Mary Kay Fleming thought she knew what retirement would look like. A developmental psychologist and humor writer, she assumed that when her husband Don retired, life would carry on much as before. He’d stay busy. Maybe even renovate the house.
That’s not what happened. Instead, the scientist she’d known for decades surprised her by turning to poetry—an old, unspoken dream that finally had room to surface.
With Don at home full time and Mary Kay still working, their marriage shifted in unexpected ways.
Suddenly, they were together all the time. Don wanted to talk—about everything. “He could do twenty minutes on where the squirrel went after it left the tree,” Fleming says. What felt like a small adjustment became a deeper reckoning with how meaning changes when work falls away.
In this episode of Young at Heart, Mary Kay reflects on what retirement asks of us—not just practically, but emotionally.
She talks about the need for “a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” and the challenge of finding purpose once the novelty of free time wears off. Drawing on her background in developmental psychology, she explores how identity and contribution continue to evolve later in life.
She also speaks candidly about loss, aging, and the power of humor to make those changes easier to bear.
“If you cannot keep a sense of humor,” she says, “there are ways that getting older becomes much harder.”
Young at Heart brings you stories of people navigating life’s transitions. For Mary Kay Fleming, retirement wasn’t about slowing down—it was about finding new ways to matter.
The post Mary Kay: The Developmental Work of Older Age appeared first on WAMU.
Published Date : 2026-02-03 03:02:00
Source : wamu.org
