I don’t remember when my father started to read this blog, I think it was in 2004 or 2005, but for a few years he read it every day. He especially liked the first year or so when I was writing Smartmom posts daily.

He really liked Smartmom and read the column every Saturday morning in the Brooklyn Paper. He would go to a deli at Pineapple and Henry in Brooklyn Heights where he could always pick it up.

That meant a lot to me.

Now I’m just so glad that I started this blog because it was a way my father could see my writing without me having to actually show it to him—that would be way too intimidating. He was a writer, an intellectual, and a great appreciator of literature. Needless to say, I was always too timid to show him any of my creative work, my novel, my poems.

He did love the songs I wrote when I was a songwriter in my teens and twenties.

But my writing. I was afraid to show him because he was an arbiter of taste and value in my lexicon of life and his opinion was always fraught. A random comment or criticism could really destroy me.

But with the blog I just put the writing out there. I always said that was the reason I started it. What I didn’t realize until yesterday was this: the blog and the column were my way of sharing myself with the father I so admired.

Now I’m so glad that I did.