Chapter 1 - The Month I Finally Took for Myself
For forty-six years, I looked after everyone but myself, and I got so good at it that people stopped noticing I was doing it at all.
David was my husband for almost my entire adult life. Together we raised three children, and then we helped raise their children too.
When he passed, the house went quiet in a way I had never heard before. But the quiet wasn't the strangest part of being a widow.
The strangest part was waking up one morning and understanding that I had spent decades tending to what everyone else needed before I ever stopped to ask what I wanted.
So at sixty-eight, I rented a cottage on the Oregon coast for a full month. I told my children after I had already paid for it, not before.
Claire set down her fork at dinner and stared at me. "A whole month? By yourself?"
"Yes," I said. "That's the entire point."
"Mom, what if something happens?"
May you like
"Then it'll happen to me, in a pretty place, with the ocean out the window."
She didn't have an answer for that.
