🔗 Share this article

I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, 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 instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. 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 dulling of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, 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 repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my guarding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity 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 attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a skill growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.