This is the last blog post I’ll be making for the foreseeable future.

The Little Girl is bristling at having her life detailed, and she worries about what her friends might think. She asked me to shut this down, and so I will.

Writing about family is a tricky thing. Anything less than full honesty does not play on the page: It just doesn’t feel authentic to the reader.

But unvarnished veracity takes a toll, especially on those who are being written about.

Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz once said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Writing about those closest to you can seem destructive, or at least disloyal. Of course, we’d never have some of our best non-fiction and fiction if all writers refrained from chronicling their families in one form or other.

As Socrates told us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I believe that, though it is a bit self-serving, I will admit.

The truth is, I loved writing about my daughter, because I love my daughter so much. Blogging about her seemed like such a natural act. And I always thought that she’d enjoy reading these blogs when she’s older.

But you can’t profess love in 350-word missives while knowing they upset the object of that love.

Thank you for reading this. I understand that a good many people did, and that’s gratifying. I appreciate the emails and comments that you sent me. Well, I appreciate most of them.

I wanted to say, finally, to people like me who are divorced parents, that we’re not failures, despite what others might say. And, if we care enough about our children and stay deeply involved in their lives, I don’t think we’re messing them up, despite what those same (very annoying) others would tell us.

Good luck to the joint custodians, to the weekend parents, to the intact families.

And good luck to our children, whom we love more than baseball, or cannoli, or ourselves.