🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against 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 pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that option only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions caused by the unattainability of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, 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 discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my sense of a ability evolving internally to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.