Four lines.

It takes ninety seconds.

It converts a conversation into a document, and a document has to be answered, and an answer is a commitment, and a commitment can be followed up.

I never sent one.

Not once in three and a half years.

And I have thought very hard about why, because I am not a timid person in other parts of my life, and the answer is two things.

The first is that I did not want to be difficult, and I had absorbed, from somewhere, without anybody ever saying it to me, that a mother who writes things down about her son’s school is difficult, and that difficult mothers get worse outcomes for their children.