🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were planning to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line 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 talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: 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 experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted 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 realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all unease. 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 nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to weep.