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Just wanted to say thanks for the laugh with the Sunday March 1 comic. I can completely relate to the situation, as can my own mother and probably every mother out there. With a 3 year old in the house, I can't recall the last time I had an uninterrupted bath. It gives me the giggles each time I see it, so it's getting framed and hung in my office.

Thanks again!

Kelly M, Endicott NY

In regards to this month's banner for Women's History Month, each of them is a mockery of the women this month is set aside to celebrate. Connie the Mindlessly Man-Crazy, as you've turned her into, only cares if a guy is single and is prepared to settle. She's also supposed to have had affairs and her feminist views are portrayed in a negative light in biographies. She's called lonely, insecure, and unhappy. According to Annie, she's burdened Lawrence with iligitimacy. Women get enough pressure to get married and hook up ASAP from society and if you hit thirty and aren't married, suddenly you're getting old and really should lower your expectations and standards, which are very likely too high and that's why you're not married yet so just settle for what you can get. Single mothers still face stigmas and assuptions. It's insulting, demeaning, and depressing. Please, go back to portraying Connie as the confident, capable woman with standards she used to be.

Elly dropped out of school to get married and has no problems with neglecting her education because she sees it as irrelevant and not needed to reach her goals. Maybe that's how it was thirty-plus years ago but not having at least a bachelors today is a *major* disadvantage in the job market. The only reason I can stand a snowball's chance at getting jobs above unskilled, minimum wage labor is I have two AAS and work towards a BA and a BS (had to drop out due to lack of money). If I only had one AAS, I'd be in trouble. We need to finish our educations and marriage cannot take priority over that, because if it does, the woman *will* ended up shafted in numerous ways and end up doing worse in life than if she'd actually finished school. I know firsthand how hard it is to go back to school as an adult after being out for a while. Elly tossed aside an opportunity denied millions of women in the past, one that many women fought against tradition and mysogynist attitudes and!
expectations to achieve, and even then few were able to receive the level of education that was free for the taking for Elly. Yes, we need people to raise kids to be productive members of society and that's a very important job, so let's be role models who show education is important and valuable, not role models who show that a woman's path should always put Mrs. and Mommy above everything else.

Annie is the poster child for doormat wives and the message that you should just shut your mouth, suck up, and resign yourself to a husband who neglects his family's well-being. According to her biography, all it takes is Steve leaving the dinner table *once* because he didn't want to hear about his failure to keep promises and Anne folds like an accordian despite the fact that doing so means a newborn will be in a room that will be cold and drafty during the winter. I don't care what Anne does on her own, it'll take more than plastic sheeting and that's not going to hold heat in or keep cold out. What she represents is what women were taught forty and fifty years ago. Put up with abuse, put up with deprivation, put up with whatever you have to so he's happy. Garbage like that is what Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Gloria Steinem, Coretta Scott King, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman fought against.

Women's History Month deserves to be promoted and celebrated and I'm glad you've put up a graphic in honor of it. It would be nice if the women portrayed didn't embody one or more qualities, attitudes, and opinions that represent the antithesis of what this month is about: celebrating strong women who brought about change, which often required bucking the traditional mysogynist attitudes and expectations.

