Since You've Been Gone

I had to break up yesterday. It was odd, since I've never really been on the breaking part. I've always been more of the broken. I wasn't fully prepared to deal with the hurt feelings and disappointment that I generated with my personal choice. But that's the way it goes in relationships sometimes. People grow apart. They want different things. It just wasn't working out, and we could either continue to cling to one another needlessly and hope that things would somehow work out, or maybe we would both get used to the dysfunctional way we had of dealing with each other. I had to tell the lady who was handling my retirement account that I was switching my account to someone else.
The truth is, I should have pulled the trigger a few years back. That was when my wife started taking an active interest in our collective finances with an eye toward actually retiring one day. That sort of thing requires long range planning, something for which I am ill-equipped. Part of me has always bristled at the notion of "socking away" money when we never seem to have enough to do all the things we really want to do anyway. As a numeric grown-up, I understand that 401Ks and portfolios and investments are a good idea, but after that first pie chart, my eyes start to glaze over.
That's why I was happy to let my money sit where it was for all those years. Every few months, my financial advisor would drop by my classroom for our appointment, and I would smile and nod until she closed up her folders and notebooks and asked if I had any questions. "Nope," I would smile and say through my haze, and then it would be another quarter before I had to go through that again.
The problem was me. I can admit it now. I should have cared more. I should have been more attentive. If I could have been a little more aggressive, or willing to take some risks. But that's not who I am. I'm the kind of guy who likes to be told by his wife that we should be making money instead of losing it. I'm the kind of guy who wants somebody else to take over the reins of my empire. Such as it is.
When she left, she asked that I remember her fondly, or at least would recommend her services to some of the other members of our staff. There wasn't a lot more for us to say, except "goodbye."