Dear LPG, 

Nowadays, I think being a pensioner can be so much more challenging because so many of us find ourselves with children that we are not as close to as we would like to be.   They move out, and the one aspect of pre-retirement living that affects us all is the time that we never seem to have enough of. Another truth is that we think there will be so much more free time in our lives once we stop working, but that is so often not the case.

When I take a look at the people who have become my close friends since I retired, it is true that so many of our children, if we have any, have moved so far away from us geographically that it is much harder to keep up with what is going on in their lives.  

We know about the significant milestones.   When they get a new and exciting job, you will likely be told immediately. We are also likely to learn about it if they find themselves with health issues or a grandchild reaches a milestone in their education, but the little aspects that help you join the dots in their lives are so often missing. This can happen because of a family rift, but it is often the case that there is not enough time to talk about minor occurrences.  

One thing that Covid-19 and the resulting bouts of self-isolation did was bring so many families closer together.  

We were suddenly more mindful of the health of the people around us, and even those sons and daughters who worked hard, maybe from home throughout the whole epidemic, seemed to find the time to keep connected with family members near and far that they would generally phone much less frequently. We were partly worried about how the pandemic affected them, and keeping that contact was a way of not being so isolated and out of touch. But in our minds, the crisis is now over, and we are all getting involved with the lives we had before it all began, with the result that our middle-aged young ones again have so little time for really keeping in touch.

So many of those longer telephone calls that lockdown time allowed have been curtailed in exchange for the ones that barely will enable enough time for an update of the positive and negative aspects of your diary because the child you are talking to has you in their ear while they are indulging in an additional multitasking exercise. 

Your conversations have again become interspersed with interruptions as you learn that your grandson is still not ready for bed because your daughter’s instructions to him and what she is saying to you are getting all mixed up, or your son is at the counter paying for a meal during his lunch hour. The fact that they have time to talk at all is good, but it seems that the more convenient life gets, the less time we have for catching up with each other.  

This was happening before the Covid-pandemic, but during those couple of years when we were forced to be isolated, we also learned much more about keeping connected. I hope it is one of the few life lessons we don’t forget, even if family catchups need to be a new entry in our ‘to-do’ lists.

GD, Bellingham

…and LPG adds some information on today’s celebration…

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