My husband likes 60 Minutes, and sometimes I watch it with him. I wouldn’t necessarily consider the broadcasts memorable, but I remember Andy Rooney once saying something like this: “The good [columns] take an hour [to write]. The bad ones take weeks.”
He was so right! When I write Dear Marshall and Dear Livia posts, the ones that I like best are almost always those that seem to write themselves. Most of them are painful and slow, and sometimes I give up trying to make them good. I just post them, because if I wait too long they’ll no longer feel relevant and I’ll have to delete them. I figure that someday I’ll be happy to have all of the posts, whether poor or mediocre or excellent, because each one tells a story, not just about the children but about the whole family and our life together. So I continue to put out those Dear Marshall and Dear Livia posts, even the slow ones that probably aren’t any good.
This is my labor of love.