🔗 Share this article

I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations 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 honest with myself. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself caught in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the feeding – 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 doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging 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 lost to 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 support her in managing the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to weep.