🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to erase events, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to recognise 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 sob.