🔗 Share this article

I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have frequently found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to cry.