🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change 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, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to endure my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to weep.