A kid’s bedtime is the worst. Trying to get little ones to go to sleep can be a nightly battle. So much so that Richard Dahlberg based an entire children’s story around a battle he had with his then 7-year-old daughter Allison. Except this battle was a little different: It was a battle of “I love you’s.”
The story goes that, one night, Dahlberg was putting Allison to bed. He said, “I love you.” She responded in kind, and they began going back and forth with “I love you more,” until finally Allison said to her father, “Dad, I love you more than more.” The moment struck Dahlberg. It was undeniably adorable, and he wanted to capture and remember the moment.
It was 1996, and Dahlberg sat down and penned a fun, rhyming children’s story about the moment, titled, appropriately, I Love You More Than More. It was about 20 pages and sweet, and something he and his family—Allison, now 25, daughter Cate, 28, and wife Geri—could cherish forever.
At the time, Dahlberg wasn’t planning on publishing his story (at least not formally, but he says it was always in the back of his mind). When Christmas rolled around in 1997, he took his first shot at turning his story into a book at the urging of his wife. Each Christmas, Geri gave their daughters a book that revolved around the theme of love. “My wife said she couldn’t find a book that was cuter than my story, so I just [printed two copies] on the computer,” says Dahlberg.
Thus began Dahlberg’s journey to becoming a published author. For the most part, it was little more than a fun hobby. Dahlberg, who has no formal writing background, has spent more than 30 years as a probation officer, a job he still has today. That’s not exactly a person you would expect to write a children’s story. At least until you meet him.
He’s kind and fatherly. He loves his family and loves the journey his story has taken him on. In the past, he’d played around with a few limericks and song parodies, but just for fun. Since I Love You More Than More was complete, he had a nagging feeling he should get it published.
From 1996–2000, Dahlberg sent it to a few vanity publishers, but his family did most of the pushing. “When we were younger, we all made a video to send to Oprah to see if she would publish it, so we were always pushing it because we knew there was something special about it,” Allison Dahlberg Mehawej says.
Fast forward to 2012. The book had gone through a few different homemade iterations. That year, Allison and Cate gave their dad an extra-special Christmas story: His. The sisters went online to the Shutterfly website and created a beautiful hardcover copy of the story and combined it with family photos. “We thought my dad would cry,” Mehawej says. He did.
Not only was it a perfect Christmas gift, but seeing a hardcover version of his book gave Dahlberg that final push to get the story published. He began seriously researching ways to self-publish, and eventually selected Xulon Press as his printer. He went on an extensive search to find an illustrator and stumbled upon Sherry A. Mitcham out of Georgia. She was a perfect fit.
After months of working on art and finalizing the layout, I Love You More Than More became available in March 2014 and Dahlberg was a published writer.
Shortly after the book was released, Dahlberg entered the story into Xulon’s children’s books competition; the company notified Dahlberg that the story had won first prize in that category and second grand prize overall in their spring 2014 competition.
Looking back at the process that has played out over nearly 20 years, Dahlberg keeps a realistic view of the future of his work—he has another story, Why Did God Make Feet that he hopes to publish as well. “On one level, it is a vanity thing,” Dahlberg says. “On the second level, it would be nice to sell enough to recoup my cost. And the third fantasy level is that by word of mouth, it would take off and become a classic.”
Story Excerpt
I knew I had to go for broke,
to finish this with one last stroke.
“I love you more than ALL,” I said.
“More than all that ever was,
more than all
that now exists,
more than what
will ever be,
more than eyes
or mind can see!”