Cheryl L

Like many others I miss the old format, but life goes on and know that no is forcing me to read the current version. I find one or two strips every couple of weeks funny or insightful, but the overall tenor of the current iteration is kind of whinny and flat. There seems to be two types of people who follow Coffee Talk and the strip. The first group are so inraptured with Lynn and the Patterson's that they would love anything that she and her staff put out; and then there is another group who know the future of the Patterson's and a little of Lynn own story and can't help but a little frustrated and disappointed, and a little bit used.
The gimmicy letters' from "Elly" complete with postmark, and worse yet the "letters" from readers to a fictional "Elly" makes me question why am I reading these posts. On those days the strip and the Coffee Talk comments become a guilty pleasure, but without the pleasure. Its a little bit like listening to my mother-in-law retell a revisionist story about her sad life. Yes those story's the FBorFW has a few valuable nuggets that shed some new light on why things are the way they are now, but for the most part they're stale and little too self absorbed. I think the success of the first iteration of the Patterson story was great because she put a lot of herself into the charaters, but ironically the reason that the overal arc of the current story seems to fall flat on a number of veteran FBorFW followers is because it may have too much of Lynn's in the current strip.
At the end of the original story arc Lynn and her staff were writting from the perspective of a grandparent or parent of grown children and that perspective made it fresh and interesting. Perhaps the challenge of writing a strip from a young mothers's persective (i.e., Elly) while you're really an empty nester and/or grandparent allows for a little to much retrospective second guessing and some times like a little too much like my mother-in-law.
Good Luck.

Greg A, St. Louis

Er ... in Sunday's strip, did Elly really leave Lizzie unattended in the bathtub with only Michael, a preschooler, to watch her? That's incredibly dangerous, and someone (John, one hopes) should tell her so before she leaves one of her children unsupervised and one of them, or even the dog, gets hurt or killed.

Chris P, Boston MA

Hi - I have loved For Better or For Worse since it began and was very happy to hear that you were going to continue, albeit with a modified format. What is disappointing to me is the current strips between Elly and John are almost always portraying John in a negative light. If he was so insensitive in the initial strip, I doubt I would have continued to read it.
Please consider lightening up on him and letting the wonderful family you have created be - faulted but loving.

Thanks!

Laurie M, New York

5,4,3,2,1... Countdown to people trying to report cartoon characters to Social Services for leaving the kids alone in the bath!

Poor Elly, I hope she found a quiet place to hide out for a while.

Valerie, Alabama

Dear Lynn, I have enjoyed EVERY ONE of your strips. You are one of the best artists who draws. The facial expressions capture the heart. You are one of the handful of comics I take the time to look at. Always the first one read.
Thank you for being so honest about life, speed bumps and all. Most of us relate to the pratfalls and pitfalls life holds for us. That is why we hold our breath from day to day some times to see what is going to happen next. You are so unique and brave to write what you do. You are a stronger person because of what you have been through. Each and every terrible thing you have had to endure has shaped you into the beautiful individual who gives so many of us hope from the wisdom learned you share so freely.
No one is perfect. Not many are brave enough to be honest about their lives. I stand and applaud you for who you are, and what you are doing with your life now.
God bless you dear.

Sandra R

I am perplexed by the animosity shown towards Lynn and her characters in this forum.

What is with people trying to read the most negative interpretation of every single strip? Neglect and abuse? I just don't see it. I see real humour from some of life's difficult situations and petty every day frustrations.

Lynn, keep up the good work!

Ted, Calgary

My initials are L.E.
When I needed a "nom de plume" when writing an article about women's work (you know, the household/family work-that-never-ends), I immediately thought of Elly and the FBorFW family.
Thanks for the inspiration and solidarity!

Lorna, Nanaimo BC

This is a comic strip folks, designed to give you a little pleasure each day. A laugh...a bit of recognition of the funny things that happen in life. If "For Better or Worse" were to show Elly as a perfect mother, her children as always doing right, her husband as Mr. Wonderful, it would never have been successful. In real life, women DO worry about their appearance, children DON'T think about the consequences of their actions, and husbands DO hand the baby to the mother when she needs changing. I have lived this life and so have thousands of other women. I have found humor in my life, even when it took a turn for the worse, especially when it took a turn for the worse. I look in the mirror of this strip and the humor in my life, too. This strip is a COMMENTARY on REAL life, not a text book for Gender Relations 101. If you are offended, get out there and work to change the society that puts a woman's looks above her abilities, regards raising children as less valuable than virtually an other job on the planet, and gives men special privileges just because they have a Y chromosome.

Robin, Missoula MT