🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a good summer: mine was not. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider 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 vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to erase events, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my baby. 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 completed the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded 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 hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling 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 nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings 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) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the urge to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a skill developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to cry.