How to Not Know

The offsprings’ lives get bigger every day. More draws them into the world. Less compels them to say home. If they are with me, it’s for lack of a better offer, but the rolling snowball of independence is picking up speed and diameter. The writing is on the wall--or at least on the bumper of the car--and it gets straight to the point: I will, within a handful of years, have worked myself out of a job.
Initially, I was tickled and excited by the possibilities. But my wonderment at the opening doors has been muted a bit by the coincidental shrinking of my partner’s ability to wonder with me. (edit: this is improving...I think it is.)
I feel a lot of ways--ways that roll around and trip each other so that no single way of feeling can rise to an important enough position to demand attention.
I have no creditable career or function. Is it ok to become nothing more than a student of my own interests, or should I feel obligated to ferret out a useful position in society, even if such a forced search might lead to absolutely nothing?
Is it fair and honorable to live off the resources we have acquired over a couple decades, retire in effect, when the actual paid portion of the joint effort was carried out by the other? To be sure, I reared children through some mighty unpleasant conditions--conditions which might have been intolerable to many women--in order to facilitate both the earning of wages and the morphing of some abysmal real estate into lovely, inhabitable houses (while my own remained abysmal until recently.) It’s easy to forget, as the physical environment improves, that I did work long, hard, and patiently. (And there’s always the uncertainty of whether one’s “resources” are even stable, or whether they’ll be washed away like major portions of the southeast Asian coastline--and if that happened--oh well, at least necessity would dispatch confusion.)
One should feel useful. A sense of purpose is an essential amino acid, except, perhaps, to Nirvana-bent demigods, and I’m not one of those. But a sense of purpose cannot be plucked from the cosmic void--it has to come, I suppose, with experiential living and time. And maybe that is the answer. The living and time outlay which must be experienced before I’ve earned my next sense of purpose have not yet happened. I’m not done with offspring. Not quite yet. If one of those Nirvana-bent demigods would just stop by from time to time and remind me of that, then, maybe, I could relax.