🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: mine was not. On the day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task 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, relentless and draining. What surprised 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 came to realise that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs 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 endure, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all unease. 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 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, hatred, disappointment, hunger. 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 contrast, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.