🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a good summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull towards finding the positive: “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 down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself trapped in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties 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 surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 help.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions 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, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have excellent about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to cry.