🔗 Share this article

I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and allowing the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the impossibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my feeling of a ability developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to weep.