🔗 Share this article

I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled 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 endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments caused by the unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, 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 attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.