🔗 Share this article

I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge towards finding the positive: “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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself caught in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs 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 realized that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a skill developing within to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to weep.