🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the feeding – 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 doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. 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 craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her suffering 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) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to click erase and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my awareness of a ability evolving internally to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.