Does anyone else still read and love Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse?

I’ve been reading For Better or For Worse since at least 1992. It was always one of my favorites, and I tended to relate most to the daughter Elizabeth, although she must be almost ten years older than me. She too was getting hassled by her mom about not getting dinner started on time while also navigating evolving friendships at school and dealing with annoying younger siblings.

For Better or For Worse concluded in 2008, but instead of dropping the series completely they decided to rerun it from the beginning again. I am still thrilled about this.

So now it’s the year 2024 and here I am forty years old and still reading For Better or For Worse every day. This second time around it’s the mom Elly who is resonating with me. She too is trying to manage all the kids’ activities, cook healthy meals for her family, and go for a run every once in a while. As a child, Elly’s storylines were boring and somewhat invisible to me. Now I’m the boring and invisible one.

Here is the downside of reading a comic strip you’ve already read: I know what’s coming.

In today’s strip it’s raining hard, Elizabeth comments to her mother that “the river is already past its banks!” The punchline has to do with college students and dirty laundry, but I hardly noticed. I was gritting my teeth as a major sense of dread passed through my body.

It’s 1995 all over again and Farley the dog is going to die soon.

I think I cried the first time Farley died, or at least got teary-eyed. I was just a kid; my sister and I were always extra sensitive to the suffering of animals. Of course I was going to cry.

But I think I’m going to cry this time too. Time has not hardened me like it was supposed to, if anything my emotional barriers crack more easily now than they did in the 1990s. And how is Elly going to feel? How does she manage her own emotions and the grief of her children? I’m going to watch her more closely this time around.

To all the other For Better or For Worse readers out there, good luck this week. It’s gonna be a rough one.