Don't Wallow In It

I can still hear my mother’s loving, yet stern caution to “just don’t wallow in it” tiptoeing through my mind’s ear as my heart deals with disappointments or misdeeds by others now and then. This caution from her didn’t come immediately in those days. She knew I was a little girl, an adolescent, a young adult, a striving career woman, or a young wife trying to filter my way through my own unfolding life. No, she would allow a time for a heartbreak to wreck its temporary havoc or a disappointment from a lost opportunity or poor result from a valiant attempt to run its course, but when she determined that any further nurturing of self-pity was entering into a totally unproductive zone she would gently draw me aside, take hold on one of my hands while I dried tears with the other, and, in her low, beautiful, reassuring melodic voice she would begin to tell me all the reasons life had taught her not to wallow.

Given to drama as I was sometimes back then, I didn’t necessarily want her to cut my pity-party short. I was enjoying the so-called ‘sweet sorrow’ or that ‘justified outrage’ I was feeling. Darn it, I’d earned the right to suffer for as long as I wanted to I’d find myself thinking, but try as I might I could not drown out her truths, her logic, her sharing, her tools that she was offering me to move to a higher place within.

Lately I find myself wishing my mother were here to talk to our nation, to take it by one of its hands and have it dry its tears with the other so that it too could hear the voice of reason she would impart with such tact and grace as to why we’d all wallowed long enough. I really wish she were here to do that because undeniably we all need a road map paved with love to take us to that higher place within.

  ©Peggy Eldridge-Love 2013