🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: mine was not. On the day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that button only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my awareness of a ability developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.