 5 years off your life you know Woffle’. Like I have a choice! Two kids still to put through uni, a recently reduced income and me being the main breadwinner? I’m going to be working for a long time to come.

OP, it's natural to feel jealous of people not having to work and feeling burned out but it's not something they've done wrong. Of course your parents should be retired. Their lives are a lot smaller now so they talk about what they've been doing which may seem boring or smug to you. Every time I speak to my mum it's to tell me whose dead or who has cancer or her ailments (or my dad's). It's constant doom and gloom (& she knows I have health anxiety) but it's not really her fault as it's her reality. They don't really leave the house (my dad's mobility and hearing isn't good). Retirement has not been kind to my parents and for many people it can be tough to adjust. Comparison is the thief of joy. You said you enjoy your job which is something to be grateful for and you are healthy enough to work too so you are lucky in that regard. I get it, the daily grind can be tough (I'm a primary school teacher). I've a friend who is a stay at home mum with kids in school and on a Monday morning when I'm getting me and my kids up, I envy her having a day to drink coffee and do jobs around the house. In reality I know I'm actually much better working. Too much time on my hands is not good for my mental health and working hard means I really treasure and enjoy my down time. In your 70s/80s you would love to feel as good as you did in your 50s.

Sounds like they don't have a clue. They're probably bored.
Any age under 60 seems very young to me to retire.

Some people are very, very, very comfortable and they either never struggled or it's a long time since they did.

I'll be working well into my late 70s or until I'm medically unfit to work, whichever is the soonest.

My contemporaries will be retired long before me.

Yes as people get elderly some of them tend to lose interest in anything outside their own realm. I noticed it with my own DPs. So it’s probably not related to genuinely thinking you or your DH shouldn’t be working more a well we aren’t working ergo this is the correct thing to do and they have lost the vocabulary to ask about it and/or aren’t much bothered to listen.

Unfortunately with your DPs you’ll likely have to settle for lightweight conversation based around themselves.

With your Dsis I think it should be possible to mention your own circumstances without it being an argument. I would just tell her the truth - you don’t have a big pension pot so you need to keep working. I would resist adding in the not like some element of it. Keep it very factual and say some of the stuff you have said here. It’s not a personal attack, it’s just your circumstances.

That's what I got too. I think this likely exacerbate the way you respond to the 'digs', OP.

Are your parents and husband well enough to do stuff around the house, i.e. cooking, cleaning and child care so that you have more time to relax once you get home from work?

Because they have family here? Although I don't think @daisyfallout has specified where she lives, might not be UK.

Their daughter lives here and supports them. They aren't taking money from taxpayers. Their home has been destroyed due to war in their home country.

Yeah, I do think the particular circumstances that enabled your parents to retire young are also just never going to be repeated, and they should have the grace to acknowledge that. I don't want to use the dreaded "boomer" word, but I do think there's a fair few people in that age group who fail to appreciate that what might genuinely have been many years of hard graft were also augmented with some bloody good luck financially. That's just not the case for people who missed that boat. Obviously other kinds of luck are available too, but some of us just end up with the graft! I don't blame you for feeling sorry for yourself, OP - I do! But I'm sure there are positive things you think about yourself and your life too, and a little bit of licking your wounds once in a while is OK, I think.

Sorry, @Wofflewaffle I hear what you’re saying and fully sympathise, but the squirrel rich aspect 🐿️ really makes me laugh!

Well they have a daughter in the UK with a good income and a large house so it's not surprising they would choose to come to live with her. She is able to support them, even if it sometimes feels a big responsibility being the only wage earner in her household. Presumably it was easier when their son-in-law was also working.

You aren’t very seen huh! My DH won’t work again - huge mental health issues. I am the breadwinner, the planner, the driver, the admin etc. His illness crashed us financially and left us with debts. Nearly lost the house, had winters with virtually no heating and came out the other side slowly. Throughout this time my millionaire mother in law would sometimes tell me how I was lucky I liked to be busy. She stopped working in her 40s. They pretend DH is fine and never discuss his illness or its impact but have plenty of praise for his barrister brother. They do like to discuss their business acumen and the profit they made by buying their house before the market shot up. Like your dad, they made their money profiting from the shit show that will make it so much harder for our children and have no sense of grace or awareness of the role of luck. Irritating.

My parents get it more but they aren’t rich so no wonder. Really I care for them too. I long stopped expecting any real validation from my family or in-laws. I get it from friends and it sounds like you have plenty too? Invest there and in you. Are you selfish enough? Revise work so it suits you. Go out when it suits you. Make a future financial plan that suits you. Celebrate yourself and stop comparing but equally say what you need to. You might get lucky with uni. One of mine didn’t go and is doing really well without it.

Frankly she sounds pathetic so I don't know why you’re tiptoeing around her. I’d be blunt with the lot of them or say “if you’re so desperate for me to retire do you fancy dropping half a mil into my pension pot? No, thought not. So shut up!”

They're purposefully oblivious and fucking smug. They know your husband isn't working, they know how most people do work until late 60s now.

They don't care. Sorry, but there it is. Complain about people buying a fucking cup of coffee when they're out there grinding, fuck off with that insensitivity.

