🔗 Share this article

I hope you had a enjoyable summer: mine was not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something 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 major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast 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 click erase and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to cry.