🔗 Share this article

I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – 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 repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending 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 distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having 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 difference, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.