“She saw no virtue in the long, drawn-out sigh or the public display of devastation.”
Most parents are quick to quote the old adage, “Don’t cry over spilled milk.” It is often the first lesson in suppression we learn as children: what is done is done, so emotion is a waste. My mother, however, did not subscribe to the efficiency of robots. She understood the spilled milk. She knew that when the glass shatters and the white puddle spreads across the kitchen linoleum, the tragedy, however small, is real. It is a shock. It is a mess. It is a sudden disruption of the order we try so hard to maintain. To her, the tears were not a waste; they were the necessary acknowledgment that something had broken.
She allowed for the crash. She gave permission for the initial wail. But if she was permissive with the shock, she was ruthless with the aftermath.
This is where she diverged from the script. Society—especially the old-world culture she navigated—has a comfortable, almost addictive relationship with the performance of grief. There is a costume for it. The cultural norm dictates that one must don the heavy weeds of mourning, wearing black for weeks or months to signal to the world that one is broken. It is a way of externalizing the pain, making it a visible, lingering identity. It is a social contract that says, “I am suffering, and I will show you my suffering every day until the calendar says I am allowed to stop.”
My mother rejected this theatrical longevity. She viewed the “weeks in mourning” not as respect for the dead, but as a disrespect to the living. To wear black for weeks was to invite the shadow to live in your house, to give it a spare room, to feed it at the table. She saw the heavy black clothes as a kind of emotional anchor, dragging the wearer back into the darkness every time they caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror. She refused to let the darkness become her uniform.
Her philosophy was distilled into a single, razor-sharp question she would ask when the initial tears dried but the mood remained sour: “How long are you going to feel bad about it?”
To the uninitiated, the line sounds harsh. It sounds like a dismissal, a lack of empathy. But in her mouth, it was not a judgment; it was a negotiation. It was an invitation to set a timer.
She acknowledged the validity of the feeling—the “spilled milk” phase—but she demanded an exit strategy. The question forced you to quantify your misery. Are you going to feel bad for ten minutes? An hour? A day? She was willing to grant you the time, provided you could name it. She understood that grief, frustration, and anger are like gases; they expand to fill the space you give them. If you give them a “weeks in mourning” container, they will last for weeks. If you give them an afternoon, they will burn out by dinner.
This approach turned emotional processing into a form of spiritual athleticism. It required stamina to feel the pain fully, and then discipline to put it down. It was a rejection of the romanticization of suffering. She saw no virtue in the long, drawn-out sigh or the public display of devastation. To her, resilience wasn’t about never feeling bad; it was about efficiency. It was the ability to visit the valley of the shadow of death without building a condo there.
In a world that often tells us to either repress everything or wallow in everything, she walked a middle path. She was the master of the “short count.” Get knocked down. Acknowledge it hurts. Cry over the milk, because it is sad that the milk is gone. But then, look at the clock. Decide when the pity party ends. And when that minute hand hits the mark, you wash your face, you put on a color that isn’t black, and you step back into the light.
She taught me that “feeling bad” is a visitor, not a tenant. The spilled milk is cleaned up. The black dress is put away. The sun comes up. Her question remains the most valuable tool in the survival kit, a challenge that rings out every time life knocks the wind out of me: How long?
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co
Travel in Life 