🔗 Share this article

I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. That day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period 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 tried that line too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – 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 suppressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to erase events, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes 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 completed the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; 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 falling into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful 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 understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my sense of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.