🔗 Share this article

I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did 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 urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those instances 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 being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. 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 thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. 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 in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a skill to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my sense of a skill developing within to understand that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to sob.