The preceding is an excerpt from Available As Is: A Midlife Widow’s Search for Love published by She Writes Press. Copyright 2022. Used with permission.
I wondered why we couldn’t we get a live-in housekeeper like the families with dead mothers got on Family Affair or The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. She could have done my chores and made us dinner so we didn’t have to eat meatloaf every night. She could have asked about my day when I got home from school and brought me milk and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Everyone knew a sad kid was supposed to be taken care of, not greeted with a list of chores. Dad should at least have told me how great I was doing, but I was pretty sure he thought only in equations.
Debbie Weiss is a former attorney who earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2020. She turned to writing after George, her husband and partner of more than three decades, died of cancer in April 2013, and she found herself living alone for the first time in her life. Weiss’s essays have been published in The New York Times’s “Modern Love” column, HuffPost, Woman’s Day and Reader’s Digest, among other publications. She lives in Benicia, CA. Explore more from Debbie at her website: The Hungover Widow
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