🔗 Share this article

I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. 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 hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not working out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, 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 think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – 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 finished the change you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a ability to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a ability developing within to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to sob.