Life has gotten progressively worse for young people and the sandwich generation since the 09 crash and it's not going to get better anytime soon. So I feel for you having to deal with that attitude from relatives who should be at least supportive of your situation.

I'd just say some of us have to work for a living or have no home and get real quiet with them.

We're the same. Well off siblings who have all retired and us at 52 and 60 with no private pensions :(
We have to hear about all their holidays and I don't begrudge them/happy for them....just wish we could do the same 😭

I agree with @ToKittyornottoKitty and @LaJacondeFumantLaPipe.

My parents are in their eighties too. The working world is a distant memory to them, and as both worked minimum wage jobs their whole working lives, inherited a tiny, crappy house from my dad’s uncle and hence never had a mortgage (I once, during Covid, in an international house move that left us living in rentals, had to use my parents address for mortgage stuff and ask my father to open a mortgage statement and photo it on his phone to send me — I swear, he wasn’t the same for months after he saw that we, in his eyes, ‘owed the bank’ £250,000). What I’m saying is you can’t look to your parents for validation. Own your own decisions and financial necessities. Your parents may think you lead a terribly unfortunate life, but that’s not something you can control.

No dear. Thats what refugees do. And most civilized governments have signed agreements and treaties to accept these refugees because the international order recognizes common humanity as an imperative. They haven’t done anything wrong. Hope that helps!

I live in the UK, I'm a British citizen, and my parents have never taken a penny from the British public purse. I've been paying tax here for more than twenty years, have been a higher-rate taxpayer for all of that time bar the two first years, and now pay a six figure amount in tax each year. It is remarkable how propaganda can short circuit people's brains.

I was trying to support the OP because I recognise that feeling. When your circumstances mean you have to work and carry responsibilities that other people around you don't, your lifestyles can gradually diverge and it can become shockingly isolating.

In any case, I seem to have accidentally taken the thread off course, so apologies to the OP for that. It wasn't my intention.

I think maybe you just need to be slightly more honest with your family op. Not in a mean way. But tell your sister, actually, I will need to keep working for x number of years financially. Say to your dad, well dad, I really can't retire with the kids in university, which is now very expensive, and I don't want them crippled with debt early.

Tbh I feel like very well off grandparents might consider helping out with their grandkids tuition. I would, anyway, though I know you can't ask. It would annoy me if they were being pushy about retirement.

I got my last full time job at 54 and promotion a couple of years later. I had part time jobs after I left that one too. Most people won’t be retired by 60.

I don't think I would be complaining if I worked term time only. What do you do during the big chunk of the year when you're not working at all?

You're going to have to spell out to them all that you don't want any more clueless comments about retiring, giving up work, how great it is to have lots of money and live in the country etc, and do it soon, otherwise you'll go ballistic at them one day having bottled it up for so long.

My husband, who has retired, was making small talk with a nurse this week, who patronisingly asked “what on earth” he does with his days. He was furious (as he is genuinely very busy). Can I advise everyone in OPs position to develop a good line in patronising comments about people with too much time on their hands. E.g. “ I suppose if I didn’t have such an interesting job, I might take more interest in vermin, sorry squirrels.”

Just be direct and honest. It won’t kill your sister. Her anxiety has let her be treated as the special one ling enough. Just treat her, and your parents, like adults. Don’t do it when you are all together just one on one “you know what, sister, my situation is really quite difficult right now and pretty much forever. I am in a financially precarious position as i support my dh and two children during a time of rising costs. I am not asking you to do anything about it but it hurts me when you ignore my experience and events in my life and substitute some fantasy version where i don’t have any problems or demands. I don’t have the money to be flexible with this holiday/my work or you could say I don’t have the flexibility to use money to solve problems.”

Next time your dad starts with the "every year you work after 60.." crap point out that that only applied to dangerous manual jobs in the past, and actually retirement from white collar work increases your risk of death, and you and dh are glad you're still working, because you want to keep your brains active and avoid becoming crashing bores ahem "I think it keeps us more engaged with the outside world"

i am.mystified as to why you are spending so much of your life listening to these insensitive, dreary self-absorbed people - even if they are family. You must have more rewarding ways to spend your time, surely?

My family couldn't understand what working for an employer means. Being self employed, owning their own businesses meant that they could holiday when it suited them rather than having to negotiate time off. So many times they'd say "let's all go off to ...." and I'd say no because I couldn't afford it, had already used my holidays or wasn't able to get that time - so never any time off at Christmas etc.

My OH (younger than me) stopped "working" in his early 50s due to ill health and then to care for his parents. No income at all. So I was the breadwinner earning a modest salary (under £30k) and balancing our budget using 0% balance transfers.

Then things changed when I was very fortunately made redundant a bit after my 64th birthday which gave me (us) a payout equal to 1 year's take home. Add to that I had 15 years worth of participation in share save/purchase schemes that meant I landed softly. Pensions starting to kick in. Inheritance.

But I still wanted to work so took a small part time job with a charity for 3 years and then finally stopped working last year.

I find it odd now that my 2 oldest siblings (well into their 70s) find that they can't leave their jobs as they can't sell the businesses or otherwise unentangle themselves.