Writing provides author therapy

Mona Ridder
Cumberland Times-News

June 29, 2008 07:30 am

— Writing a column or blogging is an outlet that allows the writer to share thoughts, ideas and opinions.
Whether they have any validity in the grand scheme of things is pretty much up to the reader, not the writer.
For the writer, it is therapy.
You, the readers, are our psychologists and psychiatrists. You often are privy to our innermost thoughts and secret desires.
I've written on a lot of topics over the years. Sometimes I know what I'm talking about and sometimes I don't. You usually catch me up on the things that I don't know quite as much about as I should.
My perspective comes from an aging baby boomer, though occasionally, my daughter or my mother could tilt that a bit.
I always thought the three of us should do a radio talk show from our different generational viewpoints.
As very opinionated women, we spanned nearly 90 years across our history and would have been able to dissect any topic with radically divergent opinions.
Alas, it only happened at occasional family get togethers.
I often wrote about my family, including my mother, my son and my daughter, in my columns. That is, until my daughter ordered me to cease and desist.
My son, who lives in California, hasn't seemed to mind being the occasional subject of my ramblings.
My mother took exception once in a while to my recollections of family history as they sometimes didn't jive with hers.
It's that different perspective thing, I guess.
But, it's true that sometimes I would talk about family that I hadn't really known and base my comments on stories I'd heard over the years.
This was especially so with my paternal grandmother, her mother-in-law, who died shortly before I was born.
From the stories one would have thought that this strong woman ruled her roost and I said so once.
Mother was quick to point out that I didn't have that right at all, rather it was my grandfather who ruled.
My mother liked her mother-in-law and I don't think she could say the same of her father-in-law though she never would have verbalized it.
I always enjoyed dissecting our lives and the times in which we lived.
My paternal grandmother was a very good businesswoman and a journalist at a time when it was not fashionable in the early 1900s. She also taught health in the public school.
My mother's own parents have also been a favorite topic of mine as they epitomized the pioneer spirit of our family that brought us from Europe in the 1600s to colonize and expand a new world and their own horizons.
This spirit passed from generation to generation and the stories of my grandparents homesteading in Canada where my mother was born are ones I cherish and will pass to future generations of cousins and grandchildren.
My mother and her sisters could have been the Wilder girls of "Little House on the Prairie" fame.
My sisters and I have been pretty independent in our own right as has my own daughter, my mother's only granddaughter.
Pets have also dominated many of my columns as I've related their sagas and their special relationships.
Travel, too, has been a mainstay of topics.
I've frequently commented on government and bureaucracy, being complimentary or critical when I thought it was deserved.
Not being a political animal in any sense of the word, I probably have come off somewhat snobbish in my assessment of some "hot topics."
Being "politically correct" is not really my style and it's not a phrase I especially care for.
I also don't care for the term "thinking outside the box" but I'd like to think that I don't reject ideas and innovations just because they are new and different.
It's true the only constant is change and we need to be flexible enough to work with it or maybe even generate it.
Now, that's a radical idea, but the status quo just won't do in this high-tech fast-paced world we live in.
The future is yours. Take it and make of it what you will.
It is also mine and I am moving forward, I just won't be inflicting my opinions on you in quite the same way.
I hope over the years my columns have made you laugh, think, get angry or even cry.
Contact Mona Ridder at mridder@times-news.com.

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