Mother's Day

T's* View
Not long ago I heard a feminist refer to God as "She," and I thought the person was being a little sacrilegious, or facetious. But as Mother's Day approaches and I think of the goodness of mothers I've known or heard about, I got to thinking that while we can't actually classify God as to gender, mothers are probably as close an image of Him as anything we'll ever find on this earth.
To begin with, mothers are our co-creators, nurturing us with their own flesh and blood until we take on our independent form. And even after the umbilical cord is cut, there are invisible bonds that bind us to them forever. From the moment of birth, they love us not for any special reason, but just because we are. They watch over us, worry about us, see that we're fed and clothed, and never completely sever their ties with us. Whenever we need them, they're there for us, regardless of how good or bad we've been. We can abuse them, neglect them or ignore them but they still go on loving us and forgiving us, over and over again. (They may scream and holler a little in between, but their better nature usually comes through.)
Do something a little special for them and they think you're the best person in the world. Regardless of what you give them, they always try to give you more. They want only what's best for you—your happiness is their happiness, your success their fulfillment; and your pain is their pain.
A mother is the one you can turn to when the rest of the world lets you down. Often she knows what you need even without your telling her. You might not always take the advice she gives you, but deep down in your heart you know she has your best interests at heart. She'll take you in when you have no place to stay and she'll do without for herself if she has to, so that there's enough for you. If she has to nag, or scold, or punish you, a mother is only trying to steer you in the right direction or teach you something that will make life easier for you in the long run. She does it out of love and concern for your well being, which is always uppermost in her mind.
Someone once said that God couldn't be everyplace, so He invented mothers. I'll venture to go a step further and say that God put a special part of Himself into all those good women called Mothers, and knowing them is like getting a glimpse of Him.
Happy Mother's Day and God Bless You, Mothers.
*Terri the Typesetter
 Week of May 13, 1984

A Visit to the doctor"s office

June 19, 1998 The New Milford Times
By Terri Andersen
So many times, when we’re faced with a medical dilemma, we’re advised to get a second opinion. But what happens when the second opinion is completely different from the first one? Is the second necessarily better? Suppose you went to the second doctor first? How is a patient supposed to know which doctor is right? (Which one graduated the head of his class and which one at the bottom?) If two opinions are different, do you look for a third doctor to match either opinion number one or opinion number two? And what if your number three's opinion is completely opposed to numbers one and two? Will the insurance company cover all these opinions? frankly, the word “opinion” makes me a little uncomfortable. Is that an “educated guess?”) I’ve been to doctors who told me they didn’t know what it was that I had, yet they charged me for an office visit anyway. Is that fair? One the doctors I visited (how do you like that word? We go for a  "visit” and we get charged for it. My friends never charged me to visit them. When I visit a department store and they don’t have what I want, they don’t charge me for coming for a visit. Maybe doctors ought to call it something else.) To get back to my unfinished sentence, one of the doctors I “visited” asked me if I ever had the problem I came to him with before. When I said yes I did but it went away before I could get an appointment (like six weeks down the line), he told me to wait a few days and if the problem persisted, to come back and see him again. (Was he going to know something in a few days that he didn’t know then?)
I figured I’d solve the dilemma by getting a medical self-help book and educating myself. Hah! Either my complaints can turn out to be symptoms of a dozen different ailments, or I’m a lot sicker than I thought. (Read a few medical books and you’ve got only six months to live.) And almost all the remedies in the medical books end their last paragraph with “if problem persists, see your physician.”
Terri Andersen is a contributing writer for The New Milford Times.

The Good Old Days?

GOLDEN
Υ Ε Α R S
The New Milford Times June 5, 1998
The Good Old Days?
 BY TERRI ANDERSEN Contributing Writer
Were the “good old days” really so good? I can think of a few things that are much better today. For instance, buying a chicken to cook for dinner. In the good old days, my family lived across the street from a live chicken market, where the cackling could be heard all over town. Sure, when you went in for a chicken, you knew you were getting a real fresh one because you saw it strutting around just a few minutes ago. But after the butcher caught it and cut off its head (yuk, I can remember my stomach turn squeamish whenever I witnessed that), the housewife had to pluck all the feathers and take out all the innards when she got the chicken home. As I watched my mother do those messy jobs in our kitchen, I remember telling her, “I’m never going to do that when I grow up.” “If you want to eat chicken, you will,” she answered. But I insisted that’s one job I'd never do, and thanks to the industry’s progress, I never had to. (Guess you figured out by now that I was not brought up on a farm.) How about permanent waves in the good old days? The first perm I ever got was so traumatizing I swore I’d never get another one. They wrapped my hair around tiny curlers that were attached to a bunch of wires connected to a big domed electrical contraption. As I sat under it for what seemed like an awfully long time, I was sure I could smell my hair burning to a crisp. Of course, you couldn’t move while all the beautifying was going on, and when I looked in the mirror after it was over, all I could think of was steel wool pads. (Thank goodness for today’s lotions and conditioners.) Another memory I don’t cherish is the cold-water flat we lived in in Brooklyn, N.Y. The only heat came from a double duty stove in the kitchen (the bedrooms were ice cold in the winter), and to get hot water for washing dishes, clothes or ourselves, we had to heat big pots of water on the stove. The bathtub was also in the kitchen, disguised under a hinged wooden board that doubled as a seating area next to the kitchen table. One time someone knocked on the kitchen door when I happened to be taking a bath and my mother opened the door, not realizing I was still in the tub. I sank as low as I could and pulled the cover down to an almost closed position, hoping whoever the caller was wouldn’t come into the kitchen and try to sit on it. (Luckily, it was just the Fuller Brush man and my mom wasn’t buying anything that day.) I can think of lots of things that are better today than they were in the old days, but there is one thing I have to admit was a little better: I was younger then.