Therèse Havenga, Head of Business Transformation at Momentum Savings, contemplates what will be waiting in retirement.
“So have you thought about what you want to do with your last two rodeos before you retire?”
The words hit me like a truck. I’m 45. I’ve barely started greying. I’m perimenopausal at most. But here I was, in a routine performance discussion, being asked to start thinking about wrapping it up. Not maliciously. Just … expectedly. While sitting with a full inbox, a full calendar, a head full of plans and still – frankly – a full tank.
In a world obsessed with youthful potential, that casual question carried the weight of something deeper. It triggered an uncomfortable awareness many women whisper about but rarely say out loud: Am I becoming invisible? Even while we’re still leading teams, raising children and holding together families and workplaces, there comes a point when the world stops looking at us in quite the same way. You start to feel less seen, less heard, less sought after.
Although I’m not there yet, retirement seems to be more than a career ending – it’s the unravelling of a set of identities women have carried for decades. It’s the letting go of roles that, while exhausting, also gave structure and purpose: leader, mom, partner, mentor, emotional anchor, planner of everyone’s lives, fixer of what breaks, peacemaker, the one who remembers birthdays, carries traditions, and listens when others fall apart.
Many women will probably feel guilty for no longer wanting to be needed in the same way. For wanting a chapter that is more about becoming than giving.
Psychologists often speak of retirement as a type of identity. For women it carries another layer: the quiet dislocation from the sense of being essential. That’s why this stage of life can trigger a sense of loss. We’ve been conditioned to find value in what we do, not in who we are.
And what does becoming look like?
In South Africa women live on average more than five years longer than men. That means potentially twenty years.
