It’s my first Labor Day weekend since the big Retirement day, just four days ago, and I’m wondering…Am I still entitled to celebrate it?…Is the idea, once a worker, always a worker? Or it this day just for current workforce laborers?

Not that I’m not doing other kinds of work. Believe me, I still work all day! …Which reminds me of the years I was a stay-at-home—I mean work-at-home—Mom, and had a hard time justifying exactly what “work” I did all day, every day.

If you’ve been there, too, you know the routine.

Husband comes home from work, inquiring if wife has done this or that.

Wife apologizes. “Sorry. I was so busy all day; I just couldn’t get to it.”

Husband rejects too-busy justification: ”Too busy doing what? You don’t work.”

Seething at the thought of all the “housework,” emphasis on the work I had done, complicated by caring for his two children (They were always just “his” children at moments such as these!), I bristled.

Fast forward to six years ago. He stopped working outside the home; I didn’t.

“Did you [fill in the blank, e.g.: make those insurance calls etc.]?” I asked when I got home.

“Sorry. I never had a chance. I was too busy.”

Ready for the turned-tables retort?

“Too busy doing what? You don’t work.” …Plus! I got to add: “And you don’t even have kids to care for.”

Truce! Husband now understands and admits—working at home is hard work.

So now we’re in the same boat. And if it’s a canoe, we’re paddling in the same direction.

Maybe that’s what we’ll do on Labor Day—go canoeing. After decades of working, we deserve the Labor Day time off, too!

Happy Labor Day, fellow retirees—we deserve to celebrate our work lives, whatever work we did or still do! Don’t you think?