🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull towards seeking optimism: “I can {book a replacement trip|schedule another vacation|arrange a different getaway”; “At least we have {travel insurance|coverage for trips|protection for journeys”; “This’ll give me {something to write about|material for an article|content for a story”. But I never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that option only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is not possible and embracing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my feeling of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.