🔗 Share this article

I trust your a good summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge towards looking for silver linings: “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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off 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 smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – 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 satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. 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 no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her suffering 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) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow 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 building the ability to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to cry.